Abuses in ‘juvie’ prisons inspire more outrage than reform
We killed Elord Revolte. You, me, us Floridians. We knowingly consigned him to a juvie lockup hellhole run by thug guards with criminal records. We put him in a joint where guards commonly instigated gang beatings as a way to outsource discipline. Or maybe just to provide the night shift some cheap entertainment.
They paid off their hired fighters with vending machine pastries. Hence the expression “honey bunned.”
On Aug. 30, 2015, Elord Revolte, 17, was honey bunned to death. We didn’t do a damn thing about it.
Actually the 135-pound Revolte, after he was beaten and stomped by about 20 inmates, managed to hang on for another 30 hours before dying. Of course, guards at the staterun Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center waited almost a full day before sending him to the hospital. They had their priorities.
It should have been a gut-wrenching scandal. Should have changed things. State newspapers led by the Miami Herald’s Carol Marbin Miller, who broke the story, dug into the Revolte death and reported that the use of honey bun bounties was a common practice throughout Florida’s juvenile penal system. Then Maurice Harris, a 17-year-old former inmate at the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center, was gunned down in Liberty City by a fellow former detention center prisoner in 2015. Police said the shooter wanted revenge on Harris, who had given his suspected killer a guard-instigated cell block beating — another honey bunning — the year before.
The honey bun revelations roused a flurry of statewide consternation back in 2015. (Including my own column.) Five guards were fired. DJJ Secretary Christina Daly issued a statement promising that henceforth her department’s “primary focus is to ensure the safety and security of all youths in our care.” Not hardly. Marbin Miller spent the last two years looking into DJJ lock-ups and found the whole damn system has remained rife with sexual abuse and physical cruelties and medical negligence. And no wonder. The state system and private juvenile prisoner contractors have regularly hired workers with criminal records. And hundreds of juvenile system guards and nurses were hired after they had been fired from the adult prison system (which must take some doing, given that operation’s infamous record of mistreating prisoners).
Apparently, all that talk about fixing the system didn’t amount to much. “I have encountered the food bounty and fighting issue locally and heard of similar instances from kids at various commitment programs, but I am still shocked at how widespread the problem is,” Gordon Weekes, Broward’s chief assistant public defender, told me via email Wednesday. Weekes, who oversees the public defender’s juvenile division, said, “I was also surprised at DJJ’s anemic response to mountains of injury complaints, video evidence, hospitalizations and deaths that have occurred on their watch, with no one being held responsible.” Me too. I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been. Back in 2003, I had written about the gruesome death of young Omar Paisley in the same juvie lockup where Elord Revolte would lose his life in 2015. For three days, the staff at the juvenile detention center had ignored 17-year-old Paisley’s agonized pleas for medical attention, until he suffered an utterly preventable death from a ruptured appendix.
The findings of a MiamiDade grand jury investigation into that 2003 death could just was well apply to the entire DJJ, circa 2017. “In the course of our investigation, we were disturbed to learn of the many Department of Juvenile Justice employees with sordid criminal histories,” the report said. “We felt strongly that the individuals charged with caring for and rehabilitating our children should not have a history of engaging in destructive criminal activity or serious, pending criminal cases.”
The report criticized a “a juvenile justice system plagued by a lack of commitment, a lack of supervision, a lack of guidelines, a lack of proper structure, and a lack of resources.”
The report added: “We, as grand jurors, as parents, and as citizens of this community, cannot bear the thought of another child suffering unbearably and, ultimately, slipping through the cracks of our system. We are confident that the commitment of resources to our children will prevent future similar tragedy.”
And yet “future similar tragedies” — and worse — occurred. Because, despite the feigned outrage, Floridians apparently don’t much care.
So what if juvie guards, who earn less than $26,000 (and less than $20,000 in private lockups), occasionally rape a few kids? Or orchestrate fatal gang beatings?
Hey. We’re getting what we pay for.
Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred and leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter or columnist in South Florida since 1976.