McMaster chooses Eden Hendrick as new SC Department of Juvenile Justice director
Gov. Henry McMaster on Tuesday officially announced his selection of Eden Hendrick to lead South Carolina’s juvenile justice agency.
Hendrick, a former family court prosecutor who has served as the department’s acting director since the fall, will become the agency’s third director since 2017 once she’s confirmed by the state Senate.
She said working on behalf of justice-involved youth has been a passion of hers since she started working in the Richland County 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office right out of law school.
Reforming the troubled agency will be a challenging and complicated process, Hendrick acknowledged, but one she said is possible with time.
“I am optimistic and inspired by the change that has occurred in the past five months since I have been there and I’m confident that this trend will continue,” she said.
McMaster announced his selection of Hendrick at a Tuesday morning news conference flanked by Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, University of South Carolina Children’s Law Office director Michelle Dhunjishah and state Sens. Penry Gustafson, R-Kershaw, and Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington.
“It is clear to me and to all of us that Ms. Hendrick is the right one for this job at this time,” the governor said. “We are lucky to have someone talented, experienced and dedicated and willing to take on this formidable task and get DJJ on the right track for all of the young people in our state.”
Lott, who called Hendrick “a breath of fresh air” for the sheriff’s office, said he’d seen her passion for youth firsthand when she worked at the solicitor’s office and more recently when he visited DJJ’s long-term facility on Broad River Road.
“What impressed me the most is how she cares. She cares about the staff, she cares about the young people out at DJJ,” he said. “That’s the one thing that I saw that makes her stand out probably more than anybody else I’ve ever seen at DJJ.”
Hendrick, 41, stepped in to lead the Department of Juvenile Justice in late September after former Director Freddie Pough resigned following months of public criticism over his leadership of the agency.
Pough, a former South Carolina Law Enforcement Division lieutenant who had led the agency since 2017, was raked over the coals by lawmakers and his own employees after an audit identified widespread staffing, training and security problems at the agency.
The former director, who has since returned to SLED as a senior special agent, defended his tenure but struggled to contain the damage wrought by the audit amid a series of headline-grabbing scandals.
Prior to being named the department’s acting director in September, Hendrick had been part of a team from the Department of Administration tasked by the governor with reviewing DJJ’s human resources policies.
Upon assuming her new role, Hendrick immediately oversaw the turnover of numerous high-level DJJ staff members and set in motion a flurry of major changes at the beleaguered juvenile justice agency.
Among them were decisions to move administrative staff back “behind the fence” at the department’s long-term commitment facility on Broad River Road and to suspend its regionalization initiative.
“We have begun the process of moving employees who provide direct care services and executive management back to DJJ campuses,” she said Tuesday. “We are modernizing many of the DJJ-owned buildings, implementing new technologies and working with national experts to improve our policies and procedures.”
Hendrick recently made headlines after she requested $20 million on behalf of the Department of Mental Health to build a private residential treatment facility for justice-involved youth.
She took the extraordinary step of asking lawmakers to give money to another agency that had not requested it because she felt like Mental Health officials were slow-walking plans to build an essential facility at the expense of her agency and vulnerable children.
For years, DJJ has been forced to house dozens of justice-involved children with serious mental illnesses in violation of state law because the Department of Mental Health has been unable to find alternative placements for them.
The relocation of youth with serious mental illnesses, who make up roughly a quarter of the population at the agency’s Broad River Road complex, would go a long way toward improving the quality of rehabilitative services the agency can provide and should improve its chances of attracting and retaining quality frontline correctional staff, Hendrick said.
In addition to her work as a family court prosecutor in the Richland County 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, Hendrick also previously served as staff attorney for the foster care review board in the governor’s office of executive policy and programs and represented the Department of Social Services in juvenile abuse and neglect cases.
This story was originally published February 22, 2022 at 10:34 AM.