Dismal California Prisons Hold Juvenile Offenders

[Chicago Democrat]

Dismal California Prisons Hold Juvenile Offenders
By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: February 15, 2004


HITTIER, Calif., Feb. 10 — The mission of the California Youth Authority, which runs the state's 10 juvenile prisons, housing 4,600 inmates, is to educate and rehabilitate offenders sentenced by juvenile courts. But state officials and outside experts brought in to study the system say it fails in its most basic tasks, because of antiquated facilities, undertrained employees and violence endemic within the walls.

Youths with psychological problems are ignored or overmedicated, classes are arbitrarily canceled, and inmates or whole institutions are locked down for days or weeks at a time because of recurring gang violence, according to the independent experts, retained by the state after it was sued two years ago in a class action brought on inmates' behalf

Two wards committed suicide at one prison last month, and dozens more try to kill themselves every year, officials and parents of wards say. Conditions in many of the institutions were described by the experts as "deplorable," with blood, mucus and dried feces on the walls of many high-security cells.

Youths in solitary confinement are often fed what officials call "blender meals," in which a bologna sandwich, an apple and a carton of milk are pulverized and fed to the inmate by straw through a slit in the cell door.

rest at...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/national/15JUVE.html?hp

[boobooday]

1. my nephew went through it

Here's the basic plan:

take troubled children
hold them in overcrowded cells for way longer than is humane
make sure their lives are constantly humiliating, frightening, violent, isolated etc.

Then, turn them loose into the world, with the assurance that ONE SLIP and they will be back in.

Thus we "reform" our troubled youth.

http://www.wgoeshome.com

[PartyPooper]

5. boobooday, I hope your nephew has survived this horrendous ordeal.

Certainly, he needs at least one loving and caring adult in his life. And, I hope you have been the one who has been able to make a difference.

The tragedy is that there are so many others out there without anyone who cares.

:-(

[markses]

2. An absolute disgrace

I read that article last night, and it is, of course, horrifying. This is how we treat juveniles. Rape and violence and beatings and cages. Still to this day, and nobody doing a goddamn thing about it. Rape rooms in Baghdad? hell, we've got rape rooms for youth offenders all over this fucking country. Goddamn hypocritical holier-than-thou savages all over this country, too.

[Nevernose]

3. This is NOT the philosophy of juvenile justice

It's the one place in the criminal system where "rehabilitation" really means something. In fact, the entre legal basis for treating juveniles differently comes NOT from the fact that they are irresponsible, but from the fact that they are young enough to change.

I work in the juvenile justice field, and conditions like this do exist, unfortunately. My department's budget, a grant worth THREE MILLION under Clinton, has been cut by 500k a year since Shrub took over. We're down to 1.5 million, and there aren't enough funds to treat anyone for anything anymore...You know, I can't even go into the details of what my Juvi Probation Dept looks like; I start to get to fucking angry. We're not only letting down the children we should be serving, we're endangering the community at large.

[raysr]

4. Some time ago

FSTV was showing ads from the California Prison System hawking them to corporations for cheap labor!

[loudnclear]

6. I thought it was only Saddam who imprisoned children...

hypocrisy still reigns in the US. Our papers headline children being held in prison by Saddam...as though they were not guilty of crimes and just in prison because Saddam was evil. What do they say about the children we imprison? Most being minorities, I guess they deserve to be in prision.

[Muddleoftheroad]

8. Most in there DO deserve to be locked up

Yes, the conditions in these facilities sound horrendous, but don't deceive yourself about what sweet little boys and girls are going there. I've lived in neighborhoods where 12, 13 and 14-year-old kids were some of the biggest threats you faced. They will rob, beat, rape, shoot and kill and fear no laws because they know they are usually free and clear once they turn 18.

[Laughing Mirror]

7. "Secure Program Areas" Wild-Animal-in-a-Zoo Cages

Secure program areas. The polite three words for the one word cages, in vogue at the Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility. What's the polite word for those open-air chicken coops at Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta?

We don't have to go to Guantanamo to find human rights abuses committed on a grand scale. We can find them right here in Whittier.

Developers (stores, houses) want the valuable property this boy's reform school is sitting on. Terminator is now in the process of shutting the place down if his budget is approved. This could take a couple of years.

The 4,600 boys now living there will just have to content themselves in their cages, twiddling their thumbs, sucking down those delicious blender meals like so many milkshakes through a straw, until then.

Out of control indeed. The way we treat miserable children who inflict misery on others is by more miserable treatment. And we wonder why 90% of these boys are recidivists.

What was Dennis Kucinich taking about? A society that desperately needs to reorder it's priorities?