Guards Had Teen Beat Up

Guards Offer Snack Bounty To Beat Up 13-Year-Old Boy In Detention >> Yet ANOTHER prison abuse horror story out of Florida! A juvenile detention center in Fort Lauderdale is under fire for offering food as a reward for beating up a teenager in its custody. A 13-year-old identified as A.R. was hospitalized for three weeks after staff at the Broward Juvenile Detention Center offered a “snack bounty” in exchange for beating him up. After A.R. was struck on the head by another teenager, staff left him in a solitary room that was scrubbed with bleach. Inhaling the toxic fumes, A.R. suffered a near-fatal asthma attack that landed him in the hospital. But his mother, Shantell McNair, wasn’t informed about the incident until her son was released 21 days later. According to Gordon Weekes, the chief public defender of Broward County, A.R. is one of many abuse victims locked away at the detention facility. In a recent letter to the Department of Juvenile Justice, Weekes wrote that at least one kid was shackled and left in a scorching hot van for hours. He also reported that kids are living in a building that wreaks of sewage, which could be the result of toxic chemicals in the facility. Guards also assaulted the boys and denied them urgent medical care in the past. Weekes believes many of the problems boil down to too few staff and not enough resources to manage so many people. “They’re frustrated, they’re tired, and it’s a recipe for disaster when you have an overworked staff working with kids who have issues,” he told the Broward Palm Beach New Times. “The staff are overworked and underpaid, and as a result they have a short fuse.” http://www.citizensforcriminaljustice.net/guards-offer-snack-bounty-to-beat-up-13-year-old-boy-in-detention/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=c4cjenewsletter

Teargassed, Stripped Naked

World | Tue Jul 26, 2016 3:41am EDT Related: World, Australia Australian PM orders inquiry after teenage prisoners teargassed, stripped naked Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday ordered an inquiry into the treatment of children in detention after the airing of video showing prison guards teargassing teenage inmates and strapping a half-naked, hooded-boy to a chair. Footage of the abuse of six aboriginal boys in a juvenile detention center sparked renewed criticism of Australia's treatment of Aborigines and their high imprisonment rate. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) aired CCTV footage late Monday of boys in a Northern Territory juvenile detention center also being stripped naked, thrown by the neck into a cell, and held for long periods in solitary confinement. "Like all Australians, I've been deeply shocked – shocked and appalled by the images of mistreatment of children," Turnbull said on ABC radio as he announced a Royal Commission, Australia's most powerful, state sanctioned inquiry. The CCTV footage from the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin was shot between 2010-2014. A lawyer representing two of the boys said all six boys abused were of aboriginal descent. Aborigines make up the majority of the Northern Territory population and 94 percent of juvenile inmates in the territory. “Our (indigenous) people have known about things like this...and to just see it laid bare in front of us last night must be a wake-up call to everyone in Australia – that something’s got to be done about the way we lock our people up in this country, and particularly the way we lock our kids up," an emotional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda told reporters. “What we saw last night is an absolute disgrace.” A report into some of the incidents by the Northern Territory Children's Commissioner in 2015 found fault with the guards' behavior, but the findings were disputed by the then head of prisons and not acted upon, said the ABC. Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles sacked his corrections minister within hours of the broadcast and said that information about the abuse had been withheld from him, blaming a "culture of cover-up" within the Corrections system. Some Aborigines in the territory called for Giles to be removed, with one wearing a hood over their head with the words "Sack Giles". A coalition of Northern Territory Aboriginal organizations called for the national government to dissolve the territory government, which it has the authority to do. "Any government that enacts policies designed to harm children and enables a culture of brutalization and cover-ups, surrenders its right to govern," said spokesman John Paterson. Residents in Alice Springs staged a peaceful protest against the abuse of children in detention, while the ABC reported that at least eight people were protesting on the roof of a prison in the town. Reuters could not confirm the prison protest. BOY SHACKLED TO CHAIR The CCTV video showed guards mocking inmates, carrying a boy by the neck and throwing him onto a mattress in a cell, and covering a teenager's head with a hood and shackling him to a chair with neck, arm, leg and foot restraints. "Excessive use of force, isolation and shackling of children is barbaric and inhumane," said Human Rights Watch Australia Director Elaine Pearson. The ABC reported that only two detention staff members identified in footage remained within the youth justice system. Lawyer Peter O'Brien, who represents Dylan Voller and Jake Roper who were abused, said he was suing the state on their behalf, alleging assault, battery and false imprisonment. "It seems as if this abuse is built into the very core of the system," he said in a statement, calling for the immediate release of Voller, who is now in an adult prison, and all children imprisoned in the Northern Territory. Australia's Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs, who backed the inquiry, said: "We have been reporting on this question of indigenous incarceration, particularly of juveniles, for many, many years and we have had many, many reports...on the appalling conditions in which they are held." Aborigines comprise just three percent of Australia's population but make up 27 percent of those in prison. (Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Jane Wardell and Michael Perry) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-prison-inquiry-idUSKCN10605H?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

Florida Teen Raped, Beaten

From the PLN in Print Archives Lawsuit Claims Florida Teen Raped, Beaten in Prison Initiation Ritual Florida's correctional facilities for youthful offenders are part of the state's adult prison system, and Florida incarcerates more minors than any other state in the nation. Approximately 140 juveniles are housed in detention centers on any given day, and in July 2013 that included a 17-year-old identified only as "R.W." According to a lawsuit filed on January 17, 2016 by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Florida Institutional Legal Services, a project of Florida Legal Services, Sumter Correctional Institution guard Bruce A. Kiser, Jr. stood by and watched while at least six youths beat and sexually assaulted R.W. in a bathroom in F Dorm as part of a prison initiation rite called a "test of heart." R.W. was cut repeatedly with sharpened pieces of barbed wire, choked unconscious and raped with a broomstick on July 24, 2013. Kiser never reported the incident. "R.W. suffered a nightmare at Sumter," said SPLC attorney Miriam Haskell. "Unfortunately, his experience is not unique. A culture of brutality persists within the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), and what R.W. endured is just another example of why children do not belong in the adult prison system." See: R.W. v. Kiser, U.S.D.C. (M.D. Fla.), Case No. 5:16-cv-00045-WTH-PRL. An investigation by the FDOC's Office of the Inspector General "noted Kiser's inaction" and recommended a review of the incident, according to the SPLC, but Kiser reportedly "was not disciplined for his role in the attack and continues to be employed as a prison guard." The FDOC had previously settled a similar lawsuit, agreeing to pay $700,000 to a youth who was permanently injured during a "test of heart" ritual at the Lancaster Correctional Institution. Another juvenile died in 2014 from injuries sustained in a comparable incident at a Florida prison for youthful offenders. Read more: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/may/5/lawsuit-claims-florida-teen-raped-beaten-prison-

Reports Of Chronic Abuse And Neglect

Residential Schools Goes Too Far Certain programs around the country for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders have a history of physical mistreatment. At least 145 children have died from avoidable causes at residential facilities over the past 35 years. At programs across the country, at least 145 children have died from avoidable causes at residential facilities over the past 35 years, a ProPublica analysis of news reports found. At least 62 children died after being restrained, most often because of asphyxiation. The job of monitoring the well-being of children at the programs is spread across so many state and local agencies that kids can fall through the cracks. State education agencies, for instance, rarely take strong action. A ProPublica survey found that about half of the education departments didn’t have the power to sanction such schools even if they discovered public-school students were being mistreated. School officials in just seven of the 44 states that responded to the survey said they had levied penalties on or closed such a program in the last decade. “State agencies can certainly step up measures to hold all residential treatment programs accountable to high health and safety standards, but the reality is that most have not despite a rash of abuse allegations occurring in programs on their turf,” the California representative Adam Schiff told ProPublica in an email. Schiff reintroduced a bill earlier this year that would require the tracking of abuse allegations lodged against such programs. Despite the public funding, there is little data on residential schools. One federal database collects state data on abuse incidents, but submission is voluntary. There is no required federal tracking of abuse allegations–and there is not even a nationwide list of all residential programs. One often-cited government survey, which is more than a decade old, estimates that there are at least 3,600 facilities across the country, housing more than 50,000 children annually. Ira Burnim, the legal director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health, believes that the current data gives an incomplete picture. “Our lack of information and data is very troubling,” said Burnim. “To a certain extent, the residential treatment centers are out of sight, out of mind.” Lawmakers have repeatedly called for changes amid reports of chronic abuse and neglect. A government report in 2008 found gaps in state regulation increased the risk of abuse and neglect at some youth residential programs. Some state agencies didn’t visit programs often enough to make sure kids were safe and well-cared for, the report found. In other states, some programs, such as private boarding schools and religious treatment centers, are exempt from licensing and do not have direct regulation. There were residential facilities that had built fortresses around themselves,” Blau said. “They kept kids in and kept families out.” There is great value to having local oversight, but it’s important for there to be federal standards that drive service advancement,” she told ProPublica. Industry groups and providers have at times aggressively sought to fend off federal regulation of their programs and worked to undermine stricter rules. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/12/kids-get-hurt-at-residential-schools/420846/?utm_source=SFTwitter

