Before McLean County had its own juvenile detention center, young people detained by the county stayed in a designated hallway of the county jail.
“It was very stark, it’s very different from what we have today,” said Charlene Beringer, who began working in McLean County’s justice system in 1987.
Beringer retired Oct. 30 after nearly 40 years with the county. Her career took her from the jail, to the juvenile detention center, to the probation department. Along the way she became as well known for her baking as for her work.
Beringer stumbled into her career while she was a student at Illinois State University.
“As a requirement for graduation from ISU, you had to do an internship and I really had no idea what I was getting into,” she said. “When I walked into the McLean County Detention Facility in January of 1987, I was a little shocked.”
Beringer said once she got used to the atmosphere of the jail, she found her place there.
She started as an intern and part-time worker and was hired full time as a correctional officer on May 17, 1987. She spent just over 10 years at the jail before transferring to the juvenile detention center in October 1997. On Jan. 1, 1998, she was promoted to juvenile detention supervisor.
In August 2007, Beringer moved to McLean County Probation, where she took over the community service program. In January 2024, she moved into the department’s problem-solving court unit, where she worked until she retired.
“Forty years is a remarkable career,” said Suzanne Montoya, director of McLean County Court Services. “For somebody to last for 40 years is kind of unheard of in this day and age.”
Montoya has worked for Court Services for 26 years. She first knew Beringer from the juvenile detention center and grew closer to her after Beringer moved to the probation office.
Coworkers say Beringer’s real legacy goes beyond her titles. She was widely known for the maternal care she showed young people in custody, and later for the way she looked after her coworkers.
“Charlene obviously was one of the best of the best,” Montoya said.
‘Jail Mom’
It started in the early 1990s with a single birthday cake.
“When I worked at the juvenile detention center at that time, anyone who turned 17, the next day they would go to jail to the adult detention facility,” Beringer said.
Beringer was working as a correctional officer in the jail’s juvenile hall when she baked a cake for a juvenile for the first time. The girl was about to turn 17, which meant her birthday would be her last night in the juvenile hall.
“I had asked a young lady what she would like [for] her last snack for the evening, because we prepared an evening snack before they went to bed,” Beringer said. “She didn’t understand what I meant.”
Beringer explained that she would bake her a cake of any kind she wanted and frost it, as her birthday treat.
“She didn’t understand because she’d never had a birthday cake before,” Beringer said, her eyes filling with tears.
Montoya said Beringer’s answer to that moment was simple: Everyone deserves a birthday cake.
From then on, every young person held at the juvenile detention center got a birthday dessert from Beringer. When she moved to probation in 2007, the tradition moved with her. About a week before each Court Services employee’s birthday, Beringer would send them an email asking what treat they wanted.
“They may not have been celebrated before,” Beringer said. “I just want to celebrate them to help them feel good.”
Then and now
Beringer’s career spans almost the entire modern history of how McLean County handles young people within the criminal justice system and people on probation.
In 1993, the county opened a dedicated juvenile detention center in Normal, a 26-bed facility that also takes in youth from neighboring counties. Beringer moved there in 1997 and became a supervisor a few months later.
The thinking behind juvenile detention has also changed since then. The county’s former chief judge, Casey Costigan, told WGLT earlier this year that “the goal of juvenile detention is rehabilitation.”
Staff at the center have been working to update the decades-old building to match that approach.
The adult side of Court Services has changed too. McLean County started its drug court in 2006 and its recovery court for people with serious mental illness in 2010. It now also runs a family treatment court and is the hub for a veterans treatment court that serves the five-county 11th Judicial Circuit. These courts try to treat the addiction or mental illness behind a case instead of relying only on jail time.
That’s where Beringer finished her career. She joined the Problem-Solving Court unit in 2024, decades after she first worked in a jail hallway that she remembers as “very stark.”
A lasting impact
Montoya, who now oversees both probation and the juvenile detention center, said she has heard from staff who worked alongside Beringer at the detention center about the care she showed the youth there. She said that kind of care is common among the facility’s staff, who often take on “maternal instincts, I believe, or paternal instincts, or just a real advocacy role.”
That care, Montoya said, makes a difference.
Through research and focus groups conducted with the Stevenson Center at ISU, Montoya said Court Services spoke with young people who had been detained, released and never entered the adult system.
Many of them pointed to the juvenile detention officers as part of what kept them out of future trouble, Montoya said. Participants didn’t name individual staff members, but Beringer’s years at the facility overlapped with that period.
Montoya said Beringer will be hard to replace.
“After 40 years of experience and dedication, and understanding the system and the job, obviously that would be huge shoes to fill,” Montoya said. “We are hopeful as always that we get some passionate individuals coming into this field and that we can also retain them for 20 years or 40.”
