‘Dying Inside’: Chaos and Cruelty in Louisiana Juvenile Detention
The New York Times, October 30, 2022: ‘Dying Inside’: Chaos and Cruelty in Louisiana Juvenile Detention
“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.”
Additional reading:
8 Days at Ware, a film by Meg Shutzer and Rachel Lauren Mueller
KSLA News, May 14, 2022: 3 Ware Youth Detention Center escapees, security guard captured in Houston
The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 2022: Philadelphia officials threaten to sue Gov. Wolf over ‘nightmare’ conditions inside juvenile facility
Brown Political Review, October 26, 2022: Juvenile Criminal Justice: The Benefits of a more Lenient Youth Policy
