What happened to you at the Youth Study Center was not okay.

The Youth Study Center. Two concrete buildings at 20th and the Parkway from 1952, then four years in the old psychiatric institute on Henry Avenue, and in January 2013 a new building on North 48th Street with a new name, the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center. Same institution. Same City. Different sign. If you were held there under the old name, any year before 2013, and something happened that you've never said out loud, this page is about you. And you wouldn't be the first: a complaint filed in Philadelphia court in August 2023 still put "The Youth Study Center" in its caption, ten years after the name came down.

WatchingSeptember 2026: the October 2024 filings that name the Juvenile Justice Services Center are still pending, with no docket number we have read. A two-year window for older claims passed the Pennsylvania House in June 2025 and sits in a Senate committee; a motion to force it out was dropped on June 23, 2026. The questions work now.

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6 questions. Your answers are private and go to one person.

Looking for the page on the new building? Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center survivors: the same institution since 2013, on North 48th Street, with the record on that name.

This applies to you no matter what

It was the Parkway building, or the one on Henry Avenue after October 2008. Both were the Youth Study Center, both were the City's. Which door you went through has no bearing on who answers.
You were there eight days. That was the average stay in 2007; in early 2003 it was 6.9. Short is what the place was for, and the length of a stay changes nothing about whether you can ask.
It was the late 1990s and the place was packed. The City's own DHS commissioner said so at the 2012 dedication: around 1998 the center was so far over its 105 beds that kids were sleeping in boats in the gym. The crowding is in the record, and it was never yours to fix.
It was another kid, not a staff member. The one conviction on this name, from 1984, is two detainees against a third. The claim against the City is for what it let happen behind a door it locked.
You have a record now, or you had one then. Everyone this page is for was locked up as a kid. It changes nothing.
You're a mother, a grandmother, an older brother asking for someone who can't yet. Reach out anyway. Plenty of people do.

What the public record says about the Youth Study Center, year by year

None of this is ours. Courts wrote most of it, state inspectors and the City's own commissioner some of it, reporters the rest, and every line links to where it came from. Where a line says a complaint alleges something, that is all it is: an allegation. The City of Philadelphia has not admitted liability in any matter here. One thing first. The Youth Study Center and the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center are one institution; the name changed in January 2013 when the building did. Below is the record on the old name, plus the one 2023 case that still used it. The new building's record lives on its own page, linked further down, and we don't re-tell it here.

July 20, 1977

Children held at the Youth Study Center had sued the City in federal court in 1974, a class action, Civil Action No. 74-2589 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The complaint said the place used corporal punishment and solitary confinement on kids, that space, heat and light were inadequate, that mail, visits, recreation and medical care were restricted, and that there was almost no schooling. On this date Chief Judge Joseph S. Lord III refused to throw most of it out, and held that the board and director who ran the center, and the City itself, could be made to answer. A ruling on what could go forward, not a finding of what happened. Santiago v. City of Philadelphia, 435 F. Supp. 136 (E.D. Pa. 1977), Justia.

October 19, 1987

The Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the convictions of two people who had been held at the Youth Study Center, for what they did to a 15-year-old boy detained there with them on September 14, 1984. A Philadelphia Common Pleas jury had convicted both of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and criminal conspiracy; the appellant got six to twelve years. We don't print their names. It is the only conviction on this name we have found, and it is a conviction, not an allegation. Commonwealth v. Baxter, 367 Pa. Super. 342 (1987), Justia.

August 23, 2007

The Inquirer's editorial board summed up a year of findings by the state Department of Public Welfare's licensing inspectors at the Parkway building. A 105-bed center for kids 13 to 20, average stay eight days, at times holding as many as 60 above capacity. Urine smell and trash in rooms, mold in an unventilated bathroom. Staff "used tactics that injured unruly kids and then didn't report the incidents to the state," the paper wrote, and got no consent for medical procedures. Half the kids were not in afternoon school. Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, August 23, 2007.

October 4, 2008

Moving day. More than 100 kids were moved from the Parkway to the former Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute on Henry Avenue in East Falls, so the Barnes Foundation could go up on the old site. The name went with them. Within a month three teenagers had gone out a first-floor window, the third escape since the move, and a City Councilman told the paper the place was "leaking kids like a sieve." Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 2008.

