Louisiana Children and OJJ

A lawsuit filed against a juvenile justice specialist and the state of Louisiana claims a teenager held at the Acadiana Center for Youth in Bunkie was repeatedly sexually abused by a staff member.

The teenager reportedly called the Prison Rape Elimination Act hotline repeatedly in May, but the lawsuit says nothing came of it. The petition also claims the facility later removed PREA informational signs.

“The OJJ plans to move around 36 youths to a unit at a dorm at the current facility. The reopened facility will house low- to moderate-risk juveniles. The OJJ said they are working to improve security, with more fencing and security cameras. As well as some remodeling to be done at the dorms.”

“OJJ licensing specialists visited the jail multiple times between July and February and found the facility violated state regulations 83 times. The Appeal also received reports for an additional 11 juvenile detention facilities inspected during the same period. Jackson Parish had more violations than the combined total of those facilities and almost 12 times more than the second-worst lock-up.”

Kenny Loftin, who Gov. Jeff Landry placed in charge of the Office of Juvenile Justice, has reinstated the state contract again and is moving incarcerated girls to Ware. Loftin helped start the facility and personally ran Ware for most of his career in juvenile justice, from 1993 to 2015.

The detention center is not a traditional state facility and instead controlled by local officials. Judges and law enforcement officials from six north Louisiana parishes sit on its management board.

Since it first opened its doors last year, the Jackson Parish jail has flouted state-licensing laws for juvenile detention facilities. It’s been consistently accused of abusing and neglecting kids in its custody. And it’s entered into contracts with nearly a dozen other parishes around the state to house the youth from their parishes that are incarcerated pre-trial.

The jail has also been collecting money each month from the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice, through an OJJ contract that agreed to pay the jail for at least 30 beds, whether or not OJJ keeps any youth there.

Soon, the lucrative contract will be no more.

Mary Livers, who was the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice for Gov. Bobby Jindal, agrees Louisiana needs more juvenile justice beds, but worries about housing pre- and post-adjudicated youth alongside each other as planned.

She said the young people who have been found guilty of a crime need intensive treatment that isn’t typically offered in regional detention centers.

“The risk would be that kids would not get the treatment they were supposed to get in an OJJ facility,” Livers said in an interview.

State Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, said at the August hearing the state had decided to house the two populations together so that the new juvenile detention centers would have a “sustainable” source of funding and not run into financial problems.

Livers also said she had hoped to see the state conduct a study of state facility needs before officials started allocating money to build new juvenile justice facilities.

“I’m disappointed there doesn’t appear to have been more planning done,” she said.

“We simply do not have the transparency and accountability mechanisms to fully grasp the breadth of abuse in youth prisons across Louisiana, and our state leaders have not taken previous claims seriously …” Womack added. “Our facilities should be a place to treat and protect youth with love and care in order to rehabilitate them before they return to their communities.”

In August, a Jackson Parish official informed OJJ in an email that 69 juveniles would be housed in the Jackson jail’s 10 new PODS, dorms created in shipping containers.

In one of its first moves since taking over licensing and oversight from the Department of Children and Family Services, the state Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) has authorized the use of mace and pepper spray in local juvenile detention facilities.

At the Jackson Parish Detention Center, guards would use pepper spray in response to minor verbal altercations, said one young man who spoke with The Lens. He described being sprayed indiscriminately while in OJJ custody in Jackson last summer. Each guard carries an orange can of pepper spray, he said, so if a kid talked back, a guard might lift his hand and spray into the child’s face, he said.

Note: Jackson Parish Detention Center is the facility in north Louisiana that planned to use converted shipping containers for detaining juveniles, which was reported to the Baton Rouge Press Club by Senator Regina Barrow and Ombudsman Kathleen Richey. In my recent phone conversation with OJJ’s Deputy Assistant Secretary Daren Patin, who is responsible for OJJ’s Licensing program, he confirmed that Jackson Parish Detention Center will not be allowed to place children in converted shipping containers (aka “Sea Cans”). — Rick Wheat

So what exactly is youth incarceration doing for our state? We know it’s contributing to poor mental and physical health, a higher likelihood of further incarceration, and a lower chance of furthering or completing education—and we also know it’s not contributing to a safer environment (Annie E. Casey Foundation). So, the costs outweigh the reward.

