Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (48 page)

Then there was eighteen-year-old Justin Caldwell. On February 11, 2007, he got into some kind of dispute with a guard—the details are unclear, since each side offers a different version of events. What happened next, however, was difficult to dispute. According to the
Tampa Bay Times
, “A video camera caught Justin standing still. A heavy-set guard grabs him by the throat, slams him backward on the ground, then chokes
him. Guards pick up Justin and are leading him away when he falls and slams his head on a table. The guards drag him to the middle of the room where they leave him, bleeding. His legs twitch.”

Both the guard involved and the superintendent eventually lost their jobs. Department of Juvenile Justice officials issued yet another call for “culture change.” Only one person involved in the incident wound up facing criminal charges, however: Justin himself. He was charged with battery on a detention officer and sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum available.

The Arthur P. Dozier School for Boys was finally shuttered in 2011, amid a sweeping investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. But even that did not stem the tide of denial—nor the cycle of institutional recidivism. Officials insisted that they were closing Dozier only as a cost-cutting measure, part of a larger state-level reorganization, not because generations of children had been tortured and killed there. And in the years since Dozier closed its doors, abuse has continued inside the private prisons on which Florida increasingly relies.

Like other states barraged by advocates, attorneys, and the press,
Florida has embarked on a major reform effort in recent years, including sharp cuts in the number of youths sent to state facilities. The state has released a Roadmap to System Excellence, a commonsense-filled document issued with the lofty goal of making Florida a leader in juvenile justice.

But no ceremony, it seems—no report, reform, or road map—can put an end to the chronic violence and violation that are part and parcel of institutional justice. After countless cleansing rituals—investigations, commissions, regulations, and reforms—the abuse continues, in Florida as elsewhere.

In 2010,
the privately run Thompson Academy found itself the target of a federal class action suit for its treatment of Florida youth. A group of public defenders filed a petition asking the state to stop sending youths to Thompson and to remove those already there. According to the public defenders' claim, “the children are fed so little, and the food is of such poor quality, that staff use it as ‘currency.' ” Images from the Thompson Academy show bare and moldering mattresses and dank, crumbling walls—a horror-show setting in which
staff allegedly slammed kids into walls,
broke one boy's nose and fractured another's ankle, sexually assaulted at least one girl multiple times (before and after the abuse was reported to the administration), choked the recalcitrant, and forced children who became ill to sleep on the floor.

In an official statement, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice claimed to have sent monitors to Thompson forty-three times since 2010 and found “no deficiencies.”
Internal documents obtained by the
Huffington Post
, however, identify serious problems dating back at least to 2004. According to a “Personnel and Training Review for Thompson” dated March 29, 2004, for example, training files for staff contained “nothing,” although wards who were interviewed said that staff “screamed, yelled, worked double shifts, [and] got mixed directives, due to lack of communication.” Staff, meanwhile, confirmed that youth were not given enough to eat, adequate hot water, towels, or clothing. “It was interesting,” the investigator wrote, “that youth interviewed were concerned about staff and staff interviewed were concerned about youth.”

Despite what the
Huffington Post
characterizes as “voluminous evidence that inmates have suffered silence, sexual abuse and neglect inside the facilities of a private juvenile prison operator” (Youth Services International, parent company of the Thompson Academy and many other private facilities), the state of Florida continues to award contracts to that same operator—nearly $37 million worth over the course of the previous year, according to
a November 2013 follow-up account in the
Huffington Post
.

In July 2011,
Eric Perez died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a West Palm Beach juvenile facility after guards dropped him on his head during what officials described as “horseplay.” Guards ignored his cries for hours on the grounds that he was “faking it.” One was seen on videotape stepping over the boy's limp body as he lay dying on a cellblock floor. In the wake of Perez's death, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice reaffirmed its commitment to “operating a safe and secure juvenile justice system” and promised to “clean house.”

In August 2012, a guard at the Milton Girls Juvenile Residential Facility for girls was arrested after she slammed a seemingly unresisting girl face-first into a concrete wall and then sat on her for more than ten minutes, according to the
Miami Herald
.
Security camera footage shows other staff
members walking in and out of the room with no visible sign of alarm. One staff member joins in for a bit, sitting on the girl's legs, and another stops by to chat as casually, it appears, as if the girl pinioned beneath her colleague were a sofa or a bench. When the girl is finally allowed to stand, she appears disoriented and unsteady on her feet. The guard who has been sitting on her hands her an ice pack before escorting her out of view.

The guard's arrest did not cause her to lose so much as a single shift: she was out on bail and back at work the next day. The
Florida Department of Juvenile Justice—which had given Milton a 100 percent satisfactory rating less than a year earlier, including in the category “provision of an abuse free environment”—did, however, transfer the fifteen-year-old girl to another facility.
Only after the department found itself investigating charges that Milton's program director had herself thrown another girl to the ground while she was already restrained, leaving the girl with lacerations on her face and ear, did it finally move to terminate Milton's contract. Even then, revelations of past abuse continued to emerge.
A mental health technician was charged next, on multiple counts of battery and sexual abuse, after six girls told investigators they had been afraid to report his frequent attacks while still in Milton's care.

Finally, in 2011, the
U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division released the results of its lengthy investigation into two Florida institutions: the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center and the Arthur G. Dozier school for Boys.

On the one hand, investigators wrote, “the [Department of Juvenile Justice] has a very well-developed statewide system of written procedural protections in the form of written policies and procedures.”

