 You're listening to Inside Louisiana's Harshest Juvenile Lockup. Tonight's event is brought to you in partnership with New Orleans Public Radio Station WWNO. My name is Connor Goodwin, and I'm an events associate with ProPublica. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism. For tonight's discussion, the reporters will share how they uncovered the story, and then bring in other experts to discuss the juvenile justice system more broadly. And explore potential pathways to reform. Our panelists will also answer your questions. To ask a question at any point, click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and type it there. Also, if you would like to enable subtitles, click on the closed captioning icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And now, allow me to introduce our panelists. Rachel Gassert is the policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, where she advocates on behalf of young people in the justice system in Louisiana. Mark Solar is the executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, a nonprofit public interest law and policy organization based in Washington, B.C. Gina Womack is the executive director of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children. Beth Shortsapful is a staff writer at the Marshall Project, where she covers criminal justice and often its intersections with addiction and health. We also extended invites to Bill Sommers, Deputy Secretary for the Office of Juvenile Justice in Louisiana, and Representative Royce DuPlessis, who chairs the Juvenile Justice Committee. Sommers' office did not reply, and Representative DuPlessis was unable to join due to a scheduling conflict. And lastly, our moderator today is ProPublica reporter Annie Waldman. I'll let Annie take it from here. Thank you, Connor. And thanks to all of you for tuning in to this important conversation. This evening, before we get to our panel discussion, I'd like to quickly bring my colleague, Beth, to the virtual table for a brief chat about our findings. Our other colleague, Erin Einhorn from NBC News, unfortunately could not make it to this evening because she's on the road. To start us off, I should note that this is a story, and it's a story like this that was really able to bring together three separate newsrooms to report out. The Marshall Project, NBC News, and ProPublica. Erin and Beth were already working together on a project about education and juvenile justice, and all three of us bumped into each other while digging into a tip that the state of Louisiana had quietly opened up a new secure care facility for juveniles. When I heard this, I was quite surprised because in the past Louisiana opened its new juvenile facilities with great fanfare and blue ribbon cuttings. But with this facility in St. Martinville, we couldn't even Google it. What kind of a government facility that is supposed to treat and rehabilitate kids has no online footprint in this day and age. Immediately, that's what piqued our interest. But when we started to hear about the conditions, we knew it was really important for the public to know what was happening. So now I'm going to just share with you some slides that we prepared. And then I'll pass it over to Beth. Beth, do you want to share some of our key findings? Sure. When we started looking into this juvenile facility, and just to be clear, it's the equivalent of a prison for adults, you would call it a prison, but for kids, it's called a secure care facility. It really looked and functioned much like an adult prison. The conditions were harsh. Kids were held in solitary confinement for weeks and sometimes months at a time. When they were able to leave their cells for showers, for example, they were wearing shackles and handcuffs. They had no education again for months after the site opened. This was a blatant violation of state and federal law. They also, the whole point of the juvenile justice system is to provide treatment to kids with some of the highest needs of any kids truly in the country. They need a substance abuse treatment. They need behavioral treatment. They need therapy. They need psychiatric and psychosocial supports. And they weren't getting almost any of that. And particularly frustrating to advocates like the folks who were kind enough to join us tonight and also to reporters, there was no transparency at all. As Annie said, this place had no digital footprint to this day. The last time we checked the Office of Juvenile Justice still does not list this place on their website. There was no phone number publicly available for parents trying to reach their children. And the state opened it without telling anyone, much to the chagrin of attorneys who found out that their clients were there, parents who found out their children were there without even knowing it existed. So a little more about our reporting methods. So for our reporting, we relied on dozens of interviews with local national advocates, juvenile lawyers, teenagers who are at the facility, as well as their parents and guardians. But because of the lack of public transparency, we also relied on public records requests to access key details about what life was like at the facility. What was so notable about these records is that they corroborated so many anecdotes and stories that we had heard in the weeks prior to even receiving the documents. So any doubts that we had, you know, about the harsh reality of life at St. Martinville that we heard from kids at the facility or the parents or lawyers or advocates, all those doubts were put to rest. So here's an example of one of those records that we found. It's one of hundreds of pages, I think, over 300 or 400 pages of unusual occurrence reports, which is a very Orwellian way of describing reports on fights, security