The state Office of Juvenile Justice is paying the Jackson Parish Sheriff’s Office about $130,000 per month for 30 youth beds at the local jail — whether occupied or not.

The number of inmates has since grown from seven to 10, and the parish is paying $1,750 each day to house them, according to the Sheriff’s Office. At the current rate, it would cost the city-parish $638,750 in a year to house 10 17-year-old inmates in Jackson Parish.

As Louisiana undertakes a massive overhaul of criminal justice laws, one of the most controversial changes is putting more 17-year-olds on trial for crimes as adults. The changes backpedal on a measure passed seven years ago that treated teens under 18 as juveniles in most cases.

“Over the past three years, as part of its oversight responsibilities, OIG (Office of Inspector General) has physically visited every secure care facility operated by (the Office of Juvenile Justice) in the State of Louisiana,” the report noted. “The Ware campus compares favorably to those other facilities.”

The OIG conducted the investigation at the governor’s request after the New York Times published an article in October 2022 alleging “repeated abuses, overlooked complaints and a surge in suicide attempts” at the facility located near Coushatta. The results of the state’s investigation were made public Thursday (April 25).

Gov. Landry’s statement reads: Today marks the start to a new justice system here in Louisiana. No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court. These are criminals and today, they will finally be treated as such.

Recently, I made a tour of a facility in Jackson Parish where there are 52 children being held and the plan that the parish has is to put these children into what are called “container units.” It is essentially a tractor trailer unit, like the 18 wheelers, and the plan is to put six children per container.

A frayed patchwork of 11 juvenile justice intervention programs in New Orleans should be placed under a single agency, according to a new report commissioned by the City Council.

The report urges the removal of several programs now under the watch of Orleans Parish Juvenile Court and recommends shunting far more youngsters with one or two arrests to a community-based agency, allowing courts to focus on higher-risk juvenile offenders.

Children incarcerated in Louisiana’s Jackson Parish Jail have been forced to sleep on the floor, shot at with pepper balls, and imprisoned close to adults, according to documents filed today in federal court.

The filing says young people at the jail reported that they were confined to overcrowded cells for nearly 24 hours a day and were only permitted to shower every other day. Some said they had to sleep on a thin mattress on the floor with a blanket and no pillow. Today’s filing says that, as of March 11, 36 kids who are in the custody of OJJ “are incarcerated with adults at the Jackson Parish Jail in shocking and abysmal conditions.”

Landry said his administration vets appointees carefully before selecting them and suggested the investigative reporters who produced the article didn’t tell the full story about Ware.

“Sometimes, the press doesn’t get it all out there. … and sometimes the whole story is not possible to be put in print,” the governor said. “He came highly recommended by many senators.”

“The reports about Ware from the NYT were beyond disturbing. OJJ clearly needs wholesale reform,” (State Sen. Royce) Duplessis wrote in a text message Wednesday. “If Mr. Loftin was in charge of Ware at that time, there are serious questions about whether this is a move in the direction toward improving OJJ.”

The Task Force on Juvenile Justice Facility Standards met at the Louisiana State Capitol to discuss its recommendations on juvenile justice for the coming session. During the meeting Wednesday, committee members discussed the ongoing concern for lack of individual assessments and the Office of Juvenile Justice’s lack of staff.

Last week, Landry’s Crime and Public Safety Transition Council released a report recommending the state direct the OJJ to “implement a corrections model that includes probation and parole versus the current therapeutic approach.”

The state should also create a facility that would assess young offenders to establish individualized treatment plans before they are placed in longer-term OJJ custody. And the broader juvenile justice system could be bettered, OJJ suggested, if judges and attorneys involved in cases received special legal training.