Cruel & All Too Usual A Terrifying Glimce Into The Life In Prison As A Kid

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/cruel-and-all-too-usual/ - WARNING: The Following Video, Obtained By The Huffington Post, Show The Rough Treatment Of A Minor By Correctional Officers & May bE Disturbing To Some Viewers. If You are In A public Place Headphones Are Advisable: - http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/cruel-and-all-too-usual/ - >Cruel & All Too Usual A Terrifying Glimce Into The Life In Prison As A Kid By Dana Liebelson. When the video above was filmed, the girl on the bed was 17 years old. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call her Jamie. There was a time when she liked acting in goofy comedy skits at her Detroit church or crawling into bed with her grandmother to watch TV. She loved to sing—her favorite artist was Chris Brown—but she was too shy to perform in front of other people. Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn't always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front door that she broke the glass mail chute. Jamie denies the assault—and the police report notes that the brick may not have hit her friend—but she admitted to officers that she was “mad” and “trying to get back in the house.” The Wayne County court gave her two concurrent six-month sentences, for assault and destruction of a building. In a wealthier Michigan county, kids convicted of minor offenses are almost always sentenced to community service, like helping out at the local science center. Doug Mullkoff, a criminal defense attorney in Ann Arbor, told me that prison in such circumstances is "virtually unheard of." But Jamie is from Detroit, and in January 2012, she was sent to the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a prison that holds inmates convicted of crimes like first-degree homicide. From this point onward, her world was largely governed by codes and practices and assumptions designed for adult criminals. Jamie is 20 now, but her soft brown eyes make her seem younger. When she first came to prison, women old enough to be her mother told her she was cute and promised to take care of her. “They rub on you and stuff, I can’t stand it,” she said. In the seven months before her 18th birthday, prison records show that Jamie was housed with at least three adult cellmates, including one in her 50s who had a history of cocaine possession. Jamie said she was also around adults in the showers and the yard. She had a bunkmate who did drugs she had never been around before, “something you snort.” In this environment, Jamie found it hard to stay out of trouble. And when trouble came, she didn’t know how to explain herself to the guards. According to Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), Jamie “failed in every instance” to meet good-behavior standards that under Michigan law allow certain inmates to have their records scrubbed clean after they serve their sentences. In June 2012, Jamie’s special status was revoked and she was resentenced to up to five years in prison for her original crime. In May, Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed a law that limits the circumstances under which kids with Jamie’s status can be sent to prison. However, he stressed that youth can still be placed in prison to “protect public safety.” When this news sank in, Jamie snapped. On June 15, 2012, she started yelling so loud and for so long that a correctional officer complained in the logbook that the noise was giving her a headache. Then she climbed on her sink and threatened to kill herself. A group of officers in gas masks hauled her out of her cell as she begged them to put her down. Chemical gas that had been used to subdue another inmate lingered in the hallway, Jamie later recalled, and she started to cough. The officers pressed a spit guard on her face and fastened straps on her arms and legs and chest, a practice known as five-point restraint. Jamie became more and more distressed, but at no point did the officers attempt to calm her or even explain what they were doing. “[There was] snot coming out of my nose. I’m trying to sit up,” she said. “I’m coughing and crying at the same time, and basically the officer said I spit on her and they still tied me down.” She recalled pleading with the guards, “I’m like only 17, you can’t do this to me.” A page from a guard’s observation log on June 15, obtained through a FOIA request. After Jamie had been restrained, the logbook shows that she was left tied to a bed for nearly 24 hours. No therapist appears to have visited her during this time. Jamie said that on another occasion, she was restrained for days and urinated on herself. “I’ve had dreams about being held down; nobody can hear me or nothing. It’s terrifying,” she said. The MDOC declined to comment on detailed questions related to her treatment because they concerned “pending litigation” and “personal medical information.” Jamie had never attempted suicide until she went to prison and her fellow inmates taught her how to cut herself. Over the course of several weeks in June, according to the prison log, she tried to hang herself with socks tied around her neck, to cut herself with wall scrapings and rocks and a comb, to eat paint chips off her door, and to scratch a wound on her arm with empty mayonnaise packets. She told a staff member she wanted her arm to get infected, amputated, and sent to her parents. A checklist from the June 15, 2012 incident report when Jamie was placed in restraints.The cause of the incident is marked as "none apparent." The treatment of kids in adult lockups recently received a rare burst of attention with the suicide of Kalief Browder on June 8 of this year. Browder was sent to the jail on Rikers Island at the age of 16 after being accused of stealing a backpack. During the three years he spent there before the charges were thrown out, he was brutally assaulted by both inmates and guards and spent about two years in solitary confinement. His case has drawn attention to what the Justice Department called a “dangerous place for adolescents” with a “pervasive climate of fear.” But the problem runs far deeper than one jail gone rogue. In the course of reporting on a lawsuit against the Michigan prison system, I obtained a series of videos depicting the treatment of underage inmates in adult facilities, as well as hundreds of prison documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other sources. (Jamie is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.) These materials show under-18-year-olds being restrained, held in solitary confinement, forcibly extracted from their cells, tasered, and allegedly sexually assaulted. Some of these incidents would not violate any official rulebook, but are simply accepted practices inside adult correctional institutions. In 1822, when prison reformers in New York proposed the nation’s first juvenile institution, they saw the need to keep children separate from adults as “too obvious to require any argument.” The juvenile justice system was founded on the idea that young people are capable of change, and so society has a responsibility to help them overcome early mistakes in life. More recent science has only confirmed this principle. Because adolescents’ brains are still developing, their patterns of behavior not yet fixed, they have a far better chance of being rehabilitated than adults. And yet this potential is lost in prisons and jails, which barely recognize any distinction between adults and minors. http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/cruel-and-all-too-usual/ In the 1980s and ‘90s, the United States was gripped by panic over the specter of the teenage “super-predator,” and the controversial Princeton professor John DiIulio warned darkly of “the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” These claims would turn out to be wildly overblown, but during this period many states introduced laws making it easier for children to be prosecuted as adults. Between 1985 and 1995, the number of youth incarcerated in prisons and jails roughly doubled. As of 2013, almost 6,000 kids were held in adult facilities across the country. Compared to kids who do their time in juvenile detention, those in the adult system attempt suicide more often. One study, reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracked what happened to minors in custody for similar crimes. After they were released, those who had served in the adult system were 77 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent felony than those who were sent to juvenile institutions. There is an increasing body of scientific research showing that when adolescents suffer from extreme stress and trauma, it can inflict permanent damage on their bodies and brains. A study led by the CDC found that children who experienced multiple forms of trauma, such as physical and sexual abuse, had a life expectancy 20 years shorter than their counterparts.

Florida's Youth Abused In Private Facilities

Arianna Huffington Huffington Magazine This Week: Juvenile Injustice Posted: 11/01/2013 n this week's issue, Chris Kirkham takes an in-depth look at a private prison empire based in Florida. What he learns about the Youth Services International prison system is deeply disturbing -- the result of six months spent scouring thousands of pages of state audits, lawsuits, local police reports and probes by state and federal agencies, along with interviews with former employees and prisoners. In Florida, YSI manages more than $100 million in contracts. And despite a record of abuse and mistreatment at its facilities, the company has continued to win business in several states. Unwilling or unable to perform the necessary oversight, Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice "routinely awards contracts to private prison operators without scrutinizing their records," Chris writes. As one former Department executive tells him, "They don't want the providers to look bad, because they don't have anyone else to provide this service. Bottom line, the state of Florida doesn't want responsibility for these kids." As a result, young people have faced a range of abuses, from being served bloody, raw chicken to being "choked and slammed head first into concrete walls," as a 2010 lawsuit chronicles. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/huffington-magazine-this-_6_b_4184159.html -------------------------------------------

Daycare worker admits abusing 23 kids

Prosecutors: Daycare worker admits abusing 23 kids
Joshua Ritchie is charged with lewd conduct with a child and is being held on $2.5 million bond


Associated Press

NAMPA, Idaho — Prosecutors say a 23-year-old daycare worker in Idaho has confessed to sexually abusing 23 children.

Joshua Ritchie is charged with lewd conduct with a child and is being held on $2.5 million bond.

Ritchie was arrested Aug. 21 after a 5-year-old boy reportedly told his parents that he was sexually abused.

Ritchie worked at Cornerstone Childcare in Nampa about 20 miles outside of Boise and was also a kitchen staff substitute for the Nampa School District and at the Idaho Arts Charter School.

