Behind the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s renewed push to close large, secure facilities it’s dubbed “youth prisons” lies what it calls a failure of earlier reforms that had once seemed hopeful.
A recent TEDx talk by Casey Foundation President Patrick McCarthy brand those correctional facilities “factories of failure” that wreck the lives of the kids they’re supposed to help. And even where problems have been identified and cleaned up in the past, new ones have emerged, a recent report by the foundation says.
“The main point is that these places have proven themselves quite susceptible and prone to maltreatment of various types,” said Richard Mendel, a veteran juvenile justice scholar who wrote the Casey report. “Many states where abuses and maltreatment have been identified have been unable to clean and clear up those problems, or have cleared them up temporarily only to have them return. So the record is becoming impossible to ignore.”
The latest report is a follow-up to “No Place For Kids,” the foundation’s 2011 assessment of conditions in juvenile correctional centers nationwide. Four years on, the Casey Foundation found 29 states were unable to prevent what it called “systemic abuse” to children in post-commitment facilities, with “substantial evidence of maltreatment” in three more.
[For more of this story, written by Matt Smith, go to http://jjie.org/previous-refor...l-casey-says/121395/]
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