issues, property destruction, and the like. And this example here, the report describes how a chemical agent was used on a child. It reads, a guard was putting a child whose name is redacted back in a cell. And when the youth got in cell, he refused to return handcuffs. Finally, the youth said he would, he will give them up and he tries to take the handcuff keys as well. The guard then pulls out pepper spray and lightly sprays in cell. And so what was not included in this report, but was in a following report from another staff member is that the hatch of the cell was closed so this is the only portal to the outside world from these tiny little cells which are no bigger than a parking space. And the hatch was closed and the child was left in there and was later found by the director of the facility coughing and vomiting from the spray. So in this next record, it's a code of contact violation report. It describes how youth broke the concrete cinder blocks in his cell and escaped at 747 at night. This report was done 12 hours later when according to public news reports that was when it was discovered that he had escaped. So we were hearing all of these things from, you know, kids who were there their parents advocates lawyers and again it wasn't until we had these records that I mean it really, you know, any doubts we have we're gone. So Beth, do you want to speak about the kind of next layer of evidence that we were working with which was really the videos and photos that we received. Sure. We, we all start by saying had a really difficult time connecting with staffers there and we came to find out that was because the opposite of juvenile justice was telling staffers in no uncertain terms, don't you dare speak to the press. We reached out to many staff members who told us if you, we were told that if we speak to the press and some of them said, we were told if we speak to you specifically that that will be fired. So the person that we did speak to was incredibly brave and we were very grateful. This person, I will say it took quite a while for them to trust us enough to share photos with us some of them had, you know, snippets of their body in it or some of them were recordings that included their face and so there was a lot of trust in sending them to us to know that we would keep their identity safe. But once we saw these we just couldn't believe it. We had heard and read in the incident reports that kids were breaking pieces off of their light fixtures and breaking pieces off of their bed. And the right hand photo you can see one of the metal kind of planks that they use as a bed. So kids were breaking those apart and they had so much time. Imagine how long it must have taken to do that. They had so much time that they just sat there with those pieces and just slowly scraped away at the cinder block walls until they could either climb through them and visit with each other, or climb out and escape. And the other thing we received is a video which I don't know, Beth if you want to talk about. Sure. Yeah, we received. So the staffer sent us a video that just chilled us to our bones. It was the, well, we actually we got multiple videos one of them was of a cell it was sort of like a panorama of the cell itself and I have to say, I've been to a lot of disgusting prisons but this was disgusting. Imagine your 14 year old 15 year old 16 year old living in these conditions 24 hours a day for weeks and months at a time. So that was first of all, the other thing we got what was the video itself was not remarkable but the audio was chilling. And I'll note if you if you go to the story itself you can see it on ProPublica site on NBC site on the Marshall Project site. You can hear the video you can hear the audio you can see the video, but you can hear a child screaming screaming, and then starting to bang on his door, and all the other kids in the unit pick up and start banging on their door to. And what the staffer told us is that this kid had smeared feces all over the wall of the common space and was locked in his cell as a result of that. And then because he was locked in his cell he was so angry that he was threatening to kill the staff members and just the pain and the frustration and the suffering in his voice was almost too much to bear. I mean I know Annie, I hope I'm not over sharing when I say that you told us you couldn't sleep that night after we first heard it it was, it was chilling. Yeah, it was incredibly disturbing. And, you know that kind of brings us to our final note before we get to the panel discussion is that you know when hearing all these stories hearing all these testimonies. Listening to what we've been telling you I think it's so important that we don't lose sight of the fact that the kids in this facility are still kids. Even those who have committed incredibly violent crimes. You know, they are still kids. And one of the most important aspects of reporting the story out has been to handle these stories and testimonies with great care and compassion, and to take great sensitivity when speaking with children or their parents or their guardians who are revealing very traumatic experiences. Beth, do you have any final thoughts on how to handle the sensitive nature of this kind of reporting. Yeah, Annie and Aaron came to this with a background in education reporting so they had some foundation in dealing with with children and their families. My background is in criminal justice reporting and all the times I've ever reported on prisons and jails, finding the people in the prisons and jails was not the hard part because that information is public. For an adult who's being held in particular jail, you just pull up the jail roster, and yet they're usually online but if they're not online you just call up the sheriff and