Higher standards

March 20

About 31 youths have been assigned to a high-security St. Martinville “transitional treatment unit” since it opened, although few people knew the facility existed, how it operated — or that the people running it were apparently violating the law.

It seems the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville was operating on a needto-know basis.

In a package of disturbing stories published in this newspaper and elsewhere, ProPublica, The Marshall Project and NBC News outlined how youngsters have been warehoused in the facility with little to no education, counseling, mental health support, physical activity or human interaction — all conditions that fly in the face of the system’s mission to help underage offenders lead productive lives.

“It’s like you put all of the things that we talk about that are so wrong with our youth justice system and you put it in one facility,” said Carmen Daugherty, the policy director at Youth First Initiative, an advocacy organization. Another advocate likened the conditions to “child abuse.”

Office of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman Beth Touchet-Morgan said the facility is for “youth who demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to discontinue violent and aggressive acts.”

We understand that these kids present major challenges for the system. Youths housed at the facility have been accused or convicted of serious crimes, including stealing cars and guns, escaping from detention facilities and beating facility guards. One teen broke the arm of an officer.

But we have serious concerns over the unit’s conditions, and its very existence.

The news organizations discovered youths subjected to solitary confinement, shackling, and limited counseling and education. Attorneys and advocates representing two of them said one saw a counselor for 30 minutes a week, and the other had to wait for two weeks before seeing a counselor.

Louisiana law requires six instruction hours each day, but youth representatives said one had 45 minutes of online instruction daily and the other met his teacher just once. In fact, the state Department of Education, which provides instruction to incarcerated youths, didn’t learn of the facility’s existence until it had been open for several months.

Louisiana officials have promised to favor a therapeutic model over locking up children, but the story also noted that the state has failed to fund more up-to-date approaches adequately.

Perry Stagg, the assistant secretary for the Office of Juvenile Justice, chalked up some of the failures to staffing challenges.

“We were basically in emergency mode,” he said. “That wasn’t something we were just being negligent on. It took time to put together.”

Officials say the facility was born of necessity.

“We have some youth in our care that are not therapy-ready and are not wanting to go down the same path as others, and we don’t have the facilities nor the manpower to hold them in those dormitory settings,” Bill Sommers, the agency’s deputy secretary, told a juvenile justice commission last year.

Maybe, but we think there must be a more productive, and humane, way.

In fact, state officials say they do too, and note that the St. Martinville facility was set up as a temporary fix while a more secure area at the Swanson Center for Youth can be built.

“If we can get them to a more isolated setting, it allows us to separate these kids, offer individual services, work with them one-on-one, provide mentoring, build relationships and try to work with them to get them to a place where we can put them back in a general population setting where they can participate and not be disruptive,” Stagg said.

We should all hold them to that standard.