Louisiana's Infamous Angola Prison Will Now Lock Up Children

[Jilly_in_VA]

In the coming days, Louisiana officials will incarcerate about two dozen children inside the old death row of Louisiana State Penitentiary, also called Angola, a massive maximum security prison for adult men that was once notorious for its violence.

Children as young as 10 with a history of assault may be transferred from their current juvenile correctional facilities to the former death row, where they will sleep in windowless cells with floor-to-ceiling metal bars that lock them in. The conditions are more punitive than those at the state’s high-security juvenile facilities, where kids normally sleep in dorms. The Office of Juvenile Justice will house the children at Angola temporarily while finishing construction on another place to detain them.

Several Louisiana law clinics and the ACLU sued to try to stop the transfers, arguing that keeping children at the adult prison—even temporarily—was unconstitutional and psychologically harmful, and that it might increase their risk of suicide. Though the kids will be housed separately from the adult men, the facility “is going to scream ‘prison’” to them, Vincent Schiraldi, a juvenile justice expert for the plaintiffs and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, told the court.

But on Friday, Chief District Judge Shelly Dick reluctantly signed off on the plan, stating that incarcerating kids at Angola would potentially be “traumatizing” for them, but that government officials had nowhere better to keep the kids, who pose security risks. “The prospect of putting a teenager to bed at night in a locked cell behind razor wire surrounded by swamps at Angola is disturbing,” the judge wrote. But “the threat of harm these youngsters present to themselves, and others, is intolerable.”

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2022/09/louisianas-infamous-angola-prison-will-now-lock-up-children/

Lousyanna. That is all.