Melissa Harris-Perry: Juvenile detention centers were established a century ago, not to punish but to rehabilitate, giving the young people held in these facilities education, emotional support, and treatment in order to make better choices. A recent investigation by The Marshall Project, ProPublica, and NBC News look into the Acadiana Center for Youth in St. Martinville, Louisiana, and expose a situation in which teenagers in juvenile detention centers were subjected to inhumane conditions.

According to the report, teenagers in the facility were being held in solitary confinement 23 to 24 hours at a time. To understand that, that means they were in small, windowless, cinder block rooms. When they came out, they were shackled just to go to the shower. The Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice or OJJ has denied allegations regarding at least some of these conditions. Bill Sommers, head of the OJJ, addressed the Juvenile Justice Reform Act Implementation Commission in January of this year in response to concerns about St. Martinville.

Bill Sommers: We have some youth in our care that are not therapy-ready and are not wanting to go down the same path as others. We don't have the facilities nor the manpower to hold them in those dormitory settings and that's where St. Martinville was born.

Melissa: Beth Schwartzapfel, staff writer at The Marshall Project, was one of the co-authors of the recent report exposing these practices.

Beth Schwartzapfel: Louisiana runs a series of what they call secure care facilities. That's the state's euphemism for prisons for kids. Most of them at least make an effort to follow best practice, which is to be as home-like as possible, to provide lots of programs and services to keep the kids busy and engaged, but they had this handful of kids that they were really having trouble with. These are kids who were struggling mightily with following rules, with behavioral issues, with mental health issues, and they didn't know what to do.

What they did was they leased out a decommissioned old jail from a sheriff in St. Martin Parish. They made a new secure care facility to lock up these kids who they didn't know what to do with. What they did was they locked them in these cells for 23, sometimes 24 hours a day anytime they left, which wasn't very often, to take a shower for instance. They were in handcuffs and shackles even in the shower. They got no school. They got little or no therapy. They pretty much just sat in their cells all day.

What they ended up doing, because they were so bored and angry at the circumstances that they found themselves in, is they started breaking apart the things in the cell that they could break, so the light fixtures, the bed. They would dig holes in the cinder block walls so that they could climb into each other's cells. Ultimately, a handful of them managed to escape. It's just a grim place and a very disappointing way for the state to manage its most troubled kids.

Melissa: Was this facility under state management or was this contracted out to a private contractor?

Beth: No, this was a state facility staffed by state juvenile justice specialists and probation officers. Theoretically, they were supposed to follow state guidelines. The Office of Juvenile Justice, which ran the facility, has guidelines about how much time kids are supposed to spend in solitary confinement. The OJJ's own policy say that kids shouldn't be in solitary confinement for more than 12 hours at a time.

For the most disruptive kids, they make an exception for up to seven days. Well, these kids were in there for months without any human contact, except the guards passing the meals through their meal slot. It is so far outside of the norm and so far outside of professional practice that one expert told us it's child abuse.

Melissa: How old are the young people that we're talking about here? Are these all boys and are they from St. Martinville or are they young people from other parts of the state?

Beth: They ranged in age from 14 to 18. They're all boys and, no, they're from all over the state. The state opened this facility essentially without telling anyone. OJJ doesn't have any outside oversight of these secure care facilities. That's unlike other similar facilities. For instance, if a kid is accused of a crime, the equivalent of jail, which is where you wait while you're awaiting trial as opposed to prison, which is where you go after you're sentenced, the equivalent of jail for kids, they're called detention facilities. Those are inspected by DCFS in the state, so they have outside oversight of their detention facilities.

For some reason, there's this oversight loophole in the state where secure care facilities where kids are sent after their sentence have no outside oversight. The state has been aware of this problem for years. They had a whole committee to look into it, but nothing has changed. OJJ was able to open this facility without asking anyone, without having anyone lay eyes on it. We heard from parents and attorneys that their kids who had previously been calling them with some regularity, all of a sudden, the phone calls just stopped and they had no idea where they were.

This was in the middle of COVID, don't forget, so there were no visits. The phone calls were all families had. We spoke to attorneys. They would go to a routine hearing and expect to hear an update on their kids' progress and how they were doing in school and, instead, discovered that they were held in this facility that nobody even knew existed. They'd never heard of it before because the state opened it in such a hurry and with so little planning.

Melissa: You talked initially about what juvenile corrections is supposed to look like. When you say "supposed to," is this about the academic theory around juvenile corrections or is this a matter of state law?

Beth: There's different pieces to it. For instance, education, that is required under state and federal law. A child who's in prison or jail or who's in detention or secure care is entitled to the same education as a kid who's outside. The schooling that my kids get on the outside should be the same as kids get inside. That is under federal law and state law. The state clearly violated those laws when it did not provide schooling to these children. In fact, they were moved into this place in late July or early August.

It wasn't until November that the Department of Education and the Special School District, which provides special education for kids with disabilities, even knew that this facility existed, let alone could make arrangements to educate these kids. The other services are not so much law as policy and best practice. There's a series of standards called performance-based standards that many states use to evaluate the quality of their secure care facilities and to plan their programming around best practice.

Louisiana says that it uses these performance-based standards as part of its own internal auditing. Well, none of those were followed in this case. For instance, one of the basic standards is minimize the use of restrictive and coercive means of responding to disorder, which is exactly the opposite of what they did in this case. Maximize opportunities for participation in activities and programs, provide a robust programming schedule of supervised structured activities and personal development opportunities. It's almost like the opposite of what they did in this case.

Melissa: Listening to you makes me angry, just simply angry. I always want to begin, when I hear this kind of reporting, when I learn this kind of reporting, with just some questions about understanding what the decision-makers may have thought they were doing. Is there any way for us to understand this as them understanding themselves as having done something that wasn't abusive or potentially facing a set of constraints or resource constraints that may have led to this? I want to begin with maybe giving the benefit of the doubt, even though I feel enraged at this moment.