On the other hand, no one appeared to be following them. State policy, for instance, requires that force be used only as a last resort. In practice, “staff subjected youth to force as a first resort . . . [including] impermissible uses of force such as choking.”

“Harmful practices threatened the physical and mental well-being of the youth committed to these facilities,” investigators wrote. “Despite its policies and procedures,” the state hired abusive staff, failed to provide adequate training or supervision, and lacked an effective accountability process. “We therefore believe that the harm suffered by juveniles confined at Dozier and JJOC is not limited to those facilities. Accordingly,
we are sharing these findings with the State despite the closure of these facilities.”

So much, in other words, for policy and procedure, for written protections, state oversight, or federal mandates. So much for ceremonies, speeches, and plaques. So much, for that matter, for the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the practices that have taken place in Florida, as elsewhere, for more than a century. Nothing, it appears, can keep children safe behind the walls of the state institutions intended to reform them.

In August 2013, after much resistance,
Florida governor Rick Scott approved a land-use agreement allowing University of South Florida anthropologists to exhume what they believe are the remains of more than one hundred children buried behind the Arthur P. Dozier School for Boys.
Digging began with the exhumation of a ten-year-old boy.

As of this writing,
it is unclear what the final death count will be. But Jerry Cooper—who received more than one hundred lashes during a single beating when he was a child at Dozier—offered his prediction: “There's not going to be enough crime scene tape in the state of Florida to take care of this situation,” Cooper told a
Miami Herald
reporter.

The events at Dozier may be extreme, but they are by no means unique. The cycle that played out there again and again—lawsuits, investigations, scandal, and revelation; blueprints for reform followed by broken promises—is routinely repeated by institutions and agencies across the country, and has been since the dawn of the training school in America.

Louisiana is one of any number of examples of juvenile corrections systems that have, like Florida, been criticized, sued, or placed under federal oversight because of chronic abuse of the youngest prisoners, only to make temporary amends that degenerate again into unconstitutional conditions. In the late 1990s, revelations of Dozier-style horrors at the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth began to draw attention. The
New York Times
described an institution where young people
“regularly appear at the infirmary with black eyes, broken noses or jaws or perforated eardrums from beatings by the poorly paid, poorly trained guards or from fights with other boys” and where “meals are so meager that many boys lose weight [and] clothing is so scarce that boys fight over shirts and shoes.”

“When I got here,” said Warden David Bonnette—a twenty-five-year veteran of Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary who was brought in to clean house—in a
New York Times
interview, “it seemed like everybody had a perforated eardrum, or a broken nose.”

In an all-too-familiar cycle, revelations of brutality at Tallulah sparked lawsuits from both advocates and the Department of Justice, resulting in a merged settlement agreement. Under pressure from family members and others, the state launched a major overhaul of the state juvenile system. The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 mandated sweeping changes: a shift to a rehabilitation-based model; a commission tasked with moving the state toward a network of smaller, therapeutic facilities; the closure of Tallulah; and a commitment to investing the money saved in community-based programs.

That, anyway, was the plan. Reality followed a different and all-too- familiar trajectory. As with Dozier, Tallulah's closure was followed by reports of violence at the state's other juvenile facilities. “No Better Off: An Update on Swanson Center for Youth,” a 2010 report from the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, documents
“significant violence” at the Swanson Center for Youth, by then home to nearly half of the youths in state secure care. Youths interviewed for the report described daily fights, some spurred on by guards, and many leading to hospitalization.

While “Louisiana's Office of Juvenile Justice . . . claims to seek the implementation of a therapeutic, rehabilitative model for youth who get in trouble,” the report's authors concluded,

According to youth at Swanson, the state has far to go in reaching that goal. The story they tell is one of mistreatment, one of violence, isolation . . . and a lack of preparation for a productive future outside of this environment. Their stories are not so different from those that advocates have heard before—first at the Tallulah facility (closed in 2003), then at the Jena facility (closed in 2004), then at Jetson Center for Youth (downsized in 2008). With every push by advocates for reform, some progress has been made. Yet too often, the challenges reappear in a different geographical location, rather than being fully addressed system wide.

So many states have gone through similar cycles of scandal, intervention, reform, and relapse that it is fair to say that institutional recidivism is the norm, not the exception. Texas, for example, has technically been operating under the constraints of a federal ruling since 1973—a mandate that did nothing to prevent the widespread sexual abuse documented in
Chapter 6
, nor the rapid unraveling of the reforms that were instituted in the wake of
that
scandal.

Morales v. Turman
, the lawsuit that led to the 1973 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, identified a “widespread practice of beating, slapping, kicking, and otherwise physically abusing juvenile inmates, in the absence of any exigent circumstances, in many of the Texas Youth Council facilities.”

According to author Kenneth Wooden, who attended the trial, children described a grotesque nomenclature that had evolved to categorize the various forms of suffering to which they were subjected. “The peel” involved a child kneeling shirtless with his head clamped between a guard's legs to keep him in place during a beating. “The tight” required a youngster to touch his toes while a guard beat him with a broom handle.

One epileptic boy who experienced a seizure was tossed into an isolation cell. Guards threw tear gas canisters into the cell behind him. According to court testimony, the boy left claw marks on the wall all the way to the floor. Another boy, subjected to similar treatment, emerged the following day with “skin peeling and hanging off.” A girl who had been pregnant described being forced to swallow a handful of pills and then exercise vigorously until she miscarried.