Restraint techniques, devices, and their “too-aggressive application” have created a controversy that has led to severe injuries and deaths.
Project Censored’s report on the buried story cites several instances where cruelty and death have occurred.
· In Maryland, seventeen-year-old Isaiah Simmons lost consciousness and died after he was held to the floor face down at a privately owned facility that was contracted by the state.
· In facilities in Tennessee, New York, and Georgia, at least twenty-four other juveniles died in correction centers between 2004 and 2007 from suicide and natural causes or preexisting medical conditions.
Unfortunately, most of the situations play out like this --- A prosecutor explains what happened. An attorney for the defense makes the case that what happened was a result of counselors trying to “protect” a juvenile from “hurting himself or someone else.” A judge dismisses the case.
For California juveniles, it is in many cases worse. Conditions in California Youth Authority (CYA) facilities were the focus of a recent drive to reform California’s juvenile justice system, according to Project Censored.
But, it was later found out that many of the juveniles in CYA facilities were being transferred to California county juvenile halls that included “severe overcrowding, with teenagers sleeping floors; nonexistent educational opportunity; nonexistent mental healthcare or rehabilitative programs; isolation for over twenty-three hours a day for months straight; use of excessive force, including beatings and pepper sprayings; and inappropriate administration of medications.”
If not as bad, being in a juvenile hall was worse.
Lawsuits against facilities where sexual abuse, physical abuse, and death have been reported have been filed by the US Justice Department (DOJ) but the DOJ does not have the “power to shut down juvenile correction facilities.” It can, however, “force a state to improve its detention centers and protect the civil rights of jailed youth” through litigation.
In this specific case concerning two judges taking money to send youth to privately run juvenile detention centers, the DOJ has filed a case summary that explains what the two judges, Mark A. Ciaverella, Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, are accused of.
The two judges are “alleged to have engaged in honest services fraud by taking millions of dollars from two unnamed persons in connection with the construction, expansion and operation of juvenile detention centers in Luzerne County and elsewhere.”
Also, they are accused of two counts of criminal information, which involves “conspiring to impede the Internal Revenue Service in the collection of federal income taxes and with having devised a scheme to defraud the citizens of Luzerne County and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania of the right to their honest services by concealing their receipt of more than $2.6 million between January of 2003 and April of 2007.”
Furthermore, the DOJ case summary accuses the Judges of taking “discretionary actions in a number of matters involving the juvenile detention facilities without recusing themselves from those matters and without disclosing to parties involved in the proceedings their conflict of interest.”
The DOJ explicitly states the judges may be guilty of:
–Taking official action to remove funding from the Luzerne County budget for the Luzerne County juvenile detention facility, effectively closing that facility;
–Ordering juveniles to be sent to these facilities in which the judges had a financial interest even when Juvenile Probation Officers did not recommend detention;
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