Louisiana Governor Calls for Inquiry Into Abuses at Juvenile Detention Center

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/us/louisiana-juvenile-detention-abuse.html

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Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said this week that he was calling for an investigation into one of the state’s largest juvenile detention centers, after The New York Times documented a long record of repeated abuse, lenient oversight and, in recent years, a surge in suicide attempts. Three children have died by suicide there since 2017.

“We’re going to take a hard look and see what is happening there,” Mr. Edwards said after a public appearance in Lafayette on Monday. He said the state would examine “what actions, if any, we need to take” to protect children at the Ware Youth Center in Red River Parish, in northwest Louisiana. On Tuesday, the governor’s office said it was asking the state’s inspector general to undertake the investigation. The inspector general’s office was not immediately available for comment.

The Times examination, published over the weekend in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, was based on thousands of pages of state records and court documents and interviews with more than 100 people who were previously held at Ware or who have worked there. In all, 42 people held at Ware over the last 25 years described being sexually abused by staff members; 30 employees were identified through interviews and records as having sexually abused children at Ware over that time. A majority of those interviewed said that guards had routinely punished, degraded or inflicted pain.

In only a few cases have Ware guards been convicted of sex crimes against children held at the facility, most in the last 13 years under the current district attorney — who, in all instances, negotiated plea deals that kept the guards out of prison and off the sex-offender registry.

Ware’s executive director, Staci Scott, said in an interview on Tuesday that “we look forward to” the governor’s inquiry. She declined to address any of The Times’s findings, including the striking number of recent suicide attempts at Ware.

In 2019 and 2020 — the most recent years for which comparable data was available — Ware had the highest rate of suicide attempts of any juvenile facility in the state. The 64 recorded suicide attempts represented roughly a quarter of the total across the state, though Ware has only about 5 percent of the Louisiana juvenile system’s beds.

While Ware is not state-run, it receives much of its funding through contracts with the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice. The agency issued a statement saying it hoped the inspector general would “conduct a thorough and timely investigation.”

State Senator Louie Bernard, a Republican who represents Red River Parish, said in an email that he was awaiting an investigation. “To say that I was stunned by the accusations contained in the article, would be putting it mildly,” he wrote.

It has been a year of crisis for Louisiana’s juvenile system, which has battled chronic staffing shortages and a succession of headline-grabbing escapes. In March, an investigation by ProPublica, The Marshall Project and NBC News documented the reliance on solitary confinement and failure to provide services to children housed in a new state-run facility at St. Martinville. Three months later, 20 children took over part of the Bridge City Center for Youth, prompting the local sheriff to call in a SWAT team to restore order.

In response, Mr. Edwards directed guards from Louisiana’s adult prisons to bolster existing staff, armed with Tasers previously banned from Louisiana juvenile facilities. He also announced in July plans to move a number of children into a segregated building of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. The first eight children were moved there last month.

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice assumed oversight of Louisiana’s juvenile system after a series of exposés about brutal conditions. In an interview on Tuesday, Royce Duplessis, a Democratic state legislator who has been a vocal proponent of juvenile reform, called for renewed federal intervention. “The story is another illustration of how Louisiana has completely failed in the area of juvenile justice,” he said.

Under the Biden Administration, the Justice Department has increased scrutiny of conditions in juvenile facilities, and last year it announced a statewide investigation of centers in Texas. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said officials would review The Times investigation, but otherwise declined to comment.

The Times’s findings brought expressions of outrage from several groups that have long advocated reforming Louisiana’s juvenile justice system.

“We are utterly devastated by the detailed accounts of the systemic abuse and enforced trauma occurring within Ware Youth Center, and we are heartbroken for the families who have lost their children to this cruelty,” said Gina Womack, co-founder and executive director of a leading advocacy group, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. “This report goes beyond our most horrific nightmares about the state’s treatment of youth under its care — and the lack of ownership for these failures makes it all the more sickening.”