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| Girl Convicted as Adult Serves Time in Solitary |
| By Los Angeles Times |
| Published: 01/14/2002 |
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A new trend in housing juveniles in adult institutions is emerging, but some say it is illegal. There is a wave of juveniles being sent to answer for their crimes in adult court and sentenced to serve their time in adult institutions. But certain juveniles present a problem for sheriff's officials, who run county jails. The law requires underage offenders to be kept separate from adults. Though judges remand enough boys to the county jail to warrant their own cellblock, girls are few and far between. For some facilities, whenever girls are sent to them for incarceration--several times a year--officials put them in solitary confinement, a move that satisfies the legal requirement to keep the children separate but that imposes far more difficult conditions on the young inmates than they would otherwise face. Children's rights advocates complain that the conditions are inappropriate. A children's advocate who has taken up one case of a 17 year-old girl in California, says she is housed under are illegal, charging that jailers are not meeting her educational, recreational or hygienic requirements and have denied her access to over-the-counter drugs, citing her age. She also says that the juvenile --who was convicted of robbing a woman on the street and who accepted the jail time as part of a plea bargain--has verbal and occasionally physical contact with adult inmates anyway, and that the inmates she encounters in the area of the jail where she is held are particularly dangerous. Sheriff's officials say the girl is alone in her cell no more than 21 hours a day and gets everything she's entitled to: three hours of recreation a week, showers every other day, teacher visits and access to a nurse. They deny that she communicates with the adult inmates around her, but acknowledge that she can hear them when they scream. The situation has also raised concerns about the girl's psychological condition. |
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