August 18, 2011

Lambda Legal announced a settlement with the City's Department of Human Services and the Youth Study Center on behalf of L.P., an 18-year-old transgender woman held there about a year and a half. Her complaint, filed with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations in October 2009, alleged daily slurs from staff, physical attacks by other residents, and a refusal to honor a 2008 Family Court order about her care. The center rewrote its policies for LGBT youth, agreed to train every staff member, and the City paid her an amount it did not disclose. A settlement, the City's own act, not a finding. Lambda Legal, August 18, 2011.

December 20, 2012

The City dedicated the $110 million Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center at 48th Street and Haverford Avenue, 150 beds, ten classrooms, move-in January 2013. That was the end of the name. At the ceremony the DHS commissioner remembered the old center as "dark and dreary," and said that around 1998 it ran so far past its 105 beds that "kids were sleeping in boats in the gym." Her words, about her own department's building. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 21, 2012.

August 15, 2023

The case this page leans on. A complaint was filed that day in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, No. 230801536, captioned Jane Doe C.C. v. The Youth Study Center, Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center, City of Philadelphia, and two individual staff defendants. Both names, old and new, on one filing, plus the City. It never went to trial. The docket shows the City's answer on July 22, 2024 and the case settled and discontinued on January 3, 2025, with a judgment against one individual marked satisfied on May 5, 2025. Settled, not dismissed. The terms are not public and we won't guess at them. Philadelphia Courts civil docket, No. 230801536.

October 23, 2024

Levy Konigsberg and co-counsel announced claims for more than 60 people alleging sexual abuse at 15 Pennsylvania juvenile facilities, conduct alleged from the early 2000s through 2023, the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center among them. The release uses the new name only; whether any Philadelphia claim reaches back into the Youth Study Center years, it doesn't say, and no docket number has been published. Those filings, and the 2023 overcrowding orders, are told on the Juvenile Justice Services Center page, not here. Levy Konigsberg release, PR Newswire.

We checked this on September 15, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from October 23, 2024. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible for what happened at the Youth Study Center

The City of Philadelphia. Not the building, which is gone, and not a staff member on his own; the City. Its Department of Human Services ran the Youth Study Center on the Parkway and on Henry Avenue the way it runs the Juvenile Justice Services Center today, hired the people on the units and decided how many kids each of them watched. That is why the 2023 caption named the old name, the new name and the City together, and why the 1977 court said the City itself could answer. The institution's new name has its own page, and the same questions run on both.

The theory in plain words. A detention center takes children who cannot leave and puts them behind a locked door with the adults it chose and the other kids it chose to put in the same room. If a child was hurt there, and the place had been told, by a federal class action in the 1970s, by state inspectors in 2007, that it was too full and too thin on staff, the institution answers for the next child through the door. That is the shape of the claim. A court decides whether it holds on your facts.

One thing Pennsylvania did in 2019 that matters here. Cities usually have immunity from negligence suits. Act 87 carved out sexual abuse: a local agency is liable when its negligence lets it happen, 42 Pa.C.S. § 8542(b)(9), the usual cap on what a local agency pays does not apply, § 8553(e), and neither does the six-month notice you normally owe a city before suing, § 5522(c). The catch is the same catch as the deadline below: the carve-out reaches back only to claims that hadn't already expired on November 26, 2019. A lawyer decides which side of that line you're on.

Your deadline: Pennsylvania's statute of limitations for abuse at the Youth Study Center

Under 18 when you were there, and born December 1989 or later? You have until your 55th birthday. Thirty-seven years past your 18th is how the statute puts it, 42 Pa.C.S. § 5533(b)(2)(i), in the version Act 87 of 2019 wrote. Now the hard part, and it's hard because the building closed in 2012. Before Act 87 you got 12 years past 18, so you had until 30, and when the act took effect on November 26, 2019 it didn't revive anything that was already gone; its own text says so. You'd turned 30 by then? Born, say, before the end of November 1989? Then the old deadline had already run on you, and the new one doesn't reach back. Which is the whole reason the question up top asks your birth year and not what happened.

Born before December 1989? Then under the law as it stands, your claim is probably barred. Probably. Not certainly, because now and then a lawyer turns up a fact that moves the line, and because Harrisburg has spent years arguing over a two-year window for older claims and still hasn't settled it. The House passed one in June 2025. It's been sitting in a Senate committee ever since; somebody tried to force it out, and that motion was dropped on June 23, 2026. No window is open today, and we won't tell you one is coming. Finish the questions anyway and say so on the call. If a window ever opens, your name will already be on a list.

