Набутыливание как система американских тюрем
kilativ — 31.10.2022
ОЧЕНЬ большая статья из New York Times (ссылку не даю, поскольку
подписка платная). Под катом приведена частично, поскольку иначе ЖЖ
не публикует - слишком большая.
Если коротко, набутыливание в подростковой тюрьме Луизианы - это
обычный порядок вещей. Никто не несет ответственности за
изнасилования со стороны работников охраны, суициды и общее
издевательство, поскольку там в основном малолетние книгги (их,
кстати, в Луизиане треть населения, если что) и их ну абсолютно не
жалко. Охранники - такие же юдендраты (черные, которым дают власть
издеваться), а вот все руководство, менеджмент, судьи, которые туда
посылают задержанных и ВЛАДЕЛЬЦЫ - исключительно белые дамы и
джентельмены. Что интересно, далеко не все из сидельцев там вот
прямо опасные для общества насильники и убийцы. В этих жутких
штатах в тюрьмы бросают за всякие школьные выходки. Один из
примеров - пацана кинули в тюрьму за то, что он в школе поджег
рулон с туалетной бумагой. Если бы в СССР таких шалунов сажали, у
нас бы четверть учеников точно бы сидела - вот ни разу не книгги,
включая моего босса, выдающегося ученого (в школе он был
хулиганом). И все потому, что моральные уродцы, которые на самом
деле ничем от книгг не отличаются, хоть и белого цвета, на этом
зарабатывают деньги. Да ещё считают себя морально правыми,
поклоняясь своей баптистской сатане.
DYING INSIDE’: CHAOS AND CRUELTY IN LOUISIANA JUVENILE
DETENTION
Repeated abuses, overlooked complaints and a surge in suicide
attempts at a detention center with powerful allies.
By Megan Shutzer and Rachel Lauren Mueller
COUSHATTA, La. — The last time Bridget Peterson saw her son Solan
was through the window of a holding cell at Ware Youth Center, just
two weeks after his 13th birthday. Even for such a small boy — a
shade over five feet tall, barely 90 pounds — the cell looked
cramped.
Four days later, he was dead by suicide. “I remember screaming, ‘My
boy is gone,’” Mrs. Peterson said.
She soon learned that another child at Ware had killed himself two
days before. Then she learned that her son had been isolated in
that bare cell for at least four days, even though state rules said
he shouldn’t have spent a single night there. The guards, who were
supposed to check on him every 15 minutes, hadn’t done so for more
than two hours, just as they had neglected to check on the other
boy, state regulators’ records and surveillance footage show.
“It’s like, what on earth is going on?” she said.
For a few days in February 2019, the back-to-back suicides flashed
across the news cycle around northwest Louisiana. But inside the
walls at Ware, one of the state’s largest juvenile detention
facilities, children have been trying to kill themselves with
stunning regularity.
There were at least 64 suicide attempts at Ware in 2019 and 2020, a
rate higher than at any other juvenile facility in the state.
Children have tied socks, towels and sheets around their necks.
They have swallowed baby powder, screws, fluid from an ice pack.
Two tried to drown themselves.
Escape attempts are surging, too: At least 91 children have tried
to flee since the beginning of 2019, a little more than 5 percent
of those held at Ware in that period. In June 2020, a girl told
staff members that she was going to run away in hopes that the
police would take her to “the big jail” rather than back to Ware,
records show. A second told staff members at Ware that she would
rather be sent to a psychiatric hospital than spend another day
there. Soon after, she tried to kill herself by leaping from a
roof.
Behind any attempt at suicide lies a tangle of factors. But what
has happened at Ware has brought into sharp focus pervasive despair
among children there that no one is going to rescue them from
repeated acts of physical violence, sexual assault and
psychological torment, an investigation by The New York Times and
the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of
California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism found.
For years, Ware’s leaders have failed to report complaints of
abuse, hired unqualified employees and disregarded state rules.
Records offer no evidence that state regulators have ever fined or
punished Ware, or threatened its contracts, even as inspectors have
documented the same failings year after year. Local law-enforcement
officials have been largely dismissive of sexual-abuse allegations
at Ware.
The Times/Berkeley investigation — based on more than 100
interviews with people previously held at Ware and current and
former staff members, thousands of pages of records and court
documents, and hours of security footage — reveals how a place
meant to offer children care and rehabilitation instead descended
into chaos and cruelty. Guards beat and choked their wards. Several
forced children to endure sexual abuse as the price for phone
privileges. They frequently maintained control by bribing children
with food to assault other children.
“I used to tell myself I’m not going to ever get through this
stuff,” Asia Perkins, the girl who threw herself off the roof, said
in an interview.