“The juvenile justice system was not designed to be a mini version of the adult corrections center. It was designed to give rehabilitative services to adjudicated youth, and when you have to remove them from their communities, that removal should be done as a last resort measure,” he (Otha “Curtis” Nelson Jr., Deputy Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice) said. “I think there are kids, young people, who, by the time we’re sending them back to their communities, we probably have done more harm than we have done good.”

Rather than just build more jails, Louisiana juvenile justice system administrators urge officials to take a closer look at policies to address youth criminal trends, in addition to curbing persistent violence and escapes at state correctional centers.

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The agency (OJJ) says the struggles at juvenile facilities make it hard to help the youths in its care.

“I think there are kids, young people who by the time we’re sending them back to their communities, we probably have done more harm than we have done good,” OJJ Deputy Secretary Curtis Nelson said.

The state’s youth incarceration agency entered into a two-year contract with the Jackson Parish Jail to lock up children—some of whom have been incarcerated at Angola, the state’s most notorious prison.

Despite lacking a required DCFS license, Jackson’s detention center is keeping pre-trial youth — and collecting roughly $200 a day per kid from surrounding parishes

But now civil rights groups say the problems persist at the facility where the teens were moved: Youth say they have been maced, forced to wear shackles while showering and denied basic services like counseling and consistent schooling. And they are urging federal officials to investigate.

The conditions at the jail are just the latest indication that Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice is failing to fulfill its mission to support—not punish—kids in their care, say advocates who have been engaged in a more than year-long fight over the state’s plan to send “problematic youth” to Angola.

The $75 hourly rate is more than any public OJJ employee made in 2022. It’s multiple times what an average person working at a secure-care facility makes. State records show that juvenile justice specialists, who interact with detained youth every day, only pull in between $17 and $35 each hour.

The plans for Jetson mark a stunning reversal in the state’s approach to juvenile incarceration. In 2014, Gov. Bobby Jindal shuttered Jetson after the state faced a series of abuse allegations from young people who lived at the site. Its facilities were also considered too “prison-like” for Louisiana’s new juvenile justice programming, which was supposed to be more therapeutic than punitive.

“We breathe a collective sigh of relief with OJJ’s decision to remove incarcerated girls out of the Ware facility,” Renard Bridgewater wrote in a statement the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights issued this week. “The history of abuse, trauma and avoidable deaths suffered by incarcerated youth for years at Ware has been well documented and will thankfully end at this facility because of this decision.”
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Scott said the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services has also expressed interest in using the incarcerated girls’ building for foster care in the future.

A federal judge Friday ordered Louisiana prison officials to stop housing youth offenders in the former death row of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and to relocate them within one week.

A federal judge ordered Louisiana officials on Friday to begin moving kids out of the former death row unit at Angola, one of the nation’s most notorious prisons.

In remarks from court, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick accused state officials of breaking “virtually every promise” they had made when announcing the plan to move children to the prison, according to NOLA.com.

Now, nearly a year later, the lawyers are back before Judge Dick, asking her to move their young clients, some as young as 15, to “lawful youth facilities” where they would no longer be subject to the mistreatment and shoddy schooling they’ve endured at the OJJ facility at Angola.

“As predicted, the state’s unprecedented decision to hold children in abusive conditions inside Angola’s former death row building has resulted in almost a year of devastating effects,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director at ACLU of Louisiana.

The federal government has weighed in on a lawsuit that aims to remove youth from a temporary site at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, saying the facility is seriously harmful and potentially unconstitutional if descriptions of dangerous living conditions and lengthy isolation are true.

A number of children were locked in a former death row prison in Louisiana in extreme heat with no air conditioning and a limited supply of water earlier this month, according to a legal filing from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

A court filing alleges the youth offenders are sleeping in hot conditions, they are isolated and forced to shower while shackled and handcuffed. Southern Poverty Law Center senior policy analyst Delvin Davis said, “The situation of incarceration in Angola is emblematic of a larger systemic issue of juvenile justice in Louisiana as a whole.”