Prosecutors told Judge Brian Lee during a hearing Wednesday that Ritchie told investigators he's sexually abused 23 kids between the ages of 5 and 12.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ritchie's attorney, public defender Bill Schwartz, did not immediately return a phone call from The Associated Press

http://www.correctionsone.com/corrections/articles/5956661-Prosecutors-Daycare-worker-admits-abusing-23-kids/

Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=149920
05/03/2012
Investigation, Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi
By Booth Gunter
Michael McIntosh couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had come to visit his son at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility near Jackson, Miss., only to be turned away. His son wasn’t there.
“I said, ‘Well, where is he?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’”
Thus began a search for his son Mike that lasted more than six weeks. Desperate for answers, he repeatedly called the prison and the Mississippi Department of Corrections. “I was running out of options. Nobody would give me an answer, from the warden all the way to the commissioner.”
Finally, a nurse at the prison gave him a clue: Check the area hospitals.
After more frantic phone calls, he found Mike in a hospital in Greenwood, hours away. He was shocked at what he saw. His son could barely move, let alone sit up. He couldn’t see or talk or use his right arm. “He’s got this baseball-size knot on the back of his head,” McIntosh said. “He’s got cuts all over him, bruises. He has stab wounds. The teeth in the front are broken. He’s scared out of his mind. He doesn’t have a clue where he’s at – or why.”
Though he had found his son, McIntosh still had no answers. He said prison officials wouldn’t allow him to see his son again for months. No one would tell him what happened – that is, until he received a phone call from a Southern Poverty Law Center advocate who was investigating Walnut Grove.
“When I was at my wit’s end and couldn’t get anywhere, an advocate from the SPLC actually found me,” McIntosh said. “She said, ‘Your son was in a riot.’ They [SPLC] just took bits [of information] and started putting this puzzle together. Without them, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Mike suffered brain damage. A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report about the conditions at Walnut Grove later noted that after weeks of hospitalization, his “previously normal cognition resembled that of a two year old.”
In the dry language typical of such reports, the DOJ investigators wrote that on February 27, 2010, “a youth melee resulted in the stabbing of several youth, as well as other types of physical injuries necessitating treatment at an outside hospital. One of the injured youth … suffered irreparable brain damage and sustained a fractured nose, cuts and stab wounds.”
And no one bothered to tell his father.
Others were hurt, too – stabbed, punched, kicked, stomped and thrown from an upper floor to a lower one. Mike and his cellmate, who was stabbed in the head, were both nearly killed. A dozen others were hospitalized.
There was another shocking detail: A female guard had “endorsed the disturbance by allowing inmates into an authorized cell to fight,” according to the March 20, 2012, DOJ report. She was fired but not charged with any crime.
The guard’s involvement wasn’t uncommon. Investigations showed that guards frequently instigated or incited youth-on-youth violence. Often, they were the perpetrators.
What happened to Mike was symptomatic of a youth prison – one run for profit by a private corporation – that was completely out of control.
The initial investigation, which began in 2006, turned into a federal civil rights lawsuit, with the ACLU and Jackson-based civil rights attorney Robert McDuff as co-counsels. It was settled in March with a sweeping consent decree designed to end the barbaric, unconstitutional conditions and the rampant violations of state and federal law that were documented separately by both the SPLC and the DOJ.
The Walnut Grove story is a cautionary tale that raises alarming questions about the treatment of youthful, mostly nonviolent offenders in Mississippi and elsewhere. And it calls into question the wisdom of turning over the care of these youths, some as young as 13, to private companies that exist solely to turn a profit – companies that have no incentive to rehabilitate youths, that thrive on recidivism, and that increase their profits by cutting corners and reaping ever more troubled souls into their walls.


‘Deliberate Indifference’
On March 26, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves issued a blistering court order approving the settlement of the lawsuit. He wrote that the GEO Group Inc., the company that runs Walnut Grove, “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.”
Violence by youths and guards wasn’t the only problem. Neither were the gang affiliations of some guards. Or the grossly inadequate medical and mental health care. Or the proliferation of drugs and other contraband. Or the lack of educational and rehabilitative programs. Or the wild overuse of pepper spray on passive youths.
Indeed, the DOJ found that sexual abuse – including brutal youth-on-youth rapes and “brazen” sexual misconduct by prison staffers who coerced youths – was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”
What’s more, both the prison staff and the Mississippi Department of Corrections, which pays GEO $14 million each year to run the prison, showed “deliberate indifference” to these problems.
In other words, nobody cared. Nobody cared that the bottom line – private profit, secured in part by dangerously understaffing the prison – was more important than providing humane conditions and services that would protect youths from violence and help get them back on the right track.
They should care – if not out of basic human decency then because these young men will eventually get out of prison. They will re-enter their communities, many lacking an education, many lacking treatment for their disabilities, many severely scarred both physically and psychologically by their experience.
GEO Riding Privatization Wave
Mike was three weeks shy of his 20th birthday when he arrived at Walnut Grove to serve a four-year sentence in October 2009. After growing up with his mother in California, he had been living for the previous two years with his father in Hazlehurst, a small town about a half hour’s drive south of Jackson. He was an active, athletic kid who liked to fish and was good with his hands. He had begun studying at a local community college, hoping to become a welder.
But now, after running afoul of the law, he was just another number in prison garb, living in a facility that housed young men ages 13 to 22 who had been tried and convicted as adults.
In August 2010, six months after Mike was injured, GEO purchased the company, Cornell Companies Inc., that had been operating the prison since 2003. GEO, which was born as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. in 1984, is the second-largest prison company in America, with 66,000 beds at 65 prison facilities across the U.S. and another seven overseas. With a total of 4,000 beds in three prisons, including Walnut Grove, the company houses about a quarter of Mississippi’s prison population.
Built with $41 million in taxpayer subsidies, Walnut Grove has generated about $100 million in revenue for the companies operating it since the doors opened in 2001.
With the acquisition of Walnut Grove and its other prison projects, GEO is riding a wave of privatization efforts.
Across the U.S., the number of inmates in such private facilities grew by 80 percent between 1999 and 2010 – from 71,208 to 128,195 – as states and the federal government bought the industry’s pitch that it could save taxpayer money by operating prisons at a lower cost, according a January 2012 report by The Sentencing Project. Thirty states now have partially privatized their prison systems.
For GEO, more privatization means greater profits. In 2011, the company produced $1.6 billion in revenue, a 27 percent increase over the previous year, and net income of $98.5 million, the best performance in the company’s history, according to its 2011 annual report.
The company’s business model depends, at least in part, on tough sentencing.
With 1.6 million people living behind bars, the U.S. already has the world’s largest population of prisoners – and the highest per-capita rate of incarceration. But the prison industry wants more. GEO’s annual report is clear about that – noting that “positive trends” in the industry may be “adversely impacted” by early release of inmates and changes to parole laws and sentencing guidelines.
Walnut Grove Population Triples
In the decade before Mike came to Walnut Grove, the prison’s population had soared – more than tripling from 2001 to 2010, from 350 to 1,200 inmates.
That was part of the problem. When the facility opened in 2001 with 500 beds, it was authorized to only accept “juvenile offenders” between the ages of 13 and 19.
There are important public policy reasons to keep children and teens separate from adult prisoners. The juvenile system was created to protect children from the harsh, punitive environment of adult prisons and to rehabilitate youths, recognizing that they are still developing and can greatly benefit from educational and other services.
Research has shown that youths who stay in the juvenile system are less likely to be arrested again than those who are transferred into the adult population. Further, youths are far more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons and are more likely to commit suicide.
Even so, the Mississippi legislature, under lobbying pressure, periodically raised the maximum age of those who could be housed at Walnut Grove – now at 22 – while also steadily increasing its capacity.
The staffing levels, however didn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population. In fact, a prison auditor reported to the legislature in 2005 – and again in 2010 – that staffing had actually decreased. When it acquired the facility in 2010, GEO did nothing to correct the imbalance. In fact, the SPLC lawsuit says GEO “has a policy … of understaffing the prison.”