18, 19 or 20 when you were there? It happened; the center held young people up to 20. If you were 18 to 23 at the time, the same statute, § 5533(b)(2)(i.1) this time, gives you until 30, and the November 2019 cutoff applies the same way. That one takes a phone call and a calendar. And one practical note from the 2023 case: a caption can name the Youth Study Center a decade after the sign came down, because the institution and the City are still there. What runs out is time, not the defendant.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never reported it. Inside a place that was 60 over capacity, who would you have told?
You did report it, to a counselor or your public defender or a judge, and nothing came of it. Say that on the call; it matters more than you'd think.
You were there more than once and the years blur. Pick the closest bucket; the call sorts the rest.
It was the Henry Avenue building, not the Parkway. Same name, same City, same page.
It went on after the move to 48th Street too. Say both. It's one institution, and the other page carries the newer record.
You live in Jersey now, or Delaware, or you're inside somewhere else. Most people who went through the Youth Study Center are somewhere else now.

Facilities covered

The Youth Study Center at 20th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, from 1952 until October 4, 2008, when it was emptied for the Barnes. The Youth Study Center in the former Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, 3232 Henry Avenue in East Falls, October 2008 until January 2013. Any unit, the gym, admissions, a transport van, anywhere the center's staff were in charge of you. People call it the YSC or just the Study Center. From January 2013 the same institution is the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center at 91 North 48th Street; that page, philadelphia-juvenile-justice-services-center-survivors, carries the record on the new name, and one form works for both. A different Pennsylvania youth facility, Delaware County's detention center, Loysville, St. Gabriel's Hall, VisionQuest? The questions still work. Answer them and say where.

Questions people are asking

Has anyone sued over the Youth Study Center before?

More than once. A federal class action by kids held there survived the City's motion to dismiss in 1977. A transgender teenager's complaint over abuse at the center settled with the City in 2011, undisclosed payment, new policies. And the 2023 case above, settled in 2025. None is a finding against the City. All are on a docket.

Can I sue the Youth Study Center?

The Youth Study Center was never a company; it was the City of Philadelphia's, so the City is who a claim runs against. And somebody already has. August 2023, Court of Common Pleas, one caption with the Youth Study Center on it, the Juvenile Justice Services Center on it, and the City on it. That case settled in January 2025. Whether you can depends mostly on when you were born, which the questions above sort out.

Is the Youth Study Center the same place as the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center?

Yes. One place. The City's juvenile lockup, with the Department of Human Services running it start to finish. Parkway from 1952. Henry Avenue from October 2008. Then the move to North 48th Street in January 2013, and with it the new name, Juvenile Justice Services Center. The 2023 complaint put both names in its caption. The courts treat it as one place, in other words, same as we do.

I was in the Youth Study Center in the '90s. Too late for me?

Honestly, under the law as it stands, probably. The 2019 law gives people until 55, yes, but only people whose claim was still alive on November 26, 2019, and under the old rule anyone born before about December 1989 had run out before that day came. No lookback window is open. The House did pass one, in 2025, and the Senate has let it sit. Finish the questions anyway. A lawyer occasionally finds a fact that changes the answer, and if a window opens someone should already have your name.

How much does a sexual abuse lawyer cost?

Nothing, here. Every case is on contingency. The lawyer is paid only out of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered you owe nothing. Not for the call, not for the review, not for the case.

Who sees your form

Kerim Eravci · Survivor Advocate · Not a lawyer

I was a victim, and I waited. Not because I didn't know what happened to me (I knew every day), but because I'd decided it was over, mine to carry, nobody's business. When I finally went looking for a lawyer, the answer came back in two words I'd never thought about: statute of limitations. My time had run out while I was busy getting through it.

What that has cost me since is a long story, and I'll tell you the whole thing in private, if you want it. The short version is the reason my name is on this page: I'm here to help people do what I wish I'd done, which is find out where you stand while the door's still open.

I'm not a lawyer. I read what you send, I call you once, on your terms, and nothing gets filed unless you say so. Ask sooner than I did.

Kerim Eravci is not an attorney. He's a survivor.

What happens next. Three steps, nothing more until you say so.

You answer 6 questions. Nothing is filed. Nothing starts.
A survivor calls you, once. Not a robot, not a call center. Someone who has been where you are.
You decide. You find out your options. If you want to stop there, you stop there.

How this works

ME2 Survivors Alliance protects the heart. Licensed Pennsylvania attorneys do the legal work. We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to be.

You never pay a dollar

Every case is on contingency. There is no charge for the call, the review, or the case. The firm is paid only out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery you owe nothing.