you ask for it and it's a public record. In this case, the kids names are sealed because their children. And so just the just finding the kids, just figuring out which kids were in there, and who were their families and who could speak for them was such a giant hill to climb. And, you know, one of the attorneys we talked to said, it's sort of taken as a given that protecting kids privacy is worth all of that. And, you know, I think that's a reasonable position to take. But I think the flip side of that privacy is this lack of transparency, because, because what it took for three fairly sizable newsrooms to find these children was really a gargantuan effort and to hear their voices I think is the only way to really really know what's going on in there. Absolutely. And with that, I'm going to bring on our other panelists. Let me just stop sharing. So quickly reintroduce them. We have Rachel Gasser, who is the policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, Mark solar, the executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy. And Gina Womack, the executive director of families and families and friends of Louisiana's incarcerated children. Thank you again for joining us. So a reminder to our audience, please feel free to submit questions during the event. After the moderated discussion we're going to open up our chat for a Q&A. So, first I want to just start with a few questions to give our audience some greater context. Rachel, the Office of Juvenile Justice here in Louisiana said that this facility in St. Martinville was born out of necessity that's a quote. Do you think it was necessary and has the facility addressed the problems it was meant to solve. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. This is a very important topic and thank you for doing this reporting and bringing this issue to light. I think that I will address the first part of the question by responding to the last part. I think it's pretty clear that this facility isn't solving any of the problems that it is supposedly meant to address and in fact is only exacerbating them. When you put children or really anyone in the kind of environment and the kind of conditions that these children have been in, you can only get the kinds of outcomes that you were hearing on that audio clip where these young people are simply sliding into more of a mental health crisis and they're becoming perhaps more dangerous and their mental health issues are becoming worse. And any potential issues that the facility was supposedly meant to address are simply becoming worse. So the idea that this facility was born out of some necessity to address problems that weren't unable to be addressed in the facilities that already existed is completely ridiculous, frankly. I also, you know, regardless of whether or not there were youth that were posing challenges for staff in the other secure care facilities, and supposedly were as we said, not therapy ready. It is under any circumstances completely unacceptable to put young people into a place like this to confine them for 24 hours a day simply because they're not participating in programming these are inhumane conditions this is bordering on torture. We're only traumatizing these children and just exacerbating any problems that were leading them to be quote unquote not therapy ready, making it more likely that they're not going to be successful when they inevitably return to their home communities because all of these children that are in the juvenile justice system will return to their homes and communities. By the time they turn 21 when they jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system ends by law and and making it more less likely that they're going to grow up into healthy productive adults. And then and finally I'll just say that it is a child is is therapy ready and you know does exactly what you want them to do the first time you tell them and there are no challenges and getting them to participate in all of the programming that they have the offer, then they probably shouldn't be in OJJ custody they should probably be at home, because the reason that they're in OJJ custody is because they are posing challenges and they have not done what has been asked of them and expected of them that have had challenges and and behavioral issues and mental health issues that have have been difficult to address. So, you know, I think that it. Yeah, absolutely not. Mark, I want to turn to you for some greater national context is what happened at St. Martinville unusual or is it part of a larger pattern in the state's history or even the nation's history or hasn't been a pattern throughout the pandemic. Gina and Rachel can talk more about the state's history, but I've spent the last 44 years of my career doing juvenile justice reform across the country I've been literally in hundreds of juvenile facilities. What happened in St. Martinville is very unusual in a number of important ways. First of all the plan is was to put young people in a jail. They have a different staff OJJ staff. Everybody knows it's a jail and the young people know it's a jail, and it's been federal policy for the last 48 years, not to hold children in adult jails. Congress even passed new legislation in 2018, saying that even children who are being prosecuted as adults cannot be held in adult jail so that was the first thing that was very unusual. The second was to put these kids in their cells in solitary confinement for such long times. The trend in the country is to sharply reduce the use of solitary confinement. American Psychological Association, American Correctional Association, National Council of Juvenile Family Court judges, a whole bunch of other organizations have said that solitary confinement should not be used except when a child is out