Brutality the Norm
It was a brutal place. Mike told his father that he was locked in his cell for 23 hours a day. He spoke of pervasive violence. “It didn’t seem like there was much being done to curtail anything going on,” McIntosh said. Guards frequently doused young men with pepper spray as a first response, rather than a last resort. Youths were routinely sprayed simply for refusing verbal commands, such as failing to remove their arms from food tray slots while locked in their cells – something they sometimes did to get attention for medical emergencies. Most commonly used was the “Fox Fogger,” a chemical weapon that discharges as much spray as possible per burst. Some inmates described instances in which entire cans of pepper spray were emptied into a cell, after which guards locked the door with the inmate inside. Typically, youths were not given the opportunity to wash away the pepper spray or decontaminate their clothes or bedding.
When DOJ investigators asked about the use of pepper spray, some guards were less than forthcoming. One lieutenant told them he couldn’t recall the last time he had used it. A video taken by one of the prison’s many cameras told a different story, showing him wielding it a mere two weeks earlier.
Pepper spray wasn’t the only hazard.
Fights were common, occurring almost daily. Cell doors could be easily rigged to remain unlocked, allowing youths to leave their cells and enter others at will. Guards were often complicit in attacks. Weapons were readily available. Emergency call buttons in the cells didn’t work.
In addition, guards “frequently and brutally react to low-level aggression” – such as using profanities or reacting too slowly to an order – by “slamming youth head first into the ground, slapping, beating, and kicking youth,” the DOJ found. In one such incident, a youth said he was ordered out of his cell by a supervising guard, who then jumped him and kicked him in the back four times. Another guard stomped on his leg. Investigators later observed a bruise on his leg in the shape of a boot print.
“We also found that youth were assaulted for the way they allegedly looked at officers or for absolutely no given reason at all,” the DOJ report says.
Some guards apparently saw their charges as sexual prey. Sexual misconduct between staffers and youth occurred on a monthly basis – “at a minimum,” the DOJ found. But GEO did little or nothing to prevent it, other than firing those caught in the act – like the female guard who yelled “close the door” at another guard who saw her engaged in intercourse with a youth in a medical department restroom.
Between July 2009 and May 2010, 13 staffers were fired and two arrested for sexual misconduct. No one knows how many other incidents went undetected.
In addition, youths were “routinely” subject to sexual assaults by other youths, the result of “grossly inadequate staffing” in the facility’s living areas, the DOJ found. Some youths told horrific stories of rape or attempted rape by cellmates who beat them or wielded “shanks,” the prison term for knives fashioned from ordinary metal objects.
Shanks, the investigators discovered, were far too common – and often used in assaults. During one 11-month period ending in November 2010, 91 youths were transported to outside medical facilities for treatment of injuries due to inmate violence. Many had cuts and stab wounds.
One youth, who was referred to as J.D. in the lawsuit, was tied up, brutally raped and beaten over a 24-hour period by a cellmate who had been the subject of multiple prior complaints involving sexual misconduct. The victim tried to summon guards, but the emergency button in his cell didn’t work.
Medical Care Lacking
Nothing, perhaps, illustrates the inhumane, callous and unconstitutional treatment of the youths at Walnut Grove more than the provision – or lack thereof – of mental health and medical care.
New inmates were not properly screened when they arrived; in fact, the facility appeared to lack even the most basic equipment needed to check arrivals for common conditions such as asthma, kidney disease or urinary infections. Exam rooms did not even contain examination tables or chairs.
Youths who were sick or injured often had to make multiple requests to see a nurse and sometimes waited weeks for treatment. Many with chronic conditions were not always given their medicine on time, if at all. The administration of medication was “grossly deficient,” the DOJ found. And though some inmates were as young as 13, none of the physicians who provided care at Walnut Grove were trained in pediatrics or family medicine.
For all those problems, the mental health care may have been worse.
The facility is not supposed to house inmates with serious mental health needs – but it does.
A number of inmates “have a history of prior psychiatric illness or treatment and/or are presently exhibiting symptoms of suicidal behavior or serious mental illness,” the DOJ report says. “The Facility, however, is not providing adequate mental health care to those youth. Instead, the Facility fails to adequately assess and treat youth at risk of suicide.”
In December 2008, a youth was found hanging from a noose attached to a light fixture but was revived. He was not placed on suicide watch. In October 2009, another youth with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts was found dead in his cell. Hours earlier, he had told a nurse that he had cut himself and planned to do it again. Ten days earlier, a guard had seen him with a rope around his neck.
In one six-month period in 2010, 285 youths – nearly a quarter of the population at the time – were placed on suicide watch. A psychiatrist evaluated only about 8 percent of them.
But many youths were placed in isolation as punishment, on the pretense they were suicidal. They were typically stripped, given a thin paper gown and forced into a cell with only a single blanket and a steel bed frame without a mattress. They stayed for 24 hours a day with little or no human contact.
For those who needed mental health crisis services, there were none – no therapy, no access to acute or chronic care, no special needs unit. Instead, medication and “therapeutic lockdown” were the only options available. Some youths, the DOJ found, “languish for years at a time without receiving evidence based mental health services that are routinely used to treat serious mental health conditions.”
A possible reason for the lack of care was the “shockingly low” level of psychiatric staffing. One psychiatrist, who was on call for just 14 hours per month, was responsible for providing care to 1,200 inmates. Additionally, a psychologist was available once a week for five hours.
The DOJ report came with a warning: “It must be noted that most of these youth with their untreated or inadequately treated mental health problems are eventually going to be released in worse condition, and often times more dangerous, than when they entered WGYCF [Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility].”


Mike McIntosh enjoys a day of fishing prior to entering the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. In February 2010, he suffered brain damage and other severe injuries during a melee that the U.S. Justice Department says was facilitated by a guard at the privately run, for-profit prison.


A ‘Sea Change’
Today, Mike is 22 and no longer at Walnut Grove. After spending some time at Parchman, the state’s only maximum security prison, he was transferred to the Alcorn County Correctional Facility.
After two years, he’s still recovering. It took a year before he could twist the top off a soda bottle. Some days, Mike can remember things about his life, like the fact he owns a car. Some days, he can’t.
As far as McIntosh knows, his son never received any kind of therapy for his injuries.
“Believe it or not, he still talks about the welding,” McIntosh said. “That’s exciting. That gives me some hope.”
As for the youths at Walnut Grove, the settlement agreement offers hope – hope for educational and rehabilitative services, hope for better health care, hope for common decency and freedom from harm.
The settlement requires the state to remove all boys under the age of 18 and certain teens who are 18 and 19 from the prison and house them in separate facilities governed by juvenile justice, rather than adult, standards. In his March 26 order, the judge wrote that the evidence in the case, along with the DOJ’s findings, left him with the “unshakeable conviction” that the settlement agreement must be entered immediately.
“Those youth, some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day,” the judge wrote. “Nothing has curtailed actions of the staff and indifference of management officials to the constant violations, even though the parties and their experts have been monitoring, investigating and conducting on-site visits constantly since before the lawsuit was filed and during the pendency of this action.”
As a result of the agreement, pepper spray will no longer be used to punish youths and can be deployed only to prevent serious bodily injury. Guards won’t be allowed to rely on inmates to enforce rules or impose punishment on others. Youths will not be subject to solitary confinement. Physical exertion used to inflict pain or discomfort won’t be allowed. Regular rehabilitative, educational and recreational programs will be available. Mental health and medical care will be required. And, “at all times,” youths will be provided with “reasonably safe living conditions and will be protected from violence” and sexual abuse.
“This represents a sea change in the way the Mississippi Department of Corrections will treat children in its custody,” said Sheila Bedi, deputy legal director for the SPLC. “As a result of this litigation, Mississippi’s children will no longer languish in an abusive, privately operated prison that profits each time a young man is tried as an adult and ends up behind bars.”
Soon, the Department of Corrections will be seeking another company to run the three prisons currently in GEO’s hands. A month after the Walnut Grove settlement, the company announced it was discontinuing its $21 million contract to operate the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, perhaps in anticipation of another SPLC lawsuit. GEO said in a press release that the facility had been “financially underperforming.” Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps then revoked GEO’s remaining contracts, saying the state would seek another company to manage all three prisons.
But questions remain. Will the future of private prisons elsewhere be affected by the abuses uncovered at Walnut Grove – many of which were blamed on severe understaffing, a lack of accountability and other shortcomings that appear related to profits? Will states rethink the idea of trying children as adults and housing them with older prisoners?
In its report “Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in America,” The Sentencing Project questions the private prison industry’s claim that it can safely and humanely operate prisons for less money than the government. Prisons run by the government are not exactly extravagant, so where do the savings – and profits – come from?
“[P]rivate prisons must make cuts in important high-cost areas such as staffing, training and programming to create savings,” the report says.
Walnut Grove seems to be a case in point.
“Deliberately indifferent.” It’s a phrase used throughout the DOJ report to describe the mindset of both the staff at Walnut Grove and the prison officials who were supposed to ensure constitutional conditions there.
McIntosh believes the evidence is sufficient to show that the profit motive isn’t a good fit for prisons.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “Our children’s lives shouldn’t be at risk because corporations cut corners in order to increase their profits.
“They rob the kids of hope. They rob the kids of dignity. I think that’s probably the worst thing you can do to them.”

© 2012. Southern Poverty Law Center.

AUTISM - CHILDREN BEATEN FORCE FED ABUSED!

AUTISM - CHILDREN BEATEN FORCE FED ABUSED!
www.youtube.com

Distraction techniques’ just plain brutality

Distraction techniques’ just plain brutality
By John Bowden – HMP Shotts (Scotland), from insidetime issue March 2012

John Bowden questions why the care of already damaged children is left to profit-seeking companies?



After more than a decade of unlawful abuse and brutality within child prisons run by private security companies it took the deaths of two young people and the inquests into those deaths to finally expose the sort of violence routinely inflicted on children held in such institutions. A subsequent legal action brought by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) laid bare completely what had been going on in these places, and on the 11th January the High Court delivered a judgement that was absolutely damning of the privately owned and run ‘ Secure Training Centres’ (STC) and the brutality of their regimes.

