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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In July, six young people incarcerated at a facility in Louisiana known as Bridge City overpowered a guard and escaped. One of those who escaped was accused of shooting a person while trying to steal a car. In response, Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards announced he'd carry out a plan to enhance security and address leadership issues at Bridge City.
Governor John Bel Edwards: What happened this past weekend at Bridge City was completely unacceptable. The escape, the theft, the shooting, all of it. It puts the youth, the staff, and the surrounding community at risk, and that's why we are taking additional action there.
Melissa Harris-Perry: The governor also announced he would temporarily relocate a portion of the 50 juveniles, young people at Bridge City to the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola. Governor Edwards said they would not have any direct contact with adult inmates at Angola and would be housed in a separate facility, but advocates and families of those at Bridge City say this move would be dangerous for the teens and young adults in juvenile detention and filed a federal lawsuit to block the move.
Last week, a federal judge placed a temporary hold on the plan to move the young people to Angola. For more on this, I'm joined now by Jacqueline DeRobertis who is a staff reporter with The Advocate. Welcome to The Takeaway, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline DeRobertis: Thank you so much for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: It's temporarily blocked, but tell us a bit more about the governor's plan to move young people to Angola.
Jacqueline DeRobertis: What we know is that after this lawsuit was filed, this hearing is scheduled and there was an announcement last week that says that the state is not planning to move youth before September 15th. What we don't have right now is a clear plan for what the care of these juveniles is actually going to look like. Advocates are worried about how they will be treated in terms of counseling, in terms of mental health. They're worried about where they will go for medical care.
They're concerned about where they will go for recreation. They're especially concerned because there are laws out there that require that youth are out of sight and sound of adult inmates. At a prison campus like Angola, which is surrounded by adult inmates who do everything from work on the grounds to clean the bathrooms, to do maintenance, that can be really difficult and really complicated.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Help us understand. We've talked a bit on the show already today about the history of mistreatment of inmates at Angola. What do we know about the state's treatment of juvenile incarcerated folk?
Jacqueline DeRobertis: Louisiana's juvenile justice system has been under some form of scrutiny for decades now. Back in the 1990s, federal officials and outside experts began to look into some of the state's prisons and their harsh treatment of youths in their care. Things got so bad that the department of justice sued the state. This was something that propelled lawmakers to finally commit to make some changes in the early 2000s. They were also receiving a ton of pressure from advocates at the time as well.
The state even signed a contract with the founder of the Missouri Model, which has been praised as the gold standard of therapeutic care for juvenile justice across the country. The plan was to create a new model for Louisiana that reflected Missouri's process and created a kinder and gentler environment for youth. There were also promises to create the Office of Juvenile Justice, which we have today, which completely separated from the adult corrections agency that it used to be housed under, and even to close one of Louisiana's most notorious youth prisons.
Back in the early 2000s, it seemed like officials were really making strides to change the way that juveniles were treated. Louisiana has been under scrutiny for some time. When you look at how they treat juveniles, some of their measures back 20 years ago were considered incredibly harsh, but the state had this goal to turn that around and to become more reform-minded.
Between Hurricane Katrina hitting and ever-worsening budget cuts that have still not gotten back up to the levels pre-Katrina that they were before, that therapeutic model, that rehabilitative model, it just never happened so say officials, so say experts who were involved at the time. What we've since it's then is just over and over again different kinds of problems that haven't quite escalated to where they are now, but have certainly been criticized by advocates and state auditors, and even caused one of the prisons to be shut down. Some of this stuff reached a boiling point around the time that the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Advocates say that the Office of Juvenile Justice fell back on more punitive, more correctional approach in their efforts to handle what was really an unprecedented situation. They say teens spent hours in isolation and had critical services disrupted and endured lockdowns. They were even overseen by staff armed with pepper spray, so say advocates in a lawsuit. It's not clear exactly why we're seeing a crisis today in juvenile justice, but the pandemic certainly could have something to do with that.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I absolutely understand the depth of concern parents, advocates, attorneys would have here. Is the concern primarily about the adults who are incarcerated or the guards and the system that does the incarcerating there?
Jacqueline DeRobertis: I would say it's both. Since the Angola announcement, I have heard advocates just be hyper-focused on stopping this move. They've been staging protests and making as much noise as possible. What they have said is that this adult prison is not a place to house teens. It's not made for them, so how could it help rehabilitate them and how could it help serve them, and how could it prevent them from becoming re-traumatized?
In the lawsuit that was recently filed that you mentioned and you've been talking about, attorneys say that youth and adult facilities are more likely to die by suicide. They're more likely to suffer from sexual assault and trauma, and more likely to experience exacerbated mental health challenges, so that's certainly a concern. What advocates have also said is that the problem lies with the Office of Juvenile Justice management and the adults in charge.
Aaron Clark-Rizzio, he is the executive director of the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights. From the beginning, he has said that OJJ, the Office of Juvenile Justice, needs to take responsibility for the dysfunction in the system and to stop blaming children. He says that moving the children, moving the teens to another facility isn't going to change anything because every single facility has problems. Even Angola will not stop these problems, he says. The reality is they need to change their operations, they need to change how they're treating these youths and how they're trying to rehabilitate them.
Melissa Harris-Perry: When is the decision expected about whether or not these young people will in fact be moved?
Jacqueline DeRobertis: There will be a hearing in early September, next few days, within the next week where both sides, the state and the advocates, will lay out their side about the movement to Angola and so we will know after that. As I said earlier, there is not a plan to move these youths before September 15th. That's our deadline, I think, at this point.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Jacqueline DeRobertis, staff reporter with The Advocate. Thank you for joining The Takeaway today.
Jacqueline DeRobertis: Thank you so much.
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