of control. There certainly are times when kids get into fights. When kids get into fights in a facility, of course you should separate the kids, give them a chance to calm down. They might be putting them in their room, but for a short period of time, as soon as the young people calm down, they should get back into programming. A third way it was unusual was that there apparently was not sufficient planning at the beginning for programming for the children for something to do programming is all the activities that take place in the facility. The second one is schooling and generally in juvenile facilities, young people should be in school for five or six hours a day that wasn't happening that wasn't happening there is not happening now. So, in addition to school there are all kinds of other programming activities that good facilities bring in there are always business people in the community can talk about how to interview for a job. So all that was not taken care of, and then the use of pepper spray. Using pepper spray is cruel and unusual there are very few juvenile facilities in the country that use pepper spray. There is not a single piece of research that has ever been done on the emotional, mental and physical effects of pepper spraying children in a locked facility. Pepper spray is used by police officers, open in the public in fresh air, when they don't know anything about the suspects that they are confronting. These children in OJJ custody are children that OJJ knows they have all the information about them. When you spray pepper spray in a juvenile facility, it goes all over the place. The staff are affected by it other kids are affected by it. And so all these things were very unusual in St. Martinville. Mark, I want to stay with you for a minute. The state agency has pointed to understaffing as a reason for having a lot of the issues that it's been facing. And I'm just wondering how common are the understaffing issues that same that OJJ has faced how common are these issues across the country. What's the role of staff training and addressing some of these issues. Yes, the staff shorting the staffing shortage problem is a very, very common problem. And it is a legitimate problem that OJJ has had trouble confronting as has virtually every other jurisdiction in the country. My organization works in about 20 states around the country, and every jurisdiction state or county that we're working with has had this problem. We are in the second year of a pen and the third year of a pandemic. And we talk about the great resignation. Well, lots of people do not want to be in a closed facility with very little air circulation when COVID is all around. And so that has really been a problem and we have seen that that's perfectly legitimate for OJJ site as a reason why they have had troubles. In terms of training, that is one way to address these issues. The staff who are in the facility need to be adequately trained. And many times staff are not trained well. And of course we always think they should be trained in de-escalation. They should be trained to calm the kids down and not escalate and not put the kids in their own rooms. And staff also need to be trained on things like adolescent development. They need to know that it is common, every adolescent fights against authority figures, every single one, all of us on this panel, everybody who is listening, everybody has resisted authority of adults. And staff need to understand that that is not a personal attack on them if a young person in a facility doesn't obey one of their orders. It means the young person is doing what young people do all over the world. And staff also need to be trained on mental health problems of adolescents. Those mental health problems are often different than mental health problems of adults, including adults in the correction system. The staff need to be trained to listen to adolescents. Listening to adolescents is really important and most of the children who are in these facilities and are in the system have not been listened to by adults their entire lives. The adults in their lives have told them what they've done wrong and they have not praised them for the things they do right and for their strengths, but instead they take a punitive approach. And so they actually have to be trained on how to listen constructively to the young people in the facilities. I'm glad you brought up mental health. Gina, I want this next question to go to you. It's estimated that nearly half of the kids in the state's care face some kind of mental illness, including many of the kids who were held at St. Ethel. How common is this in the juvenile justice system and what sort of treatment is typical and also what sort of treatment is actually needed. Thank you for asking the question again thank you for having me as well. Unfortunately, we understand that it is very common right now from our understanding we have about 73% of the incarcerated youth are dealing with mental health challenges. So, from our perspective like we need to look at this but look at it more holistically in terms of providing youth and families with the supports they need across the board. Part of that might be looking at the intergenerational trauma and the role of the systems in creating that trauma through the institutional violence and racism and definitely Mark touched on what some of the things that need to happen. And again, from a parent perspective, we recognize that and feel like they need to address how these systems are causing poverty and creating obstacles to quality education, in addition to mental health. One would really accept that children were dealing with mental health issues that it would, they would receive services outside of a punitive prison system, and instead in an appropriate