Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center: Staffing, Audit, and Reform

The Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center is Virginia’s only state-operated secure youth prison, a Chesterfield County facility that houses people aged 14 to 20 committed by juvenile courts. A December 2025 audit by the Office of the State Inspector General confirmed years of complaints about severe staff shortages, extended room confinement, missed therapy and school hours, and failures in basic oversight. New leadership under Governor Abigail Spanberger took over in January 2026 and is now working through 61 required corrective actions while the legislature pushes new rules on confinement and outside monitoring.

What Bon Air Is Today

The facility has an operational capacity of 272 beds.¹ As of late 2025 it held about 188 residents, and by mid-2026 the population had dropped to roughly 162.² It is the only remaining long-term residential juvenile correctional facility in the commonwealth.

Who is actually inside shapes almost every other question about the place. About 76 percent of the committed population is serving time for crimes against another person, and more than 60 percent of residents are over the age of 18. DJJ Director Bob Bermingham has said that demographic reality effectively makes the facility “nothing more than an adult correctional center.”²

The Staffing Shortage Driving Everything Else

Most of what has gone wrong at Bon Air traces back to the number of people available to supervise residents. A 2024 state Senate report found a vacancy rate of 50.8 percent, and the number of filled juvenile correctional specialist positions dropped from 245 in 2019 to just 111 by 2024.³ The December 2025 audit found that 56 percent of correctional specialist separations between July 2021 and August 2025 happened within the first two years of employment, and 43 percent left within six months.⁴

DJJ has pointed to burnout, low starting salaries, difficult working conditions, and bureaucratic hiring barriers.⁵ Former DJJ Director Amy Floriano called the staffing situation a “historic issue” going back to at least 2016 and said it had become “beyond our control.”⁶ To keep the facility running, the agency has relied on mandatory overtime, borrowed specialized staff from the adult Department of Corrections, and offered signing bonuses and flexible shifts for contract workers.

Room Confinement and Lockdowns

With too few staff to run the facility normally, Bon Air has leaned heavily on keeping residents in their units. An independent 2024 assessment by The Moss Group found residents “restricted almost entirely to living units” and reporting “high levels of idleness and boredom,” and said the facility had “halted or reformatted nearly all of its programming,” including education, vocational training, and behavioral health services.⁷

Parents, advocates, and lawmakers describe youth locked in their cells for extended periods. State Senator Barbara Favola, chair of the Commission on Youth, cited reports of youth in solitary confinement for “a whole weekend.” University of Richmond law professor Julie McConnell testified that lockdowns lasting days without youth leaving their cells were “causing trouble” and that residents were “bored out of their minds.”⁸

Floriano characterized these periods as “administrative holds” rather than solitary confinement, saying youth could paint and decorate their rooms. She acknowledged the holds could last 24 to 48 hours, during which residents did not have access to showers.⁶ In January 2026, a resident wrote to his mother describing “constant lockdowns” that kept him from classes and required rehabilitation services; the letter was submitted to the DJJ Board and the Virginia Commission on Youth.⁹

Fires, Emergency Calls, and Staff Misconduct

Emergency calls to Bon Air more than doubled between 2023 and early 2025, according to Chesterfield Fire Chief Edward Senter. In the first three months of 2025 alone, there were seven reports of intentionally set fires, more than the total for all of 2024.⁶ Between February 2024 and February 2025, the Chesterfield fire department responded to 45 calls from the facility, and Chesterfield police were called 29 times in a slightly longer period.³

In March 2025, a Chesterfield County grand jury indicted former Bon Air security staff member Cedric Thomas, 60, on three counts of indecent liberties with a child by a custodian and one count of object sexual penetration. The charges stem from an alleged May 2024 incident; DJJ reported the matter to Chesterfield police in late June 2024.¹⁰ Thomas was arrested and held without bond.¹¹ He had been placed on leave during the internal investigation but applied for and was granted retirement by the Virginia Retirement System before the inquiry concluded. Under state law, those benefits would be revoked upon a felony conviction connected to his employment. Police said they believed Thomas may have additional victims in the community.

A separate January 2026 report by the Office of the State Inspector General substantiated a claim that a correctional officer under a Prison Rape Elimination Act investigation was allowed to transport the very resident who had filed the complaint. Investigators also found the facility lacked a comprehensive list of staff under PREA investigation who should be barred from contact with certain residents.¹²

What the December 2025 State Audit Found

In May 2025, Governor Glenn Youngkin directed the Office of the State Inspector General to audit Bon Air. Investigators reviewed data from July 2024 through August 2025 and conducted unannounced inspections from June through October 2025.¹³ The 102-page report, released in December 2025, identified 18 findings and required 61 corrective actions.

Missed Therapy

A review of 22 residents’ treatment records showed:

18 of 22 residents (82 percent) did not receive required monthly individual therapy sessions.
14 of 21 (67 percent) did not receive substance abuse therapy on time.
14 of 22 (64 percent) did not receive timely aggression management treatment.
All four residents reviewed for sex offender treatment did not receive required group sessions.

