Juvenile Injustice
Overcrowding, violence, and abuse--state juvenile justice systems are in a shockingly chaotic state. Now, finally, the feds are stepping in.
CHINO, CALIF. -At the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility here, the K&L disciplinary lockdown is known as "the Rock." Here dim corridors are lined with the steel doors of a dozen concrete cells. The air is dank, and the drip-drip of water echoes quietly, thanks to the perpetually leaking showers. On the mental health unit, shouts and curses bounce off the walls. In a cell, a young man with his head down paces silently, back and forth, back and forth.
Angry outbursts punctuate the din. One day, two youths--one black, the other Latino--passed each other and a racial slur was muttered. Both teens started swinging. A counselor screamed at them to stop, then blasted the pair with Mace. The smaller Latino boy knocked the black youth to the ground and kicked him. A guard ran up and slammed the Latino with his baton. Then, the black kid jumped up and pummeled the Latino. The guard flailed at the black youth with his baton and yelled: "Get off him! Get off him!" A second guard threw the black inmate to the ground. Finally, both kids were cuffed and sent off for a stretch in 23-hour lockdown.
It was just another day at Stark, the biggest, toughest prison in the California Youth Authority system. One expert has called the CYA system "a very dangerous place" with "an intense climate of fear." Last year, there were nearly 300 attacks at Stark--more than double the previous year's total. And that was just kids beating up other kids. There were also 52 assaults on staffers at Stark--also double the previous year's tally. "There's riots and fights all the time," says German Carranza, 23, a round-faced native of East Los Angeles who was sent to the Youth Authority at age 17 for a gang-related murder. "I don't feel safe here. But you get so used to it you don't feel fear. You're just alert all the time."
California is hardly unique. Juvenile justice facilities across the nation are in a dangerously advanced state of disarray, with violence an almost everyday occurrence and rehabilitation the exception rather than the rule. Abuse of juvenile inmates by staff is routine. At the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore, staffers used force on juveniles 550 times between July 2002 and December 2003. At the Nevada Youth Training Center, staffers repeatedly punched boys in the chest, kicked their legs, and shoved them against walls. In Florida, a 211-page report issued in March faulted employees at the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center for failing to act as a 17-year-old begged for help but slowly died of a ruptured appendix over two days in June 2003. In Mississippi, suicidal girls at the Columbia Training School were stripped naked and placed in the "dark room," a locked, windowless isolation cell with no light and only a drain in the floor for a toilet; other kids were hogtied and pole-shackled and put on public display for hours. Girls were forced to eat their own vomit. Some staffers at Arizona's Adobe Mountain School sexually abused teens. Several states have had a disturbing spate of suicides among incarcerated kids. "Almost every place is experiencing major problems," says criminologist Barry Krisberg, author of a recent scathing report on the California Youth Authority. "There are cycles of abuse, reform, and abuse, and we are in a cycle of abuse."
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