In his judgement Judge Justice Foskett said that in bringing the case CRAE had shone ‘a light into a corner which might otherwise have remained in the dark’, and indeed it was a corner of the penal system where the brutalisation of already damaged children in the name of so-called ‘restraint’ was endemic and institutionalised and actively encouraged and promoted by the government’s Youth Justice Board. It was also revealed that none of the statutory agencies charged with monitoring the care and treatment of children in the STCs did anything to stop the unlawful treatment. Clearly the human rights of such powerless working class children counted for nothing.

What the ruling finally exposed were places where a culture of abuse had been allowed to flourish and where the victims were too terrified to complain and accepted such treatment as an inevitable part of their captivity. In his judgement Justice Foskett said, ‘I do not think there can be any doubt that in the vast majority of cases the detainees made the subject of an (unlawful)) restraint technique would simply have accepted it as part and parcel of the routine in the STC. There is, of course, also the inevitable reluctance that there would have been on the part of the young detainee to ‘rock the boat’ by making a complaint’. Too frightened to complain on their own behalf, the children subjected to abuse and ill treatment were given absolutely no protection by social workers or prison inspectors who knew exactly what was going on. Justice Foskett said in this regard, ‘It is a legitimate comment that until the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood, and the investigations and inquiries that resulted from these deaths, none of the agencies in place to monitor what took place within an STC had identified and/or acted to stop the unlawful nature of what was happening’. In fact, so called monitors from the Youth Justice Board actively encouraged restraint techniques (which were often injury inducing) that were criticised by the United Nations, the European Torture Committee and Parliamentarians on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. These techniques included the ‘nose distraction’ technique, which involved members of staff punching non-complying children on the nose; other ‘restraint’ techniques included punching children in the ribs and yanking their thumbs back. 14 year old Adam Rickwood was subjected to the ‘nose distraction’ technique hours before he hung himself.

The extent of the abuse was also revealed in the judgement. The number of violent ‘restraints’ on children ran at over 350 per month across the 4STCs up until July 2008. Hassockfield STC seemed to use an almost gratuitous amount of violence against its child inmates and during a six month period in 2004 applied violent ‘restraint’ approximately 570 times.

The widespread use of unlawful violence over such a prolonged period was allowed and encouraged to take place because those employing it operated without any accountability and because an environment of frequent staff brutality was obviously considered appropriate for difficult and rebellious working class children.

Despite delivering a scathing condemnation of the STC regimes, Justice Foskett refused to make a judgement requiring the state to identify victims and notify them of their right to seek compensation. He claimed that such a judgement might have a ‘springboard’ effect in creating a mass of compensation claims from both children and adults abused in state institutions. There was no suggestion either that a police investigation should be conducted into what took place in the STCs over such a prolonged period, nor any inquiry into the culpability of senior management at G4S and Serco or why both companies are continuing to run and operate penal facilities for children. In effect, everyone involved in the unlawful abuse of children in the STCs for over a decade got off scot free.

An important question that emerges from this case is why the care and custody of already damaged children is still being entrusted to profit-driven private companies like G4S and Serco, who have clearly shown by this case a total disregard for the human rights of those in their custody? Running jails for profit is always morally dubious, but when it has been clearly established and proven that children have been so brutalised by regimes operating in privately owned child jails that some of them have been driven to kill themselves, then the whole corrupt business needs to be fundamentally questioned.

http://www.insidetime.org/articleview.asp?a=1152&c=distraction_techniques_just_plain_brutality

A former juvenile corrections officer has been jailed after being accused of sex

Former juvenile corrections officer jailed
Associated Press
March 15, 2012

A former juvenile corrections officer has been jailed after being accused of sex
crimes.

The former employee, Ardith Brown, faces charges of felony child molestation and
sexual assault against persons in custody, the Georgia Department of Juvenile
Justice said in a statement late Wednesday.

Brown was a former staff member at the Regional Youth Detention Center in
Gainesville. She was fired on Feb. 2, after an internal investigation into
allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old in the
department's custody, authorities said.

Brown was being held in the Hall County Jail. Jail records did not indicate
whether she had an attorney.

The Gainesville case is the latest in a series of investigations involving the
Department of Juvenile Justice, which began a system-wide review after the
beating death of a 19-year-old at an Augusta facility.

"As a result of our surprise inspections at all 27 Georgia juvenile detention
centers, we've observed many of our Juvenile Corrections Officers become more
diligent in monitoring youth activity at all our facilities," Commissioner Gale
Buckner said in a statement.

The agency recently named a new director of the Augusta Youth Development
Campus, which has been at the center of several investigations involving its
staff after the beating death.

Nine workers at the Augusta youth center have been fired since November. Two
others were demoted and offered positions at different facilities.

http://www.ajc.com/news/former-juvenile-corrections-officer-1386082.html?cxtype=\
rss_news_82001

Kids In Mississippi Held In Solitary And Abused

New Ban on Solitary Confinement for Child Prisoners in Mississippi
by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

The United States, alone among industrialized nations, incarcerates thousands of juveniles in adult prisons, after trying and sentencing them as adults. We also lead the world in the practice of solitary confinement. These two facts have come together to create a horrifying reality: hundreds of children languishing in isolation cells.

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center announced that after years of litigation, they had reached an agreement with the state of Mississippi that will end juvenile solitary confinement in its prisons. According to a post on the ACLU's "Blog of Rights":

On March 22, 2012, a federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, will enter a groundbreaking consent decree, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, banning the horrendous practice of subjecting kids convicted as adults to solitary confinement...While in solitary, the youth are held in almost complete isolation and sensory deprivation with virtually no human contact, without books, paper or pens, radios, pictures, access to television or any kind of recreational activity, and are denied all visits, telephone calls and even mail from their families. If prison staff tags a kid as suicidal — which they often do with punitive motives — that kid is stripped naked except for a paper gown and denied a mattress.

It's been known for a long time that prolonged solitary confinement inflicts intense suffering, worsens pre-existing mental illness and causes psychiatric breakdown even in mature healthy adults — let alone in emotionally vulnerable kids. International law recognizes that solitary confinement can rise to torture and, furthermore, that kids under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of solitary. These effects are so well understood that international law now prohibits solitary confinement of any person under the age of 18, strongly condemning it as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger, the groups' lawsuit, filed in November 2010, challenged what it called "brutal, unconstitutional conditions" at Mississippi's Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. WGYCF, which houses male prisoners ages 13 to 22, is operated by the GEO Group, America's second largest private prison company. In addition to placing kids in solitary confinement, the suit alleges that "guards beat inmates, smuggled drugs to the youths and engaged in sexual acts with them," as well as allowing older inmates to prey on younger ones. In an incident two years ago, 14 young inmates were injured, including one who suffered brain damage. The consent degree announced this week will also ban the placement of juveniles at WGYCF.

It’s been known for a long time that prolonged solitary confinement inflicts intense suffering, worsens pre-existing mental illness and causes psychiatric breakdown even in mature healthy adults — let alone in emotionally vulnerable kids. International law recognizes that solitary confinement can rise to torture and, furthermore, that kids under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of solitary. These effects are so well understood that international law now prohibits solitary confinement of any person under the age of 18, strongly condemning it as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger, the groups’ lawsuit, filed in November 2010, challenged what it called “brutal, unconstitutional conditions” at Mississippi’s Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. WGYCF, which houses male prisoners ages 13 to 22, is operated by the GEO Group, America’s second largest private prison company. In addition to placing kids in solitary confinement, the suit alleges that “guards beat inmates, smuggled drugs to the youths and engaged in sexual acts with them,” as well as allowing older inmates to prey on younger ones. In an incident two years ago, 14 young inmates were injured, including one who suffered brain damage. The consent degree announced this week will also ban the placement of juveniles at WGYCF.

http://solitarywatch.com/2012/02/29/new-ban-on-solitary-confinement-for-child-prisoners-in-mississippi/