setting with support of loved ones. We need to look at counselors, social workers and therapists that are treatment based and child centered. You know we need to really look at implementing the solutions we know work and they're in the largest scheme of things living wages for workers, trauma and mental health issues with policies and with culturally competent curriculum access to physical health care alone with the mental health care, affordable housing and other investments in communities. Beth and mark this next question I want to extend to both of you. The state said that it had to do something in response to the violent behavior of kids and their care last year. Just last year they had seven escapes, and they had many more altercations at their facilities. Why do you think kids were acting out in this way and what other options were available to the state besides opening St. Martinville. Mark, I can, I can start. When I put on I posed this question to every almost every single person I talked to, because you know it is a compelling question like what is the state supposed to do you have these kids who are, you know, one of the kids we talked to broke of guards arm in a prior facility, you know these are kids who really do need a tremendous amount of help and they may be a danger to have around other kids so what is the state supposed to do. To a person who we spoke to said, first of all, not this, but second of all, once a kid is breaking a guard's arm, you're already asking the wrong question. These are kids who clearly have not been getting what they need from minute one. I mean I think Gina spoke to the fact that they've been getting what they need many of them since they were born really. But even from when they entered the system, if they have been provided the therapy to treatment the programming the engagement, the education that they needed from minute one, we wouldn't have to have this conversation. So I think asking the question at the point that we're asking it sort of makes it into a false choice, what the state is supposed to do is do a better job from the beginning. And then I don't think they're backed into a corner the way that they say that they are in this instance. And I have an interview the young people at St. Martinville, or the staff, or seen what the situation there is so I can't talk about St. Martinville, but I've recently been involved in a situation very, very similar to this. Maine has done a lot of work in the state of Maine, and Maine has done a lot of work to reform its juvenile justice system has been very effective in many ways it's sharply reduced the population of children confined and set up a number of community based programs. But last summer there was an outbreak of violent behavior there were seven incidents in Maine that that seemed out of character. So the state of Maine the Department of Corrections asked my organization to go in and interview the young people interview the staff and find out why were these violent. Why was this violent behavior going on and I think this may have a lot of implications for St. Martinville. One is the short staffing that's a serious problem. And with few staff that means the staff are not able to spend time with the young people it means they're mostly trying to manage their behavior. Instead of developing relationships with the young people, which would be so much better in terms of confining them a second as the kids were bored. The kids in Maine had nothing to do just like these kids in St. Martinville, and they told us very clearly. They just wanted some excitement in their lives they wanted some stimulation in their lives. Being locked up in a room for 23 hours a day is really a terrible traumatic experience. Most rooms in juvenile facilities would fit inside the parking lot space in a mall. Most of them would fit wholly inside it's a tiny space that they're in there. And so the kids just had nothing to do and they wanted some kind of stimulation. The third was that there was nothing for them to do no programming and everybody knows and the truth is OJJ knows that you need to have programming to keep young people active. The most effective juvenile facilities around the country and there are many and there are many states that do a wonderful job on this. Keep the kids busy all day long. They can have some downtime of course, but they go to school and they come out of school. They have hours in the afternoon before dinner. They can have groups there they can have people come in from the community. After dinner, they can have other kinds of groups, other organized activities, watch movies and other things like that, until they go to sleep, but not to let them idle. Anyone who has ever raised an adolescent or anyone who's ever been an adolescent knows that adolescents don't do very well when you ask them to sit quietly. Rachel did you want to add to that. Yes, thank you. So, as Mark pointed out he hasn't had the opportunity to speak to the youth in Louisiana, but my office Louisiana Center for Children's Rights. We are the public defender for kids in New Orleans and we also have staff in the East Baton Rouge public defender's office so we do speak to the kids in New Orleans. And what I can tell you is that this rings very true here. Kids, the lack of programming has been a real problem and so kids are idle, and they have been for quite some time. We've talked about specifically in St. Martinville, the lack of education. Well, that's not unique to St. Martinville kids have been not going to school in all of the facilities. And so that is many hours in the day when kids are supposed to be in school that they're not going to school. And the problem is that that is, that is sort of, you know, the violence. It actually kind of feeds into this where it's a cyclical