Marion County is third in state for juvenile detention days

The Marion Regional Juvenile Detention Center is shown on Northwest 10th Street in Ocala, Fla. on Tuesday, July 29, 2025. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2025.

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Posted July 30, 2025 | By Jennifer Hunt Murty
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Marion County detains juveniles for more days than every other Florida county except for Duval and Broward, despite having a smaller population. Some officials think the pace has been set to be first in the state.

Detentions of Marion County juveniles at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center have quadrupled since 2022-23, and the cost to Marion County taxpayers for incarcerating juveniles has risen more than three times from $1.3 million annually to $4.3 million, according to data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

By contrast, juvenile detention stays statewide increased from 191,813 to 309,453.

For the 2025-26 budget year, the DJJ projects that the number of juvenile detention stays at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center will be twice as much as this year, and the cost will climb from $2.7 million to $4.3 million.

Although the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center holds juveniles for other counties as well, the DJJ parcels out Marion County’s participation in their analysis to issue bills based on county participation.

During a recent budget session, Marion County Commissioners questioned why there has been such a dramatic increase in this area, especially when compared to other counties in the state.

Clerk of Court Greg Harrell said Marion is currently third in the state and rising. Commission Chair Kathy Bryant asked staff to obtain to year-to-date juvenile detention numbers to get an idea of whether this was a continuing trend.

The greater number of detention stays didn’t correlate to increased juvenile criminal filings in Marion County. According to the Clerk of Court’s office, those totaled 984 in 2022-23; 1,001 in 2023-24; 872 in 2024-25; and 38 so far in 2025. The state’s budget year starts July 1.

One new element over the last two years is the assignment of Circuit Judge Brad King to the juvenile docket. Prior to being appointed as a judge, King served as the state attorney of the Fifth Circuit for 30 year and worked as a law enforcement officer. King and court administration did not return requests for comment about the uptick in detention days.

The commissioners sought an explanation from Fifth Circuit State Attorney Bill Gladson and Public Defender Michael Graves during their respective budget meetings.

Grave’s take

Graves said everything is compressed in the juvenile justice system. If a juvenile is being held in detention, the state has 21 days to act on the case and judges are rarely able to get the case to trial in that period. However, if the juvenile is committed because they are assessed as a higher risk by the DJJ, it is taking “twice as much time” to get the juvenile placed into a rehabilitative program because of the “lack of bed space.”

“They are caught there, and there’s nothing we can do,” said Graves.

“A couple of years ago, the law changed. It used to be that if they were in a moderate-risk program, they could be released to their parents, if appropriate, on ankle-monitored release. That law was changed. Now, the judge is required to put them in JDC awaiting placement. It is another one of those unfunded mandates,” said .

Commissioner Carl Zalak said that it still didn’t explain the disproportionately high number of juvenile detentions in Marion compared to the rest of the state. “There’s also something else, because we’re statistically an outlier,” he said.

Graves explained that the discretion of a judge to release juveniles without regard to the alleged criminal offense “differs from county to county within our circuit.”

Graves pointed out that his counterpart, Gladson, includes in every speech he gives that the Fifth Judicial Circuit sends more people prison than other districts, and frequently includes “more than Miami-Dade County every month.”

“I’m not sure we want to use Miami-Dade as a measuring stick, nor do the citizens of our community. There’s a reason we live here and not in Miami,” Graves offered.

“It’s even a worse problem when we’re talking with girls, because there are less programs. Anecdotally, and this is out of a Lake County case, there was a girl committed in March who is still awaiting bed space, four months later, and for some reason she was transferred out of our facility down to Miami. Not that there’s a connection, there was just space there. So, she’s awaiting transport. Her parents can’t visit her. But that’s the kind of issues that we’re seeing. There are things that I can’t say I’ve seen in my decades of doing this,” Graves said.

Gladson’s take

Gladson noted that he came to the meeting prepared to discuss his office’s 2025-26 budget request and not the juvenile detention issue. However, he said he was as surprised as commissioners by what he was hearing.

“I didn’t know that DJJ billed counties,” he said. “It’s not something that ever comes up.”

He offered commissioners this explanation:

“About three or four years ago, we saw a huge spike in violent juvenile crime. It was gang-related crime. You recall, particularly in the city of Ocala, we had lots of shootings, and we had drive-by shootings. A lot of innocent bystanders were getting hit. This is what I think might be the catalyst for this change.

“The sheriff and I, and the police chief met with the people in Department of Juvenile Justice in Tallahassee,” he continued. “We said these offenders are getting out right away. Sometimes they’re not even being accepted into DJJ, they’re just getting turned right back out and they’re creating the same problem.