Youth detention worker arrested on sex charges

Youth detention worker arrested on sex charges
Richard Bradberry, 54, is suspected of abusing inmates
By Patrick Lohmann
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A supervisor at an Albuquerque youth detention facility was arrested Friday afternoon on charges of sexually abusing several female juvenile inmates.
Richard Bradberry, 54, is charged with three counts each of criminal sexual contact, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, false imprisonment and voyeurism. Authorities said he groped three underage female inmates, including one instance of pulling down the pants and underwear of a girl.
Two of the alleged victims are 16 years old and one is 17, police said. All three are inmates at the Camino Nuevo Youth Center, where Bradberry worked as a youth care specialist.
Police first heard allegations of abuse a year ago, said State Police spokesman Sgt. Tim Johnson, but they didn't have enough evidence.
In April, however, police said one of the alleged victims told police she had been touched inappropriately, and investigators were able to corroborate several witness interviews with the facility's surveillance footage, Johnson said.
"He touched them inappropriately," Johnson said. "... We're hoping that there aren't any more victims, but if there are, they can definitely contact State Police."
Bradberry was arrested shortly before 6 p.m. on Friday at his home.
According to the arrest warrant, the girls told police that Bradberry often made them feel uncomfortable by telling them he needed a girlfriend and inviting them to dance upon their release at a club he claimed to own. The girls' testimonies also claimed that Bradberry would try to get girls alone during cleaning times at the youth jail and try and kiss them, and one of the girls said she always cleaned with a fellow inmate to avoid unwanted contact from the supervisor.
One of the alleged victims told police Bradberry groped her more than a dozen times, according to the warrant.
A second alleged victim said Bradberry groped her as he placed a piece of gum in her back pocket, according to the arrest warrant, and another claimed the supervisor often told her that he was "horny" and needed a girlfriend.
New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department spokesman Enrique Knell said the allegations against Bradberry counteract the good work of "99 percent" of CYFD employees.
"It's really devastating to the mission here," he said. "When this kind of thing happens, it tends to tarnish the reputation of everyone here."
Bradberry was a CYFD employee for between eight and 10 years, Knell said, and he is now on administrative leave.

http://www.correctionsone.com/staff-misconduct/articles/4189763-Youth-detention-worker-arrested-on-sex-charges/

Class Action Lawsuits: Mississippi Kids Abused

Agenda Area(s): Children at Risk


J.H., et al. v. Hinds County, Miss.
Date Filed: 06/01/2011

Hinds County, which operates Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center in Jackson, violated the constitutional rights of children by subjecting them to prolonged periods of isolation and sensory deprivation, denying them mental health services, and subjecting them to verbal abuse and threats of physical harm. The SPLC and Disability Rights Mississippi filed the class action lawsuit after numerous attempts to resolve the issues with county officials failed.
----------------------------------------------------Disability Rights Mississippi v. Forrest County, Miss.
Date Filed: 03/07/2011

The Forrest County Juvenile Detention Center in Mississippi was the site of numerous abuse allegations. Video footage from the facility showed youths being slammed into walls and beaten by staffers. When Disability Rights Mississippi (DRMS) attempted to provide the youths with services to protect them from further abuse, Forrest County officials prevented DRMS from having access to the youths. The Southern Poverty Law Center and DRMS sued the county to force it to comply with federal law and allow DRMS access to the children.
-----------------------------------------------------J.A., et al. v. Barbour, et al.

Date Filed: 07/11/2007
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit on behalf of mentally ill girls living at the Columbia Training School who were shackled, physically and sexually abused, and provided with inadequate mental health treatment.
---------------------------------------------------
>> UPDATE

SPLC Wins Access to Youths at Abusive Mississippi Detention Facility
07/26/2011
The Southern Poverty Law Center and Disability Rights Mississippi (DRMS) have won access to youths held at the abusive Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center in Jackson, Miss. A federal judge ruled Monday that facility officials can no longer block lawyers and advocates from meeting with detained children and teens.
----------------------------------------------------
Federal Lawsuit Reveals Inhumane Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison
11/16/2010

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Jackson, MS civil rights attorney Robert B. McDuff today filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the for-profit operators of Mississippi's Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF), charging that the children there are forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and are subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.
----------------------------------------------------Abuses outlined in the report included pole-shackling, hog-tying with chains and physical assault by guards. During military exercises, children were sprayed with chemicals to make it more difficult for them to breathe and forced to eat their own vomit if they became sick after hours of exertion and heat exposure.

( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-works-to-improve-mississippi-juvenile-justice )

Guard suspended in teen’s death was fired from last job

Guard suspended in teen’s death was fired from last job
By Carol Marbin Miller
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com


Eric Perez When Laryell King was forced to leave her job at the Department of Juvenile Justice lockup in Orlando for “negligently” leaving a youth alone in a room, juvenile justice administrators left a clear warning in her personnel file: “NO rehire in any position.”
But rehire her they did.

King ended up on the payroll at the DJJ lockup in West Palm Beach. Now, she is one of five guards suspended after staffers ignored the suffering of 18-year-old Eric Perez, who died at the West Palm Beach juvenile detention center following seven hours of vomiting, hallucinating and complaining of severe headaches.

The person who hired King despite the admonition, lockup superintendent Anthony C. Flowers, has a work history that raises other questions.

When Flowers was hired by the state, he was the assistant program director for the Florida Institute for Girls, a 100-bed prison for hard-to-manage girls that was being closed down amid a Palm Beach County grand jury report that found it rife with violence, sexual abuse by guards, and endless lockdowns due to chronic short-staffing.

“The culture of some staff was to protect each other, fostering cover-ups and unprofessional conduct,” the grand jury wrote in February 2004.

The employment records for Flowers and King were provided to The Miami Herald in response to a public records request. Samadhi Jones, an agency spokeswoman in Tallahassee, declined to comment about the two employees. “While the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) is committed to being open and transparent to the greatest degree possible, due to ongoing investigations by the DJJ Inspector General’s Office and the West Palm Beach Police Department we cannot comment further on the death of the young man at the Palm Beach Regional Juvenile Detention Center,” Jones said Tuesday.

Eric, who turned 18 on July 2 while detained at the West Palm Beach center, was locked up after officers found marijuana in his possession when they stopped his bicycle for a broken light. The arrest violated his probation years earlier on a robbery charge.

Beginning around 1:30 a.m. on July 10, the teen began to complain of a severe headache, and vomited the rest of the night. He also appeared to be hallucinating, waving his arms and screaming at officers to extricate him from an imaginary assailant. Records and interviews suggest guards moved Eric by dragging his mat from room to room, but did nothing to help him until just before 8 a.m., when they called for an ambulance. By the time paramedics arrived, a heart monitor showed only a “flat line,” records show.

King, who had been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, was first hired by DJJ to work in the Orange County detention center in late 2001. She had been working for a security company at the time. Her evaluations from the early 2000s were generally positive, though unremarkable. “Officer King is dedicated to her work and the department,” a supervisor wrote in March 2005, for example. “She’s respectful, cooperative and committed to excellence.”

But in March 2008, Jeffrey Lonton, the then-superintendent of the Orlando lockup, moved to fire King.

King had “negligently” left a youth alone and unsupervised for 45 minutes, until another staff member heard the child “banging on the door” to get out. “Ms. King also placed three youths in the laundry room the same day unsupervised; they let themselves out after several minutes,” a memo states. “Additionally, after reviewing video surveillance, the same events had occurred over several days in the month of February.”

The memo noted that King would be allowed to resign “in lieu of termination.” The subject line of the memo stated: “NO rehire in any position for Laryell King.”

But in September 2010, King applied at DJJ for a job as a probation officer and correctional treatment specialist. When asked on the employment application why she left the Orlando lockup, King gave a one-word answer: “advancement.”

On Sept. 28, 2010, Flowers informed King of her job offer. “In accordance with the provisions of the state of Florida’s personnel rules, you have been selected for position of juvenile justice detention officer,” he wrote.

Less than a year later, when administrators suspended King, personnel managers in Orlando were asked in writing by DJJ whether King had ever been counseled or disciplined. “No disciplinary actions in the personnel file,” was the response.
King could not be reached for comment.

Flowers was hired by DJJ in October 2003 as a senior detention officer. At the time, he was working as the assistant program director at the Florida Institute for Girls, or FIG. His application said he was “responsible for the day-to-day operation of the intensive mental health wing’’ of the prison, where he supervised staff, monitored compliance with state regulations and standards, and evaluated employee performance. He had been an assistant superintendent at the West Palm Beach lockup before his employment at FIG.

Though FIG was being paid $5 million per year by DJJ to operate the treatment center, a company personnel manager refused to answer a single question about his performance when asked by juvenile justice administrators doing a background check.

“What were the major duties performed?,” a reference check asked. “Per company policy cannot give out information,” was the reply. “How effectively did he perform these functions?,” the questionnaire asked. “Same as above,” FIG answered.

Roy Miller, who heads the Florida Children’s Campaign, questioned why administrators would have hired a guard from a program that was rife was abuse — and why they would have allowed a contract agency to refuse to provide personnel information that is covered under the state’s public records law.

“It’s a matter of public record that girls were abused sexually and physically at the Florida Institute for Girls,” Miller said. “Why they would hire employees from FIG without knowing explicitly their employment record is beyond comprehension,” said Miller, whose group has long been a DJJ watchdog.

DJJ records obtained at the time by The Herald showed one girl complained that she had been taken to the facility’s “boom boom room,” where officers “slammed her head into the wall and struck her in the mouth.” The girl suffered bruises and welts, said a report that verified the girl’s claims.

After his return to DJJ, Flowers rose quickly through the ranks: senior detention officer, assistant detention center superintendent, superintendent. His work was described as “outstanding’’ and “exceptional” in yearly evaluations. His personnel file shows he has never been disciplined.

