The head of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center has been getting property tax breaks in Michigan that are allowed only for a primary residence for years even though he’s required to live in Cook County, an investigation by Injustice Watch has found.
Leonard Dixon, who at $280,000 a year is among the county’s highest-paid officials, has been the superintendent of the center for a decade. It’s one of the country’s largest youth jails.
Asked where he lives, Dixon told a reporter, “I live in Chicago.”
Leonard Dixon and his wife own this home in a suburb of Detroit, which they claim as their principal residence for property tax purposes. Records show a Michigan homeowners exemption has saved them more than $13,000 in property taxes since 2015, when Dixon became superintendent of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
Sylvia Jarrus for Injustice Watch
And a spokesman for his boss, Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans, says a review Evans commissioned found that Dixon lives in Illinois.
But records show Dixon and his wife own a house in Woodhaven, Michigan, for which they receive a property tax break that Michigan law allows only for a homeowner’s principal residence — a tax break they have gotten for the past 30 years. Since 2015, when Dixon took the Cook County job, the exemption has saved them more than $13,000 in property taxes.
Also, Dixon has been registered to vote from his Michigan address since 1995, records show. He has cast absentee ballots in Michigan since 2012, voting there as recently as the 2024 primary and general elections.
He and his wife also own a home north of Miami and two vacant properties in rural Florida. In May, they put the ownership of one of the properties in a trust — and listed their Michigan address in the legal paperwork as their residence when doing so.
Dixon also listed his Michigan address — along with his Cook County work email — in progress reports he made to a federal court in Mississippi between 2016 and 2018, while moonlighting as a consultant on troubled juvenile detention facilities.
A spokesperson for Evans, whose office hired a law firm to investigate Dixon’s residency in response to questions from Injustice Watch, said that investigation had “concluded that Supt. Dixon resides in Illinois.” Evans, who lost a re-election bid for chief judge Wednesday, did not respond to questions about how the lawyers came to that conclusion or why they specified Illinois, not Cook County.
Dixon, 69, declined interview requests. Approached by a reporter outside a county board meeting, he said he’s been living in Chicago since taking the job as superintendent. Asked about his house in Michigan, he said his wife visits the property sporadically, “but no one is living there permanently.”
In an interview in December 2023 posted on YouTube, Dixon said of his day-to-day work as superintendent of the juvenile detention center: “My day usually starts about 6, 6:15 in the morning, and I’m usually here until about 3, sometimes 5. And on the weekends it varies based on what’s going on.
“I spend a lot of time on the units. I’m not a desk person. I like to go up and meet with the kids, have conversations with them and (be) hands-on. That’s very important to me, especially being a Black male.”
But nine current and former employees of the detention center — many of them critical of what they describe as mismanagement and poor leadership — say Dixon is rarely seen at the facility.
“It’s an open secret,” said Fitzgerald Mullins, a retired detention center supervisor, who sued the county for retaliation after being suspended in 2017. “He would be there for a month straight when he first got the job. But, as time went on, it slowed down.”
The other current and former employees also said Dixon is rarely seen at the facility but would speak only on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared professional consequences if they spoke out.
The Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center houses an average of 200 kids, ages 10 to 18 awaiting trial. Of the children at the facility in late August, 80% were Black and 96% were male, according to data from the Office of the Chief Judge.
Dixon was hired in 2015 as the juvenile jail, located on the Near West Side, was emerging from federal oversight. In recent years, child welfare advocates have criticized some of the facility’s practices, including prolonged room confinement, strip searches and restraint.
Last year, 19 former detainees said in a lawsuit that they were sexually abused at the facility while it was under Dixon’s leadership. Those accusations were part of a class-action lawsuit against Cook County filed by nearly 200 former detainees who said they were sexually abused while detained between 1995 and 2022.
The center’s advisory board — a public body made up of child-welfare experts and advocates appointed by the county board — published a report in 2019 criticizing the “alarming rise in the use of punitive room confinement.”
In 2022, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, which audits county juvenile detention facilities, found the Cook County JTDC was out of compliance with state detention standards.
Officials said the facility was using punitive room confinement, including “240 occasions when 24 hours or more of confinement was administered.” They also found employees were conducting invasive strip searches on all kids entering the facility, in violation of state standards.
In 2023, that agency noted the facility had reduced its use of punitive room confinement, but not by enough to meet standards, and that strip searches were still being conducted on youth.
Last year, Evans’ office unveiled a plan to drastically downsize the juvenile jail and replace it with smaller “communities of care.” The plan, submitted as part of a federal grant proposal, said the facility would shrink to just 50 kids by the end of this year.
Despite some outstanding concerns from the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice and the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts about practices at the detention center, both state agencies found the facility in compliance with state standards in their most recent evaluations.
Kelly Garcia reports for Injustice Watch, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit journalism organization.
Contributing: Maya Dukmasova