“When I close my eyes at night, I still have nightmares about solitary confinement 20 years later,” Hilton said. “The sounds of my peers screaming as they were physically restrained by numerous staff members and injected with sedatives will also never leave me.”

Zoe Schreiber, another survivor, said she was sent at age 13 to a Utah facility, where she was restrained face down in the mud by six adults for hours in the rain. Schreiber described enduring seclusion, hard labor, and humiliation for four years.

Democratic state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who chairs the Human Services Committee, said she had worked in such residential treatment facilities and noticed that staff often didn’t have proper training.

“I don’t think they’re all bad, but I do think the ones that are bad, that impact the trauma of our children, that are unregulated, that are unstructured, that do not have evidence-based programming — I wonder how we get away with that here in California,” Alvarado-Gil said.

Wahab said it’s important for California to act in the absence of a federal bill. California enacted related legislation in 2021 to prevent the state from sending foster children to out-of-state facilities.

“I’m hoping that we do some justice to the kids here,” Wahab said.

The Senate Human Services Committee passed SB 1043 on a 5-0 vote. The bill now goes to the Appropriations Committee.

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This article was produced by KFF Health News , which publishes California Healthline , an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation .

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.