FIG was shuttered about the same time a Palm Beach County grand jury blasted it, but not because DJJ administrators took the action. Lawmakers sliced the program’s funding from their spending plan, at the urging of children’s advocates.

“It was a hellhole for girls,” Miller said.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/26/v-print/2332308/guard-suspended-in-teens-death.html#ixzz1TohOQWRZ

An Epidemic of Abuse Inside Juvenile Institutions

http://www.cjcj.org/post/juvenile/justice/epidemic/abuse/continues


An Epidemic of Abuse Inside Juvenile Institutions
by Randall G. Shelden
At the close of my last blog (“More Abuse in Youth Prisons”) I suggested doing a simple search on the Internet and type in words like “abuse in juvenile institutions” and select some states at random. I said at the time that I would continue my search. And so I did. And what I found was way beyond what I expected. I don’t often like to use the word “epidemic” since it is so value-loaded and defies precise definition. One definition from Webster’s includes “widespread growth” and so I think I can safely say that abuse within juvenile institutions can be described as an “epidemic.”

I started my search with South Dakota, since I recall the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice being consulted for a scandal that was occurring there within some of their juvenile prisons. I first found a story called “Cape Fear,” which appeared in Mother Jones back in December, 2000. The link brought me to a story about the death of a 14-year-old girl in a boot camp. I read the story and as I scrolled down to the bottom I saw two links and the first one was called “BOOT CAMP FOR KIDS: Torturing Teens for Fun and Profit.” So I clicked on this and what I found was a list of 207 news reports on abuse inside not only boot camps but other institutions where kids are locked up. Not only this, but there were other links to more stories, such as one that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times called “For their own good: a St. Petersburg Times special report on child abuse at the Florida School for Boys.” The story, which made quite a splash when it came out in April, 2009, is about a group of men in their 50s who have come forward to tell of the abuse they suffered at this prison. They testified that bodies were buried on the premises. (It reminded me of the bodies buried at an Arkansas prison about 50 years ago.) A time-line shows that investigations of abuse began in 1903 when a Florida senate committee said that “We have no hesitancy in saying, under its present management it is nothing more nor less than a prison, where juvenile prisoners are confined." A 1968 report called this institution "Hell's 1,400 Acres.”

There are several articles concerning scandals within the State of Texas. One story noted that “Thousands of juvenile inmates could be back out on the streets within a few months -- many who committed crimes in East Texas. That's the latest in a scandal within the Texas Youth Commission, where there have been allegations of improper conduct and sexual abuse at TYC facilities.” Within one institution a youth said "When they slammed my head against the concrete, they tried to move the camera so it wouldn't see."


Then there is the story of one facility described as follows: “The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, MA, uses cruel "aversive therapy" on children with autism, depression, and mental retardation. It's the only school in the US that allows painful shocks of children, sometimes tying them down for long sessions of shocks. ‘Hot-saucing’, extreme food deprivation, and other corporal punishments are routine and frequent.”

Finally, there is the story of 14-year-old black youth named Martin Lee Anderson who died at the hands of several guards in a boot camp in Florida. There is a video showing the incident. An all-white jury acquitted the guards.

How many deaths will it take to get the attention of those with the power and influence to do something about this? It is possible that the problem is ignored because most of these kids are minorities and/or from poor families?

The epidemic of abuse continues

The epidemic of abuse continues

submitted on Fri, 04/09/2010 - 05:38 by Randall G. Shelden
In my most recent post I said that I would continue my investigation of what I termed an "epidemic" of abuse inside juvenile institutions. This led me first to the state of Mississippi.



In Mississippi the situation has become so bad that a special web site has been set up devoted to following the issue. It is called “A Mississippi Gulag.” Back in 2002 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began an investigation of the conditions inside the Oakley Training School in Raymond, Mississippi and the Columbia Training School in Columbia, Mississippi. In June, 2003 they issued a report submitted to the Governor of the state. Among other things, the report concluded: “We find that conditions at Oakley and Columbia violate the constitutional and statutory rights of juveniles. Youth confined at Oakley and Columbia suffer harm or the risk of harm from deficiencies in the facilities’ provision of mental health and medical care, protection of juveniles from harm, and juvenile justice management. There are also sanitation deficiencies at Oakley. In addition, both facilities fail to provide required general education services as well as education to eligible youth…” Space does not permit a complete review of this report, but one thing caught my eye immediately and it was the following description of the training school for boys at Oakley: "Oakley Training School, also known as the Mississippi Youth Correctional Complex, sits on approximately 1,068 acres of land surrounded by agricultural fields in Raymond, Mississippi, which is approximately 30 minutes outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Oakley is designed to function as a paramilitary program for delinquent boys.” This program [the program] imposes a military style discipline on youth and is purported to promote a “vigorous physical fitness training program.” The state settled the suit and promised to make changes, but in 2006 a federal court monitor noted that “few if any changes have actually been made.” It was revealed that: “In addition to being hog-tied and left for days in pitch-black cells, children ages 10 to 17 were sometimes sprayed with chemicals during mandatory exercises and forced to eat their own vomit. Other youth were forced to run with automobile tires around their necks or mattresses on their backs.” Mississippi Youth Justice Project (MYJP) co-director Ellen Reddy stated that: "At best, the training schools do nothing but warehouse children. At worst, our children experience gross abuse and neglect when sent away from their home communities," In a separate story posted on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web site Rhonda Brownstein, the Legal Director of the Center, stated that: "What the investigation reported is nothing short of torture. These abuses are the kind of things you would hear about in some torture chamber in a Third World country. This is not how we treat our children in the United States." In a related story it was reported that the SPLC has filed a lawsuit against Mississippi concerning the lack of mental health treatment available for youth charging that the state “fails to invest in community-based services and instead pumps the bulk of its resources into ineffective, expensive institutions.” In October of 2009 the SPLC filed yet another suit concerning conditions at the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center charging, among other things, that: Youths endured physical and mental abuse as they were crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with pepper spray for even minor infractions. Many of the youths had mental illnesses or learning disabilities. They were either awaiting court hearings or serving sentences for mostly non-violent offenses. During one three-week stretch, a 17-year-old girl, identified in the suit as J.A., languished in her small cell for 23 hours a day. Most of the children were allowed to leave their cells for only one to two hours a day." Then there is the story of 14-year-old black youth named Martin Lee Anderson who died at the hands of several guards in a boot camp in Florida. There is a video showing the incident. An all-white jury acquitted the guards.



Most recently a series of reports in the New York Times revealed rampant abuse within several detention centers in New York State. One story, dated August 25, 2009, noted that “Children at four juvenile detention centers in New York were so severely abused by workers that it constituted a violation of their constitutional rights, according to a report by the United States Department of Justice made public on Monday.”

My search will continue. I wonder where it will end.

Category: Juvenile JusticeAuthor: Randall G. Shelden

http://www.cjcj.org/post/juvenile/justice/epidemic/abuse/continues

Kids Sexually Abused In Arizona's Juvenile Corrections

The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Is a Bloody Mess

It's not typically a headline-making department. The state's most violent juvenile offenders go to the adult system; most kids wind up at the ADJC after committing a series of petty crimes. In October 2008, only 126 of the 625 kids in custody were there for violent crimes.

The agency's mandate is to rehabilitate, not punish. These are, after all, children. Their records are kept secret and expunged once they turn 18.

You may not have known of it, but the U.S. Department of Justice is well aware of the ADJC. Twice now, the state agency has fallen under scrutiny and federal orders to improve services and ensure safety.

The 1987 civil rights lawsuit Johnson v. Upchurch ultimately led to federally mandated changes at the agency, which had famously kept one boy in solitary confinement for several weeks.

Conditions for kids behind bars in Arizona got better — for a while. Then they got worse.

In 2001, the Department of Justice began making inquiries into conditions at the ADJC, after a series of stories in New Times revealed concerns about the safety of both staff and kids, as well as potential civil rights violations. In 2002 and 2003, three boys in ADJC custody committed suicide. The DOJ ultimately investigated under CRIPA, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, confirming much of what New Times had originally reported.

Again, things got better, though internal critics have always wondered just how much. The Department of Justice was satisfied, however, and closed its case in 2007.

No one from the outside has paid much attention since. And even when they have, it's tough to figure out just how closely anyone's looking. This fall, the Arizona Auditor General released a report on suicide prevention at the ADJC. The report was largely glowing, leading the Arizona Republic, the state's newspaper of record, to hand out high-fives in a story headlined, "Arizona's Juvenile Jails Free of Suicides Since '03."

The story and the audit didn't mention how close some of the calls were, even though the report acknowledged reviewing agency documents from March to May 2009; presumably, those would have included several of the incidents mentioned above.

The audit also praised the department for improving staff/youth relations, while ignoring three recent criminal cases in which ADJC staff were sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to having sexual relationships with kids.

