Laqasia Tatum has gotten used to feeling helpless since her teenage son entered juvenile detention in March. Around 4 a.m. the morning after Mother’s Day, she got a phone call asking for consent to sedate her son so he could get stitches, she said.

“ I'm asking what's going on,” she said. “I'm just hearing the machines in the hospital going off, and I'm just trying to figure out what's going on.”

Tatum’s son, then 16, was incarcerated at Horizon Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx at the time. The person on the other end of the line told her that her son had injuries on his hand and back but wouldn’t reveal much else, she said. The mother said she learned later that her son had been attacked by other teens in custody.

“He had staples in his back. He had three different areas where he was cut at,” Tatum said. “Between both hands, he had about 46 stitches.”

Tatum is advocating for sweeping changes to the city’s juvenile detention centers, as the number of incarcerated young people swells beyond capacity and violence is on the rise, according to city data. The City Council is holding a hearing Tuesday to consider several bills aimed at reducing the youth detention population and improving conditions for those who remain.

Councilmember Althea Stevens, chair of the committee on children and youth, said the situation reflects a systemic failure to keep kids out of detention in the first place — and to properly care for those in custody.

“These are young people, and it’s our job to keep them safe,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services, which runs the city’s juvenile detention centers, said in a statement that the agency “is committed to providing a safe and supportive environment for youth and staff in our secure detention centers.”

“We will continue our work to improve the conditions of care, including by renovating our existing facilities, enhancing security measures, onboarding additional staff members, developing updated staff training, and increasing youth educational opportunities, as well as, investing in youth workforce development and training programs,” Marisa Kaufman said.

The hearing comes about a month after Jones Gaston and Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced plans to bolster community-based programs and lower the number of young people in secure detention. The plan followed some prodding from state officials, who revoked a special waiver that for years had granted the city permission to exceed the official capacity in its juvenile detention facilities.

That waiver let young people sleep in classrooms and other common spaces, sometimes in shallow plastic tubs with thin mattresses, instead of in bedrooms.

The mayor’s office announced in September that it will increase funding for alternatives to incarceration for 14- to 20-year-olds accused of crimes, expand access to family counseling, launch an intensive community monitoring program for young people who stay home while their court cases are pending, and keep teens with good behavior in less restrictive settings. City officials also plan to coordinate more with the state officials to speed up court cases and transfers to state prisons.

Stevens said she’s grateful for the plan, but she’s still waiting to see deadlines and funding numbers. Without those concrete details, she said, the plan “isn’t going to work.”

“ The conditions haven't changed. They are just as bad as they've always been,” she said. “It's still severely overcrowded.”

There were an average of 385 young people in secure detention in July, according to the latest city data. The two facilities, Horizon and Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brooklyn, are only supposed to hold a combined 259 people. City data shows there were 185 youth-on-youth assaults and altercations between April and June, up from 128 during the same period last year, according to the most recent available numbers.