In interviews and documents, 42 people held at Ware over the last
25 years described being sexually abused by staff members. Many
accounts were corroborated by relatives, others once held at Ware
or court records. In all, they identified 30 staff members who had
sexually abused children at Ware; one of the accused, a longtime
manager, still works there. Yet many said they had remained silent
at the time, out of fear of retaliation or the understanding that
others’ complaints had been simply brushed aside.
“Basically, you can’t do nothing, you can’t go tell on them,” said
Shakira Williams, who spent about a year and a half at Ware.
Ware declined to comment for this article.
The center may be extreme in some respects, but it embodies the
chronic dysfunctions of America’s juvenile justice systems, their
stubborn resistance to decades of exposés and waves of reform. In
Louisiana, where brutal conditions prompted juvenile justice reform
two decades ago, the system is again in crisis. Amid chronic
staffing shortages, a succession of headline-grabbing uprisings and
escapes is being met with measures once banned, such as arming some
guards with Tasers.
Ware, in Red River Parish, is also emblematic of the systems’
pervasive racial imbalances. Roughly three-quarters of the children
held there are Black, many from urban areas hours away from this
part of the state, which violently opposed Reconstruction and
fought school desegregation into the late 1970s. Most Ware guards
are Black, as well, though nearly all of its leaders are white, as
are the local judge, sheriff and district attorney.
Yet central to the story of Ware are the politics and protocols of
this patch of northwest Louisiana forest and bayou, where a handful
of influential men harnessed their power to direct millions of
state dollars to the construction and nurturing of what is now a
major regional employer, while insulating it from outside
intervention. “They had their political ducks in a row,” said Mary
Livers, who until 2016 ran the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice.
“It was pretty well protected.”
At the same time, allegations of abuse at Ware have frequently
received superficial scrutiny from the local criminal-justice
system. Year after year, records and interviews show, the sheriff’s
office conducted cursory investigations, sometimes failing to
interview key witnesses or rejecting out of hand allegations from
children they viewed as incorrigible criminals. Julie Jones, who
has prosecuted three Ware guards for sexual abuse in her 13 years
as district attorney, offered each of them plea bargains that kept
them out of prison and off sex-offender registries.
“I do not like the idea of burdening someone with a charge that
they do not deserve,” Ms. Jones said in an interview.
Asked if those cases gave her concerns about the safety of children
at Ware, she responded: “We’re talking about armed robbers and
murderers. And these girls haven’t even hit the age of 18 yet, some
of them. Do I worry about their safety? No, I don’t. I think that
they’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.”
In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent
crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson,
sent there for nonviolent offenses or infractions as minor as
skipping school. “We knew there would be consequences,” his mother
said, “but my kid didn’t deserve to die because he set fire to a
roll of toilet paper in a school.”
On Thursday nights in the late 1980s, some of the most powerful men
in northwest Louisiana — judges, sheriffs’ deputies and politicians
from seven neighboring parishes — began meeting at the Catfish Bend
restaurant south of town to discuss a shared problem: where to send
local children who broke the law.
Some of Louisiana’s larger parishes had their own juvenile
detention centers. But in small parishes like Red River, officials
had to hope they could snag empty beds — at considerable expense —
at a center in, say, Lafayette or Baton Rouge, several hours
away.
One Catfish Bend participant was Donald Kelly, a close confidant of
Gov. Edwin Edwards. As the Democratic floor leader in the State
Senate, Mr. Kelly wielded significant influence over the state
budget; now he would use it to secure funding for a juvenile
facility serving all seven parishes. Red River is one of
Louisiana’s least populous parishes, but Mr. Kelly said in an
interview that he worked to have the new center built there, in the
place where he grew up and where his former law partner was the
judge.
The center would be named for that judge, Richard Ware. Its
director would be Kenny Loftin, a 29-year-old child-abuse
investigator recommended by Mr. Kelly and voted in by Ware’s
founders. As one Catfish Bend participant put it, Mr. Loftin was
“Donnie’s guy.”
Ware opened in 1993, at a time when Louisiana was earning a
reputation for operating one of the country’s worst juvenile
systems. A series of scandals led to the closing of all privately
run juvenile facilities, and in 2000, the federal government
assumed oversight of those run by the state.
But Ware was neither private nor state-run. It was a “political
subdivision” of the state, created by legislation and overseen by a
board composed of many of the men who met at Catfish Bend. This
structure offered them and their charismatic new director ready
access to tax dollars and far more independence from
regulators.
Ware began to grow. In addition to the detention center, for
children arrested and awaiting disposition of their cases, it added
group homes for children with substance abuse and behavioral
problems. And with Mr. Loftin working his political connections,
Ware won a no-bid contract to house every girl in Louisiana
sentenced to secure care — the state’s most restrictive form of
detention for children convicted of crimes — along with $5 million
to build new girls’ dormitories.
