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| Senate committee rejects plan to close two juvenile prisons |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 06/06/2005 |
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Louisiana needs more time to reform its juvenile corrections system and should keep its three large prisons open, despite continuing allegations of young inmates being beaten and raped, a Senate panel decided last Wednesday. The committee rejected a bill by Sen. Don Cravins that would have forced the state to shut down one large prison in Monroe and another in East Baton Rouge Parish. The administration of Gov. Kathleen Blanco opposed the measure, saying closing the lockups would be a symbolic move that would only hinder the state's two-year-old reform process. "You don't reform juvenile justice by changing the address of the facility," Kim Hunter Reed, a Blanco policy adviser, told the Senate Judiciary B Committee. Cravins and reform advocates said the state has made little progress in reform since 2003, when the Legislature passed a package of bills to correct what federal investigators and human rights groups said is a pattern of violence among guards and inmates in the juvenile prisons. The state is in the process of moving the young convicts out of large prisons and into small rehabilitative facilities closer to their families. Cravins said the large lockups need to be shut down quickly because the inmates get little assistance in preparing to rejoin their communities when they're released. He said Louisiana locks up more of its residents in adult prisons than any other state partly because those prisons are fed by the juvenile justice system: when released, the teenagers are unprepared for life outside prison and wind up committing more crimes. "The pipeline is the juvenile justice system," said Cravins, D-Opelousas. Several women testified in favor of the bill, saying their sons and brothers had been beaten and raped while locked up in the East Baton Rouge and Monroe prisons. Robin Brunker of Shreveport said her son spent three of his teen years inside the Monroe lockup and was beaten repeatedly by other inmates, as officers looked the other way. A punch to the face in a locker room knocked out four of her son's teeth, she said. "My son was returned to me very damaged," said Brunker, whose son is now 18. The committee deferred the bill without a vote, effectively killing the measure. |
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