“I would not dare to keep my dog in these conditions for fear of my dog dying,” she wrote. “Louisiana’s cruelty to animals laws would not support keeping a dog confined in this heat in a cage. And Louisiana law requires air conditioning in all juvenile detention centers.”

Fifteen youth are currently held in a renovated former death row building at Angola, Nelson said. They are taking part in what he described as a four- to eight-week “treatment plan” before being returned to their original youth correctional campuses.

Some 70 to 80 juveniles have been sent to Angola since Gov. John Bel Edwards announced a year ago some would be moved to the state penitentiary until a more suitable facility was available.

Ashley Hamilton with the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights paints the Cathey legislation and other bills that target youth offenders as regressively punitive rather than therapeutic. She also challenges claims — in Louisiana and across the country — that juvenile crime is occuring at an increased rate, citing a lack of supporting data.

In Louisiana, there are certainly correlations between delinquent youth and a lack of investment in education, public health, recreational opportunities and alternatives to incarceration that span generations. Anyone who can’t see this hand-in-hand relationship clearly doesn’t want to for selfish reasons.

Yet rather than target the prosecutors who let such matters slip through the cracks, the Truth and Transparency in the Louisiana Criminal Justice System Pilot Program from Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, goes against the grain by removing the veil of confidentiality from juvenile court records.

LLA Mike Waguespack published an audit report for the Department of Public Safety and Corrections’ Office of Juvenile Justice on Wednesday that evaluated the effectiveness of internal controls over the federal foster care program during the last fiscal year. Auditors found OJJ did not adequately review foster care invoices submitted to the Department of Children and Family Services for reimbursement to ensure billings were accurately calculated.

Last year, the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice began transferring children to Angola, the state’s most notorious prison. Since then, kids say they’ve suffered through horrific conditions and routine mistreatment.

Two teens held at a new juvenile lockup in a former death row building at Angola said in court filings that youth there have been pepper sprayed, held in solitary confinement for hours with breaks only for showers and regularly had aggressive run-ins with Department of Corrections guards.

The expansion allows for an additional $415,000 to defend the relocation of teens from the Bridge City Youth Center to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in federal court. Three teenagers filed suit against the Edwards administration in August, arguing that the move is detrimental to their mental health, and could interfere with special education services at least one of the teens is receiving.

OJJ incident reports for the Swanson facility between June 2021 and June 2022 depict a chaotic year: Youths in certain dorms joined forces to assault those in other units; they hit staff members with broom handles and discussed attacking the adults at the facility; one employee discovered an apparent weapon — a stick with nails protruding from it — outside on a school balcony. Local law enforcement was called numerous times.

Advocates and civil rights attorneys are not the only ones calling for the state to stop housing youth at the Angola facility. Last month, the administrator of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention, Liz Ryan, renewed her criticism of housing youth at Angola, saying that they should be moved “immediately.”

The OJJ budget peaked at $182.5 million in 2008-09, then faced steep cuts until it bottomed out at $111.3 million by 2013-14. The OJJ budget has slowly rebounded since to $150.3 million in 2021-22.

The Office of Juvenile Justice spent $550,000 to renovate the former death row facility at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola so they could use it to house incarcerated youth over the next year.

Edwards named OJJ Assistant Secretary Otha “Curtis” Nelson as interim deputy secretary. Nelson joined the agency earlier this year after serving as deputy judicial administrator for the Louisiana Supreme Court Division of Children and Families. The governor said Nelson has more than 30 years of knowledge and experience working with children and families including as an adolescent mental health technician in mental health settings, a court appointed special advocate, a family attorney for children in need of care and delinquency proceedings, and juvenile prosecutor for the 19th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Sommers had been in charge of the agency since 2020. Assistant Secretary Otha “Curtis” Nelson has been appointed interim deputy secretary, according to the governor.

Nelson acknowledged the juvenile justice system is currently in crisis. He said the transfer of incarcerated youth to a building on the grounds of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the country’s largest maximum-security prison, should be taken as a sign of distress.

“Angola should be a wake-up call to the entire state of Louisiana,” Nelson said of the new juvenile justice facility he helped open at the adult prison. “So what happened in our state that that became an option?”