Some residents waited more than five months to start treatment, and others had gaps of two months or more with no therapy. In some cases, sessions were marked complete even though the resident had not attended.⁹ Auditors tied the failures largely to insufficient clinical staffing in the Behavioral Services Unit.⁴

Missed School

Of 25 residents reviewed during the 2024–2025 school year, 19 (76 percent) had attendance rates below 75 percent, and seven had at least one class they never attended during the review period. Students were frequently late or absent because of untimely releases from housing units, late lunch service, and room confinement.⁴ Not a single student in the sample attended all scheduled classes.¹⁴

Missing Wellness Checks

Investigators reviewed 37 confinement monitoring forms and found that 27 (73 percent) had no evidence that required visual wellness checks had been performed. DJJ policy requires those checks every 15 minutes for youth in confinement, exceeding the state administrative code requirement of every 30 minutes. The audit also flagged missing documentation of daily exercise, fragmented health records, and heavy reliance on paper-based systems that hampered oversight.⁴

How DJJ Responded

DJJ management concurred with 15 of the 18 findings and agreed to implement corrective actions between December 2025 and December 2026.⁴ Floriano described the findings as “documentation based” and said the audit confirmed that allegations against Bon Air were “unfounded,” maintaining there was no evidence of “harm, mistreatment or danger.”¹³ Valerie Slater of RISE for Youth said the findings “unequivocally align” with complaints that families, residents, and staff had raised for years.⁹ Favola announced plans to pursue legislation for independent oversight.

Legislative Response

During the 2025 session, Senator Lamont Bagby introduced two notable bills. SB 1255, which prohibits the indiscriminate shackling of youth during court proceedings, passed both chambers unanimously, was signed by Governor Youngkin on March 23, 2025, and took effect July 1, 2025.¹⁵ SB 1409, which would have banned the use of “restorative housing” (solitary confinement) for incarcerated individuals including youth at Bon Air, was vetoed by Governor Youngkin on March 24, 2025, and the Senate sustained the veto.¹⁶

After the December 2025 audit, the 2026 session passed additional measures. HB 91, sponsored by Delegate Holly Seibold, directs DJJ to study the psychological, social, and developmental effects of room confinement and to establish standards for a minimum number of hours per day that youth must spend outside their cells. The agency must work with juvenile justice advocates, public defenders, and prosecutors, and submit a report with recommendations by November 1, 2026.¹⁷ SB 64, sponsored by Favola, created a formal process for DJJ and the courts to adjust lengths of stay for youth with indeterminate commitments.²

The Commission on Youth also adopted a recommendation to introduce legislation extending the purview of the Office of the Children’s Ombudsman to include juveniles committed to DJJ, with a work group required to report on the needed changes by November 1, 2026.¹⁸

New Leadership and What’s Changing

Governor Spanberger appointed Robert “Bob” Bermingham Jr. to lead DJJ, succeeding Floriano, with the appointment announced in January 2026. Bermingham has nearly 40 years in youth justice; he began in 1985 as a child care specialist at the Fairfax County juvenile detention center and later served as director of Fairfax County’s juvenile and domestic relations court services for over a decade, with a reputation for diversion program work.¹⁹

At a May 2026 Commission on Youth meeting, Bermingham reported that 31 of the 61 corrective actions from the December 2025 audit had been completed, with the remaining 30 scheduled for completion by the end of 2026. He disclosed that during his first week on the job, 35 to 40 residents were being held beyond the high end of their designated length of stay. Between January and April 2026, DJJ processed 66 releases under a population management initiative aimed at resolving barriers to community transition.²⁰

On staffing, DJJ graduated its largest class of juvenile correctional specialists in a decade in September 2025, and the agency has reclassified correctional specialists to higher pay bands with access to the Virginia Law Officers Retirement System. Renovation projects are underway to convert the Oakridge building into a 40-bed standalone vocational center and to renovate four existing cottage dormitories.²⁰ Bermingham has also signaled interest in expanding diversion programs that would let some youth avoid placement at Bon Air entirely, including a potential pilot he described at the May 2026 hearing.²

The November 2026 deadlines for the HB 91 confinement study and the ombudsman work group’s report will be the first measurable tests of whether these changes reach the daily lives of residents inside the facility.

1
Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice. Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center
2
WVTF. Dept of Juvenile Justice Works to Implement New Directives From Legislators
3
VPM. Bon Air Juvenile Center Fire Problems
4
Office of the State Inspector General. Performance Audit on Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center
5
WHRO. Virginia Juvenile Justice System Strained by Staffing Shortages
6
WTVR. Bon Air Youth Prison Reports
7
The Moss Group. Cultural Assessment of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice
8
Courthouse News Service. Virginia Lawmakers Voice Concerns Over State’s Lone Youth Prison
9
VPM. Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center Youth Justice Report
10
Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice. News Release: Arrest of Former Staff
11
WTVR. Cedric Thomas Arrest
12
WTVR. Bon Air Youth Prison Watchdog Report
13
WTVR. Bon Air OSIG Report
14
Axios Richmond. Bon Air Virginia Youth Prison Audit
15
Virginia Legislative Information System. SB 1255
16
Virginia Legislative Information System. SB 1409
17
Virginia Legislative Information System. HB 91
18
Virginia Commission on Youth. Commission on Youth Report
19
Richmond Times-Dispatch. Bermingham Appointed to Lead Department of Juvenile Justice
20
Virginia Commission on Youth. DJJ Presentation to Commission on Youth