Hundreds of former residents of juvenile detention centers are accusing the state and Cook County of failing to protect them from “persistent and prevalent” sexual abuse by employees in youth prisons across Illinois in another set of sweeping lawsuits.

Over two hundred people who passed through the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center as adolescents say the facility's guards, teachers and other staff members took sexual advantage of them.

A scathing new lawsuit accuses Cook County and Illinois state employees of sexually abusing children held in detention facilities. The complaints are 410 pages long altogether—and the details of what 272 men and women say happened to them in juvenile custody are unsettling.