Beth: Yes, no, I definitely see where you're coming from. There's a lot of reasons to be sure in an instance like this. I think, first off, the state has severely underfunded the juvenile justice system for years and years. Under a previous governor, Bobby Jindal, there was just aggressive budget-slashing all across the government, including OJJ. OJJ to be clear is Office of Juvenile Justice.

The amount that they're spending on the thing they're supposedly trying to do just does not fit. The entry-level juvenile justice specialist positions start at $27,000 a year. They don't require a college degree. They don't require any particular background. As long as you have a high school degree and no felony convictions, you too can make $27,000 a year as a juvenile justice specialist in these dangerous secure care facilities.

You can see how some of the bedrocks of good practice and juvenile justice, which are relationship-building, mentoring, motivating kids to want to do the right thing, how do you do that with staff that have very little incentive to stay? The other thing I think that's worth noting is Louisiana, like other states, has done a really good job in the last 20 years or so reducing the number of kids that it locks up in the first place. Right now, they have about 350 kids in secure care. 20 years ago, that number was twice that. You'll see that in almost every state across the country that the number of kids who get locked up is much, much lower than it used to be. That's a good thing, right?

What experts are telling us is that the kids that they sent to St. Martinville, the kids who are the hardest of the hard, the kids with the most difficult problems who can't manage in the more therapeutic home-like setting of the other facilities, those should realistically be the only kids we're locking up. Everyone else, if they're doing fine in a dormitory setting, send them home. Whatever services they're getting at this secure care facility, they can get at home. It would be a lot less traumatic for them to be separated from their family, not to mention a lot cheaper. You could do more with less if you focus your resources on the kids who need the most.

Melissa: Is there going to be accountability for what has happened to these young people? What's happening now?

Beth: First of all, there is a state legislator who has introduced a bill that would ban solitary confinement for juveniles in Louisiana. It is unclear where that's going to go because there have been a number of high-profile incidents where staff have been really seriously injured in these facilities. Louisiana is one of the reddest of the red states.

The conservative take on this is that they need consequences and they need punishment for hurting these guards. First and foremost, the priority is keeping the guard safe. If you take away solitary confinement, the argument goes, well, then there are really no consequences and kids will not fear consequences for acting out and it will be even less safe for staff. That bill's fate is very uncertain.

Melissa: I understand there's a law-and-order incentive in all states. Particularly maybe in red states. I'm wondering, presumably, many of these young people are young people of color. I'm wondering if maybe they need to actually hear from a 14-year-old, what it's like to be locked up and to be shackled and to be so desperate that you would dig through cinder block.

Beth: Yes, it's a really good point. To your point, 80% of the kids in OJJ custody in Louisiana are Black. Just think about that for a minute. 80%. It is so far disproportionate to their numbers in the general population that it's actually really shocking. We've come to expect sadly, racism and disproportionality in so many aspects of the criminal justice system, but 80% is really something.

It's very hard to really know what it's like for them without hearing from them. At the same time, we ran into this in our reporting. These are kids who are already disenfranchised. They're struggling with instability. They're struggling with mental illness. Multiple kids that we talked to had been diagnosed with very serious mental conditions. One kid we talked to, he was actually released early when the judge found out about the conditions he was held.

She was so horrified that she ordered him immediately released. When my co-reporter, Amy Walden from ProPublica, caught up with him, he could barely articulate what he had been through. She would try to get at, "What was it like for you?" The most he could really say was, "I try not to think about it too much. If I think about it, it makes me sad." Here's a kid who-- he got no schooling when he was in there and that was months and months at a time.

When he got out, he didn't have any way to re-enroll in his homeschool. Here's a 16-year-old who has just gotten out of prison essentially. He's just driftless. He has no school. His home life is fairly unstable, so he's bouncing around between family members. What's going to happen to that kid? How in the world could you get a kid like that to go to the legislature in a suit and tie and tell them what it was like for him? It's really hard to imagine.

Melissa: You talked twice about when they get out. That is certainly true for the vast majority of our fellow neighbors, citizen residents who we lock up in adult facilities. For young people, it is basically universally true that they will not always be in this space. They will, fairly short order, be our neighbors, our classmates in our communities again. You talked in that question. It's an important one. What's going to happen to him? I guess I also wonder, what does it mean for us for whole communities where young people who have experienced this kind of abuse at the hands of the state will be returning?

Beth: It is the thing I keep coming back to you honestly because I think there are enough people who will read this article or listen to this segment and think to themselves, "The kid did a bad thing. The kid stole a car. The kid assaulted another kid. Whatever it is that the kid did, there has to be consequences. You want me to get out my tiny violin for you because this poor kid went to jail for doing something bad? Sorry, I don't have any sympathy for you."

I don't particularly agree with that, but I see where folks are coming from if they feel that way. However, let's leave aside what feels like a satisfying answer to bad behavior and ask ourselves that more important question, which is, "Well, do you want them to come out and do that more, or do you want them to come out and be a productive citizen who has proactive and positive ties to the community, who has relationships, who has job skills, who has an education?"

Because if your end goal is to make the community more safe, then treating these kids with humanity and dignity and respect is the way to make us all more safe. We don't even have to talk about whether they "deserve" this because it's irrelevant. If our goal is to reduce crime, then providing them with the programs, the education, the therapy, the support they need to grow and thrive and re-enter the world as functional adults is the way to reduce crime.

Melissa: Beth Schwartzapfel of The Marshall Project, thank you so much for joining us.

Beth: Oh, thanks for having me. It's been a really sobering conversation.

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