“Let me be clear on this point: Children do not belong in adult courts and certainly not in adult prisons and jails,” Liz Ryan, administrator of the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said at the State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

“No state agency should take custody and control of a child if they’re not prepared and able to care and protect that child, and provide all of the things a child needs and deserves in the same way a caring parent would,” he (Aaron Clark-Rizzio) said.

Louisiana’s troubled youth jails are “at full bed capacity” and can’t accept any more teen offenders, state officials said in a letter last week to youth judges, in which they requested the judges’ help in releasing some low-risk teens back to their communities.

Faced with the destruction of one “secure care facility” in a riot, and deep problems at others, the state system is turning away youths who have been ordered into state custody.

The state’s supervision of its contractors is at issue here, but so is the responsibility of local law enforcement to oversee the actions of correctional officers that may be seen as colleagues in a small-town setting. Professional standards and humane conduct cannot be divorced away by contractor status of the facility.

A controversial transfer of juvenile prisoners to a temporary facility at Louisiana’s sprawling high security prison farm for adult convicts involves a shuffle of youths to and from four different lockups around the state, officials said Thursday.

The eight young people sent to the Angola site also came from Swanson Center for Youth in Monroe and an old jail in St. Martinville that the state converted into a youth lockup in 2021. They were not moved directly from the Bridge City Center for Youth in Jefferson Parish, as previously reported.

State officials stressed that the situation is temporary, while new youth facilities are constructed — and that the young inmates would be segregated from the adult population at Angola.

According to the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice, the temporary facility at Angola will be used to rehabilitate youth who identify as needing intensive therapeutic services.

Transfer has begun of violent juvenile offenders, from the troubled Bridge City Center for Youth in Jefferson Parish to the Louisiana State Prison at Angola. A bus carrying ten young inmates made the trip to the prison early Tuesday morning. Marrero state Senator Patrick Connick says it took a legal battle to put the plan in motion, but it is now happening…

The plan includes transferring 24 of the most violent inmates to a temporary transitional treatment unit at Angola. Office of Juvenile Justice officials said those youth offenders will not come in contact with adult inmates, as the unit is more than a mile away.

The Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice has transferred incarcerated young people from the Bridge City for Youth to a new juvenile justice facility on the grounds of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the largest maximum security adult prisons in the country.

On the tour, officials acknowledged that moving teenagers to the notorious state penitentiary is not ideal. It is a product of a system in need of overhaul, they said — overhaul they pledged is ongoing, despite a pattern of what advocates and former youth justice officials describe as the agency’s deepening failure to maintain safety and some services at existing facilities.

OK, what did Chief U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick say in her 64-page ruling? She said the plan is “untenable” and “disturbing,” but doesn’t appear to violate federal law.
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“While locking children in cells at night at Angola is untenable, the threat of harm these youngsters present to themselves, and others, is intolerable,” she wrote. “The untenable must yield to the intolerable.”

The state was looking to move eight incarcerated youths to the Angola site by the end of September, according to testimony a top state juvenile justice official gave in federal court last month. That deadline was apparently missed. Gordon said the agency would notify the media once the first group of youth are “safely” in the new building at the adult prison.

Schools in Louisiana’s juvenile detention facilities are routinely closed for weeks at a time, often don’t offer enough credits for students to complete grades, and fail to maintain sufficient records, forcing many kids to repeat grades and drop out at much higher rates than schools in the community, according to a new report released by Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights.

A federal judge denied a request to halt plans to transfer violent, troubled youth to Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, arguing “the untenable must yield to the intolerable.”

The governor and other state officials have pushed the Angola building as the temporary solution to existing youth lockups being overrun with violence and escapes. Incarcerated teens and children in the facilities have repeatedly attacked each other and staff over the past two years.

Young people transferred to Angola will be held in windowless cells with floor to ceiling metal bars, according to the court filing submitted by the ACLU and others. The facility “is going to scream ‘prison’ to young people,” Vincent Schiraldi, an expert for the plaintiffs and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, testified in early September. During a tour of the unit before the hearing, Schiraldi photographed fire exit plans posted on the walls that stated, “Reception Center – Death Row.”

