Feds condemn conditions at Florida youth prisons (Not confined to Dozier, Jackson Juvenile Center)

[seafan]

Feds condemn conditions at Florida youth prisons

By Carol Marbin Miller, Miami Herald
December 2, 2011

Florida’s youth-corrections system is so poorly administered that children are assaulted by officers, denied necessary medical care and punished harshly for minor infractions, a federal report released Friday concludes.

Conditions are so severe, the U.S. Department of Justice said, that they violate the Constitution.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a scathing 28-page report Friday on conditions at two North Florida youth prisons, the Dozier School for Boys and the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center. Though the two camps were both shut down by state juvenile-justice administrators earlier this year, the report said the state’s “failed system of oversight and accountability” likely has resulted in dangerous conditions at youth prisons throughout the state.

.....

The investigation, which began in April 2010, concerned two large youth camps in the Panhandle — Dozier, a 159-acre campus that had been open for 110 years, and the nearby Jackson Juvenile Offender Center, or JJOC, which later combined with Dozier to form the North Florida Youth Development Center. Dozier had been the subject of intense scrutiny since October 2008, when The Miami Herald reported on The White House Boys, a group of now-older adult men who said they had been beaten and raped at the facility during their youth.

.....

(bolding added)



Federal investigation confirms abuse at Dozier, suggests children in danger at other facilities

By Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times
December 3, 2011

.....

The Justice Department's investigation, announced in 2010 to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, showed "reasonable cause to believe that the state of Florida was engaged in a pattern or practice of failing to have proper measures of accountability that led to serious deficiencies."

The Justice Department alleged many instances in which the state violated the constitutional rights of the boys, ages 13 to 21, confined to Dozier, and said the state must take immediate measures to "assess the full extent of its failed oversight" to protect children at its other facilities. The state must also strengthen its oversight processes by implementing a more rigorous system of hiring, training and accountability, the report said.

.....

"What the Department of Justice has done in this report is help us look back at what was and gives us a true guide for what should never, ever happen again," said child advocate Jack Levine, who exposed abuse at Dozier in the early 1980s that prompted a federal class-action lawsuit against the state.

.....

Florida closes controversial boys' school in Marianna, St. Petersburg Times, May 26, 2011


Times files (2009)
Boys would frequently run away from the school. It was eventually ringed with a chain-link fence and razor wire.


Search of 32 graves at Florida reform school ordered by Governor Charlie Crist

December 9, 2008

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has ordered an investigation to determine whether the remains of 32 students were buried decades ago in shallow graves on the grounds of a former reform school for boys

The governor's action came at the urging of four former residents of what was known as the Florida School for Boys. The four alleged that students were abused and killed by guards decades ago at the school in Marianna, Florida, just south of the Georgia border

In a letter Crist asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the graves and determine whether any crimes were committed

"Questions remain unanswered as to the identity of the deceased and the origin of these graves," Crist wrote in his letter to the FDLE.

.....

After a century of pain, former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys closes, July 1, 2011


Here is the link to the St. Petersburg Times series For Their Own Good.




It remains to be seen whether the DOJ intends to take further action in these ongoing violations of human rights of children, including most likely, murder.




The White House




Please Remember Me

Row upon row of crosses white,
Plain, unmarked, their names unknown,
Lie children, and short were their lives,
Buried beneath Florida's tall pine trees,
You can almost hear them whisper,
Please remember me ..….

You were big and I was small,
Under your hands, not protected,
But crushed by them, you took my all,
Alone and afraid, where none could see,
I rest uneasy and forgotten,
Please remember me ...…..

For the Unknown Children that lie buried, but not forgotten, in
unmarked graves at the Florida School For Boys in Marianna, now
known as the Dozier School for Boys.

Link

[William769]

1. Sounds like we are headed to another Federal consent order.

Recommended.