One of the first to arrive would be Shakira Williams. On Sept. 30,
2009, nearly 300 miles to the south, Shakira woke up at Florida
Parishes Juvenile Detention Center expecting a routine Wednesday.
Instead, she recalls, she and about a dozen other girls were
shackled and loaded into a van headed for Ware.
Shakira, 16 at the time, had entered the juvenile system the year
before. Her mother struggling with addiction, Shakira had turned to
theft to support her siblings. “I was the oldest, and I had to step
up. Or I thought I had to,” she said in an interview. She got
caught and was put in a group home. When she was arrested again —
for possessing an acquaintance’s gun — she was sentenced to secure
care at Florida Parishes.
There the program was tailored to girls, many of whom had histories
of sexual abuse or pregnancy. Florida Parishes is just an hour from
New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where most of the girls were from. “We
were doing good work with girls,” Joseph Dominick, an administrator
at Florida Parishes, said. “Why send them so far up north?”
Shakira was struck by the “straight cotton fields” as the van drew
closer to Ware, she recalls. “There were a lot of things that would
upset an African-American kid,” she said.
At Ware — the detention center, school and several group homes
surrounded by 125 acres of forest — Shakira found a place that
seemed to view her as irredeemable. Training materials in use since
at least 2014 teach employees that “society” expects them to serve
“as their last line of defense in protecting their community from
those deemed unfit to live among them.”
At Florida Parishes, days had been carefully structured with school
and therapy; misbehavior was met with five-minute timeouts. But
with Ware’s new girls’ dormitories still unfinished, Shakira said,
she was placed in a cell and put on “23 and 1” — 23 hours a day
locked up, with one hour out to shower. She and other girls said
they were kept on lockdown until the new housing was ready.
Eleanor Morgan, a former supervisor with decades of experience in
other juvenile facilities, said she had never seen lockdown used as
much as at Ware. Experts have long known that prolonged isolation
is harmful to children’s neurological development. In 2013, the
state limited lockdown to 72 hours. But Ware continued confining
children for far longer, five people held at Ware said. One said
she had been kept on lockdown for two months.
What made lockdown worse, several said, were psychiatric drugs —
common in juvenile facilities — that left them feeling like
“zombies.” Forced to take Seroquel and Prozac but fearing their
effects, Shakira would hide the pills under her tongue and stow
them under her mattress, she said.
“I don’t know how they function with the amount of medications some
of them were on,” said Janice McCanliss, who worked at Ware until
2019.
Ware’s policies prohibit “the inflicting of physical pain on a
youth for punishment.” But a majority of those interviewed for this
article who had been held at Ware or worked there said guards
routinely punished, degraded or inflicted pain.
One favored takedown, they said, was “chicken wings”: Guards would
cross your arms behind your back, then force them up until it
seemed that your shoulders would pop out of their sockets. Patricia
Bell, who still works at Ware, said in an interview in 2020 that
the technique had been part of the training until 2018. “Now you
aren’t supposed to do the chicken wing,” she said. “Of course, they
still do.” In reports to the state, Ware’s nurses described carpet
burns on children’s faces and head-to-toe bruises from
restraints.
For Shakira, the abuse didn’t let up once she moved into Ware’s new
dormitories. She was no longer locked up all day, but she and
others once held at Ware overwhelmingly recalled a staff who
tormented them. “They would say my mom didn’t want me for nothing
but a disability check,” said Dayja Nixon, incarcerated at Ware in
2017 and 2018. Six women said staff members had withheld sanitary
pads as punishment. One recalled a white supervisor who treated
Black children differently. “I frightened her; she called me an
N-word,” she said.
Shakira’s dorm supervisor, Tynica Haskett, inspired singular fear.
Nine women once held at Ware said she would often painfully
restrain and beat children. “It was like a drill,” said one former
co-worker, Tracy Mosley. “She would go into the rooms on a rampage
and flip the mattresses, take the kids down.”
Ms. Haskett, who no longer works at Ware, declined to
comment.
Sometimes guards bribed children to beat up other children. “They’d
give us a sign” by gesturing toward the designated target, Shakira
said. “Then, they’d take your order for shrimp or chicken.”
She remembered being constantly hungry, and said that when a female
guard came into her room and kissed her, she went along, enduring
sexual abuse for weeks in exchange for food. “You’ve got to
survive,” she said.
Not all employees were abusive. Samyra Williams, held at Ware until
2020, recalled that she grew close to her unit’s residential
adviser; she called her “the mother that most children wish they
had.”
But even the best intentions were challenged by Ware’s culture.
Precious Sellers said she hoped to be a role model when she started
as a guard in 2019. “That was knocked out of me the first time I
went into Ware,” she said. She quit after a month.