The plan to imprison children in Angola is part of a pattern of doubling down on failed approaches, according to Aaron Clark-Rizzio, co-Executive Director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights and a public defender for the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.

The Office of Juvenile Justice needs to consider a smaller, more humane system for addressing youth offenders, he said during an address to the Press Club of Baton Rouge.

Moving youths to Angola would lead to “children … enduring more violence and probably [make] them more willing to inflict violence at the end of the day,” Clark-Rizzio said. A doctor specializing in juvenile mental health testified at a hearing over the Angola plan that the move could have long-term consequences for the youths’ psychological wellbeing.

Louisiana will likely face challenges in hiring the guards, medical personnel, teachers and therapists and it needs for a new, controversial juvenile justice secure care facility it plans to open later this year at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

“The vision for the Acadiana Center for Youth…was that it would be a place where people from all over the country could come see how Louisiana was doing juvenile justice, because we were going to get it right,” said Mary Livers, former head of the Office of Juvenile Justice from 2008 to 2016. “We’re, sadly, far from that today.”

Just two weeks ago, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced plans to move two dozen teens to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, to be housed in an old building that once held the prison’s death row. A month before, officials deployed department of corrections guards armed with tasers and pepper spray to understaffed youth prisons.

The extraordinary move comes several years after Louisiana lawmakers promised to refocus the justice system on reforming and rehabilitating youths. A range of public records, interviews with current and former officials and recent outbreaks show that plan largely failed as the state’s youth prisons, from Bridge City to Bunkie, have remained mired in crisis including a slew of escapes and incidents.

Several years after Louisiana lawmakers promised to refocus the justice system on reforming and rehabilitating youths, experts fear this last-ditch effort to quell a crisis could do exactly the opposite — increase the chance that they land back in prison as adults.

“I don’t know that any plan where kids are placed in Angola is in any way in the interest of the child or of society,” said Hector Linares, a professor of youth justice law at Loyola University and former youth public defender in New Orleans.

Plaquemine is not the only place in Louisiana that is sending kids who are arrested out of state. The Lens found that over a dozen cities and parishes are contracting either with the Dothan facility, or another in Natchez, Mississippi, and have together paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold kids from Louisiana — sometimes for just days, but often for weeks or months at a time.

“The saying was ‘If they’re not a true criminal when they get here, they will be when they leave,’” a former OJJ employee says.

The Monroe/Ouachita Parish Branch of the NAACP held a news conference Wednesday voicing concerns about the escape rate and violent incidents at Swanson Center for Youth following separate incidents earlier this week.

A report issued by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor last week examined the use of room confinement and isolation in juvenile detention centers and secure care facilities throughout Louisiana in 2019 and 2020, as requested by House Resolution 50 approved by the Legislature last year.

After years of delays due to lagging state funds, the Acadiana Center for Youth officially opened this month to house some of the state’s delinquent youth in a facility designed for Louisiana’s therapeutic model of care.

“It’s an important responsibility to ensure we provide a safe and secure environment for our youth that reside in our secure care facilities,” said Gov. John Bel Edwards at a ceremony Tuesday morning.

When the youth prison at Jena was shut down last year, DOC managed the closing handily by transferring all Jena inmates to other juvenile facilities. But transfers don’t address the problems that underlie this state’s entire juvenile corrections system: facilities that are too big to deal personally with each inmate, and too many staffers who are inadequately trained and undereducated.

A series of United States Supreme Court decisions and state laws have long mandated a higher standard for juvenile prisons than for adult prisons. There is supposed to be more schooling, medical care and security because the young inmates have been adjudged delinquent, rather than convicted of crimes as adults are, and so are held for rehabilitation instead of punishment.

“It’s incredibly perverse,” said David Utter, director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. “They have this place that creates all these injuries and they have all these kids with mental disorders, and then they save money by not treating them.”