And perhaps auditors failed to interview the staff members New Times spoke with, all of whom presented grave concerns about conditions at the ADJC — while insisting they like their jobs and want to continue working with kids who desperately need them.



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The employees' concerns vary from person to person, with an overriding theme: This agency — charged with taking care of sometimes violent and mentally disturbed kids — is not very professional.

The ADJC employees warn that a public-records request will reveal only some of what's going on at the agency.

"All someone has to do is write an IR [incident report] and put 'confidential' on it," and it's kept secret, one guard says. (To the agency's credit, many of the records provided by the ADJC for this story are, in fact, quite damning.)

A tour of the facilities is pointless, too, another guard says — even for the federal investigators, who were treated to a whitewash, several of the employees say.

"Anytime anybody comes to do an inspection, we know months in advance," one comments. It's easy to make things look good.

Another, who has worked for the ADJC since the Upchurch case, sees a real change in the kids coming into the system today.

"The kids we have now are nothing like the kids we had in those days," he says. "The kids we had then were real criminals."

He adds, "I wish we had counselors for every single one of them, and then I wouldn't have a job . . . We have psych associates that are overly taxed. Usually at any given point and time we'll have three psych associates to deal with 100 kids."

As for the community-based care that the agency is pushing for, which results in early release, the employee says, "Those kids come right back."

Norman Davis, chief presiding judge for the juvenile division of the Maricopa County Superior Court, echoes this.

"The first year I thought I was saving everybody. The second year, all the kids came back," he says, laughing ruefully and adding that obviously this is an exaggeration.

As for the extent to which mental illness affects the behaviors of the kids he sentences, Davis says he's really not sure.

"The longer I go — mental illness, what does that mean, exactly?" he asks, rhetorically. "Things of the mind are very difficult to get ahold of.

One shared concern among those interviewed for this story is staffing numbers. The CRIPA investigators strongly suggested that in many cases, each housing unit needs to have two staff members on hand at all times — including at night. And yet that tends to be a time, staff say, when corners are cut.

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The Kids Are Not Alright
The Department of Juvenile Corrections is supposed to watch -- and rehabilitate -- troubled teens. But no one's watching the department.?
Editor's note: The names of juveniles throughout these stories have been changed to protect their privacy. Although their criminal case files are public record, their corrections files are not.
Suicide at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections


From Brewer to Arpaio, No One's Listening to the Experts About How to Save Money or Protect Civil Rights and Public Safety When It Comes to Juvenile Corrections

Suicidal Tendencies: The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Is a Bloody Mess
December 17, 2009
Terri CapozziDavid GasparArizona Department of Juvenile CorrectionsPrisonsCriminal Sentencing and Punishment The boys in the Nova cottage at Adobe Mountain School had been locked in their cells for six days. They had not been allowed to go to school or to the cafeteria or to chapel. No weekly phone calls. They had not showered, or washed their clothes. Some had been without a mattress on their metal bed frames for weeks. Leftover food and garbage sat on the floors of their cells; some boys banged on the doors, demanding to use the bathroom. A streak of dried urine ran under the door of one cell. Inside there was more urine and feces on the floor.

Terri Capozzi followed a trail of blood, seeping into the hallway, to the door of the cell belonging to a boy named Roberto. She looked through the window.

"The room was in complete disarray," Capozzi, the youth rights ombudsman for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, would later write in a memo obtained by New Times. "Looking down on the floor, I saw the bottom half of a pint milk container set carefully in the middle of the blood-spattered floor. It appeared that the container was filled to the brim with blood.

" . . . As I stepped into the empty room, I noticed on the floor not far from the milk carton a wad of white gauze bound together. It was blood-soaked on one end. When I looked up at the walls, I realized that the container was a bucket, the gauze a rudimentary paintbrush and that [Roberto's] blood was the paint. The walls were filled with carefully drawn ornate designs, carefully rendered. I was awestruck by what occurred in this room."

Capozzi was told the mess had been made in the past 30 minutes, but her associate, Adobe Mountain youth rights specialist Brenda Lewis, confirmed it had been there for at least several hours. Roberto, a 15-year-old serving time for burglary, had been in and out of the infirmary for days, treated for self-inflicted cuts.

The Nova boys were locked down because they'd been misbehaving, and were supposed to be participating in a marathon group-counseling session. But just one brief session had been held the previous night, they told Lewis, when she visited them early on the afternoon of Day Six.

As Capozzi and Lewis left the cottage, the boys were allowed to go to dinner in the cafeteria for the first time in almost a week. Capozzi was speaking with Roberto -- he had never cut himself before coming to Adobe, she would write, but now was "clearly mentally compromised" and suicidal -- when Joe Taylor, the school's superintendent, approached. He called her into his office and ordered her off school property, angry that she'd crossed him by speaking with kids without his permission, undermining him and his staff.



The response: Taylor has since been promoted to ADJC assistant director, in charge of the agency's Safe Schools program.

As for Roberto, he was released from Adobe but returned in November, after he ran away from a residential treatment center. And he's still cutting himself .

The story of Roberto and what happened in the Nova cottage may be particularly chilling, but it is not the only example of abuse of children in the custody of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections. Contrary to the agency's name, policymakers long ago gave ADJC the mandate to rehabilitate troubled kids, not punish them -- and certainly not abuse them.

And yet reports of mistreatment -- including verbal and sexual abuse, inappropriate use of restraints and solitary confinement, and violence against both juveniles and staff -- are common at the state's facilities, which typically house just under 1,000 Arizona youths at a time.

New Times has spent more than nine months investigating conditions within ADJC. Among the findings:

ADJC no longer follows the practices put into place by a federal court order in 1993 that were designed to ensure that proper conditions are maintained for youth in detention. ADJC violates the intent of the now-expired court order by:

• Routinely putting children in solitary confinement in specialized "separation units" for days or weeks, sometimes even months, without adequate education or other services.

• Locking children in their cells for days at a time, also in violation of a department policy that prohibits lock downs lasting longer than two hours at a time.

• Providing substandard mental health services. Undertrained staff counsel children, and there are waiting lists for beds in mental health cottages.

• Failing to provide enough staff. The staff-to-youth ratio should be at least one staff member for every eight youths.

In addition, ADJC violates its own internal policies and goes against acceptable national practices in the following areas:

• Staff members often use violence to control kids when it is not necessary. Sometimes staffers are disciplined, sometimes not.

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2001-07-05/news/the-kids-are-not-alright/

Kids Dieing FRom Abuse

Children Abused
A report published earlier last year by the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) provided

additional examples, including one in which a 7-year-old Wisconsin girl, who was diagnosed with an

emotional disturbance and ADHD, died of suffocation after several adult staff pinned her to the

floor in a “prone restraint” because she was blowing bubbles in her milk.

A handful of earlier accounts also exposed the widespread use in schools of “seclusion rooms” or

“time-out rooms”–basically, solitary confinement cells for difficult-to-control children. Mary Hallowell

wrote about one such case in her 2009 book Forgotten Rooms. According to an article the Atlanta

Journal-Constitution:

Education researcher Mary Hollowell spent months chronicling an alternative high school in rural

Georgia before she discovered the awful secret that continues to haunt her today. Walking with the

principal down a hall, Hollowell heard a loud pounding. She followed the principal into a room and

then through a connecting doorway that led to a solitary confinement cell double bolted from the

outside.

“The cell was dark inside and had a small, square window,” she said. “It was the kind of set-up you

saw in a mental institution, not a school.” Inside the cell was a boy Hollowell recognized; she had

tutored him in reading and even had artwork from him. “I felt like I had been punched in the stomach

when I realized what I was seeing,” she says. “The principal’s comment to me was that most people

didn’t know this room was there.”

*As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported: “Seclusion rooms are allowed in Georgia public

schools provided they are big enough for children to lie down, have good visibility and have locks

that spring open in case of an emergency such as a fire. In 2004, Jonathan King, 13, hanged himself in

one such room, a stark, 8-foot-by-8-foot ‘timeout’ room in a Gainesville public school.” Jonathan was

also a special ed student, who had ADHD and depression. He had talked about suicide to the

school psychologist, but she concluded it was “an escape or attention-getting technique,” according

to the Gainesville Times. A civil rights lawsuit brought by his parents was thrown out of federal court.

These are the sorts of abuses that H.R. 4247 seeks to address. And the pressing need for federal

legislation is clear from the GAO report: ”GAO found no federal laws restricting the use of

seclusion and restraints in public and private schools and widely divergent laws at the state level,”

it said. In addition, “GAO could not find a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that

collects information on the use of these methods or the extent of their alleged abuse.”

Yet 153 members of Congress chose to vote against a law that would expose and limit what can in

some cases only be described as the torture of schoolchildren.

Perhaps not so shocking after all: In a country that condones torture not only in its military detention

centers, but in its state and federal prisons, immigration jails, and juvenile detention centers, it was

only a matter of time before it trickled down, even into our schools.