A judge in Detroit forced a 15-year-old girl to wear handcuffs and a prison uniform after she appeared to fall asleep during a trip to his court.

District Judge Kenneth King said he did not like Eva Goodman’s “attitude” and wanted to show her “how to behave in a courtroom.”

The teenager visited the 36th District Court as part of a field trip organized by the environmental group The Greening, whose other excursions include kayaking and bird watching.

The girl’s mother, Latoreya Hill, told local news: “Would you want someone to treat your child like that?

“To belittle her in front of the whole world and her friends, to make her feel like her situation is even worse.”

A video from the courtroom shows Judge King telling Hill’s daughter: “One thing you will learn about my courtroom is that I am not a toy. I am not a toy to be played with.”

He asked the other visitors on his tour to vote on whether he should put Eva in a youth detention center before deciding to handcuff her and dress her in a prison outfit before her release.

“It was her whole demeanor and her whole being that disturbed me,” the judge said in subsequent interviews.

“I wanted to get through to her and show her how serious the situation is,” he said, adding: “I will do whatever it takes to reach these children and make sure they don’t end up ahead of me.”

In the video of the incident, Judge King tells Eva, “You sleep at home in your bed, not in the courtroom.”

However, her mother said Eva “doesn’t have her own bed to sleep in.”

“She was tired,” said Ms. Hill, a single mother of two. “I’m doing my best.”

Judge Aliyah Sabree, who holds the court’s second-in-command post, said on Wednesday that Mr King’s actions “did not meet the court’s standards” and that she would “treat the matter with the utmost care.”

Mr King said he stood by his decisions. “I wanted it to look and feel very real to them, even though there was probably no real chance of me putting them in jail,” he said.

“That was my own version of Scared Straight.”