- I'm Johnitha McNair. I'm the executive director at the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia. It's very important to me to ensure that any facility that I'm affiliated with is in keeping with the federal standards as it relates to sexual safety and prison rape elimination. It's so easy to put a policy in place and to hire people to do your staff training, and then put posters on the wall. Leadership has to be involved in the information that's being put out to their staff, to their population of residents or inmates or detainees. They have to know what's going on in the trenches. I still make the time to make rounds in my facility to get an idea of the dynamic and to feel the environment. I don't want the staff to shift when I walk in. I don't want them to get up when I walk through the door. I want everybody to stay the same. And when it starts to change because I walked in, then that gives me an indication that maybe I have more work to do with the environment in my facility. To ensure that my kids are safe, I start with the basics. I ask them, do they feel safe? I ask them, what makes them feel safe? I really want to hear feedback of whether they trust communicating with my staff, whether they trust being able to communicate with me. One of the things that drives staff crazy, but that I love, is when my children file grievances. If my kid feels safe enough to complain about the brand of soap, they could complain about everything. But it's those facilities where there's never a complaint or a grievance that gives me concern because I feel like now that population doesn't feel safe enough to say, "I don't like what's going on." I know it's a stretch from soap to sexual safety, right? But when kids can start to advocate on any level about what is fair treatment to them, or whether the environment makes them feel like they're important, then I know we're on the right track. But I want to hear my kids say to me without ever having to say the exact words, "I'm safe here." "I'm important here." "I'm significant." "Somebody cares about me."