Gladson outlined how the agencies were working together to identify which juveniles needed to be held longer.

“We worked with our local DJJ representative (Randy Reynolds.) We came up with a game plan where he would let us know which offenders [were in custody] immediately,” Gladson said, adding, “Sometimes it takes a little bit of time for us to get the information.”

“We knew who the prolific offenders were, and we identified them, and we were able to tamp down to …  a remarkable decrease in the number of juvenile-related offenses that were violent,” he said. “Once we identified the offenders, then we were able to focus on them. Rather than being very broad, we targeted individual situations and gangs and that, I think, is part of what has resulted in more people being held in custody and detention.”

“If that’s where that bill comes from,” he said, ”it comes from pre-trial detention.

“The other thing that happened is … two years ago, the Legislature made it so that a juvenile who was charged with a crime had to be released within a certain period of time. And that was a statutory change that now gives the judge the ability to (give) a second extension until there’s proper placement. Before, they were just getting right back out.”

Gladson said those legislative changes gave “judges across the state more authority to hold on to juveniles until there’s proper placement.”

“I think that, along with us meeting with DJJ and then working locally together to identify the offenders, is the reason for the increase,” he said.

Gladson said the cost aspect was news to him. “I’ve never seen that bill,” he said. “I don’t know how they do it.”

Gladson spoke of sitting through a three-hour sentencing hearing for a 12-year-old boy, now 15, who was sentenced to 40 years for his part in the killing of three other teens in 2022, noting that case factored into the legislation.

“Around the time we realized we have to do better at identifying the offenders, and this is the result of doing it. That’s a long answer to your question, but that’s where I think this comes from,” he said.

Gladson said detaining offenders longer should decrease all types of juvenile crime.

“I see part of the issue with juvenile crimes is when they’re nonviolent, they’re the typical breaking into cars, stealing things. There should be a decrease in all types of juvenile-related crime, particularly in the summer when kids aren’t in school, that’s when they’re out doing the bad things. There should be some trends that I think would be positive with more people in detention.”

Gladson pointed to the Ocala Police Department reporting no homicides this year, which was confirmed by a spokesperson for OPD. However, there is no data the “Gazette” could find that supports any notion that the majority of homicides in the past couple of years have been committed by juveniles, other than the 2023 triple teen murder at the hands of three local teens who were all recently sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The “Gazette” followed up with OPD Chief Michael Balken, who wrote in an email, “The Ocala Police Department has worked extremely hard over the past several years to embrace an “intelligence-led” policing model. That model involves the accurate identification of things such as prolific criminal groups, repeat offenders, and high crime areas. That information allows us to allocate resources from a proactive posture rather than the historic reactive model, which yields lower results.”

“We feel this approach has allowed us to remain laser-focused on the very small percentage of offenders who are committing the majority of the crime,” he continued. “Fundamentally, we believe we are arresting all the right people for all the right reasons. And we believe the results of our efforts are showing up in lower crime rates across the board.”

A Tallahassee attorney, Marie Mattox, recently notified Ocala of an intent to sue the city for damages in a case “where a juvenile was falsely arrested, surrounding unfounded claims that he was attempting to break into a car, and continues to be aggressively policed. In that particular case, no internal investigation was opened about the false arrest or continued aggressive policing.”

The “Gazette” confirmed that there has been no internal affairs investigation into this matter referenced in OPD public records. According to Mattox’s letter, the city did offer to administratively expunge the false arrest but has not done it correctly.

She added, “There have been threats made by the City of Ocala for more charges if the family fights them.”

Balken did not respond to a question from the “Gazette” about this case and whether it is an indication that the law enforcement pendulum has swung too far.

 

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Here are the stats from the DJJ:

* FY 2022-2023: Marion County’s total detention and DV respite days were 5,148, representing 2.68386% of the total service days for non-fiscally constrained counties.  The annual billable amount was $1,344,890, with a monthly amount of $112,074.

* FY 2023-2024: Marion County’s total detention days increased to 6,673, representing 2.87810% of the total. The annual billable amount rose to $1,662,341, with a monthly amount of $138,528.44.

* FY 2024-2025: Marion County’s total detention days were 13,498, representing 4.36189% of the total. The annual billable amount was $2,688,138, with a monthly amount of $224,011.49.

* FY 2025-2026 (Projected):  Marion County’s projected utilization is 22,765 days, representing 6.71% of the total. The projected annual billable amount is $4,363,018, with a projected monthly amount of $363,585.