Bill and report aim to shut down two Louisiana juvenile prisons
5/31/2005, 7:45 p.m. CT
By DOUG SIMPSON
The Associated Press
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) ? Violence and abuse at two Louisiana juvenile prisons have increased in the past year, as the state continues with reform of
its youth corrections system intended to reduce fights among inmates and guards, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a longtime critic of state youth prisons, was released in support of a bill by state Sen. Don Cravins aimed at shutting down the large lockups in Monroe and East Baton Rouge Parish, and moving inmates to smaller facilities that are not run as prisons.
"In spite of years of attempts to fix these places, we failed, and it's time to try something different," said David Utter, head of the Juvenile Justice Project. "Rather than throw good money after bad, the governor needs to come up with a plan to move away from these big facilities."
However, the report's findings were disputed by Simon Gonsoulin, the head of the Office of Youth Services, which oversees the prisons.
Gonsoulin said the rate of injuries due to violence has declined at the two prisons, despite an increase in the percentage of inmates who are
severely mentally ill and were convicted of violent crimes. The percentage of injuries caused by violence dropped from 24 percent in February 2004 to 22 percent in February of this year, Gonsoulin said in an e-mail message.
Since 2002, reforms in the juvenile justice system have cut by about two-thirds the number of young convicts in prisons, according to Gonsoulin's office. In 2002, 1,500 juvenile convicts were housed in the state's four youth
prisons. One of those lockups has been closed, and the number of young people inside them has dropped to 609, the agency said.
Gonsoulin has said children shifted out of those lockups have been transferred to facilities closer to their families which focus more on
rehabilitation and less on punishment.
The bill by Cravins, D-Arnaudville, is scheduled for a hearing before a Senate judiciary committee Wednesday. It would force the state to close the Monroe and East Baton Rouge prisons by the end of next year.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco does not support the measure, based on advice from the nonprofit Annie E. Casey Foundation and from Mark Steward, the top official in Missouri's juvenile justice system, which reform advocates see as a model, according to Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher. Blanco wants reforms already in place to run their course, Bottcher said.
Kimberly Johnson, the mother of a 14-year-old recently released from the East Baton Rouge Parish lockup, said she visited her son every Sunday in the two years he spent behind bars. She often arrived at the visiting room to find him injured: he suffered a broken nose, chipped tooth and broken hand in various fights, she said. Once he had a gash over his eye, which was bruised
purple; another inmate had hit him in the face with a sock that had a padlock inside, she said.
[My older son told me this was common at the military facility, only they used bar soap.]
"If I hadn't visited my son, I would never have known he was getting beaten up and had all these scars and broken bones," said Johnson, 37, who lives in Hammond. "If that had happened at home, that would have been abuse, and the state would have taken away my son."
The boy, Dwight Gilbert, was sent to the prison ? known as Jetson Correctional Center for Youth ? after a probation violation. He had earlier been convicted of battery for a school fight and spent six months at a boot camp at
another juvenile prison in Jefferson Parish, Johnson said.
Gilbert's accounts of abuse are similar to those in the Juvenile Justice Project's report, compiled in interviews with the young inmates earlier this year. In February 2004, injury reports at Jetson showed fighting caused 67
injuries to inmates. In February 2005, fights caused 47 injuries, even though the prison's population had dropped from 265 to 175, the report said.
The report found similar violence at the Monroe lockup, known as Swanson Correctional Center for Youth. A 14-year-old north Louisiana boy was sent there after he was caught stealing a dog, the report said. He suffered assaults from prison staff and other inmates and now has permanent vision loss in one eye after a punch to the face fractured his eye socket, the report said.
On the Net:
Senate Bill 321 can be viewed at
http://www.legis.state.la.us/ Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana:
http://www.jjpl.org/