thing. So, if there are not, if there are real and perceived concerns about violence, the kids will not be allowed to go to school, because there are concerns about violence that say, Okay, well, we don't have enough staff to take the kids to school because we're concerned that there's going to be violence. So they don't get to go to school because they're not because there isn't enough staff to take them to school and it just feeds into itself. But I also, you know, this really started because of coded that what the initial reaction when the pandemic started was to shut down everything. And I totally understand why that happened. I mean, we all didn't really know how to respond. What ended up happening was that you had 12 to, you know, 15 teenagers in dorms in these facilities that were spending, you know, whatever 1218 hours a day whatever how many hours they're not sleeping just sitting staring at each other in new dorms all day long. They just went on for months, they weren't allowed to go outside, they weren't allowed to play sports, they weren't having any programming other than, you know, some worksheets. They were having some computer time, sometimes, and, and that went on for really long time not only that their visits were stopped, their furloughs home were stopped, and a lot of that has not resumed. They have not resumed the furloughs home which were a really important part of the rehabilitative process where they could get weekend passes to go home and see their families. And, and not all the programming has resumed. And part of it is because they had these problems that came about because the kids were getting really frustrated because they weren't doing anything. And then they get punished and they get on lockdown because of those behaviors and then they don't get to do the programming they don't get to do the furloughs, and it's a cyclical problem. So, the boredom factor is a huge, huge factor here in Louisiana. Thanks Rachel. Now, an open question for all of the panelists. I'm curious what are the key differences between the juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system for adults. Are there any surprising similarities. I mean, I, oh sorry, go ahead. So, the, the differences is a legal distinction right so specifically the juvenile justice system is is legally speaking, not meant to be for punishment. And the legally specific purpose is for rehabilitation. And, and additionally the law requires that youth receive certain standards of care. That's mentioned earlier that that young people are required I mean this is not specific to juvenile facilities but it applies in juvenile facilities that kids are required to get education. And that that education must meet certain requirements. It can't just be 45 minutes of completing a worksheet or sitting in front of a computer screen. And, you know, those worksheets have, you know, can't just be completed and nobody ever looks at them again. But additionally, you know, there are laws that that prohibit kids from being in adult facilities and Louisiana State Constitution specifically provides for special juvenile procedures those are the words that are in Louisiana State Constitution. So, when our juvenile justice facilities start to look just like or perhaps even worse than our, our state prisons, or they start to look like our death row units. You know, we've got a serious problem right now. There are other important differences between the juvenile system and the adult system. The juvenile system recognizes that adolescents are not small adults. They are different. They are different. Adolescent brains develop. We've had research for more than 20 years. Adolescent brains are continually developing unto into their mid 20s. So a child who's 14 years old who's in a juvenile facility has another 11 years to go on average until they develop their brains developed fully and the important part is that the last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex which is the part of the very front of the brain, which controls what we call executive functions. It controls critical thinking, it controls the ability to think into the future. Adolescents are not very good at thinking into the future. Adolescents are interested in what's happening right now. They are interested in how they look they're interested in how their friends feel about them they're interested in their parents and punishments that they get immediately, but they're not good at saying, if you misbehave now and get into trouble this could cost you in the future because you may have trouble getting a job because you've been locked up for so long. Adolescents are terrible at that. What adolescents are good at doing is responding to positive behavior. And there's a whole bunch of research on that. We need systems and the best systems do this, we need systems that will base their behavior management on positive reinforcement, rather than punitive sanctions. Thanks Mark. So now that we have a little more historical and national context, I want to focus the conversation on potential solutions, what can actually be done from this point in time. So first I want to turn to Gina and Mark. It's clear that juvenile justice officials in Louisiana are overwhelmed. They're struggling with staff turnover, struggling with violent conditions struggling with all those escapes. What are the immediate steps that need to be taken to protect children in their care, as well as the people who work in their facilities I want to turn to Gina first. Thank you so much for asking. Actually, we dealt with this question and these issues so many years ago when we passed the juvenile justice reform Act of 2003. And speaking about that, that reform really was the blueprint for everything we're talking about. So one of the things like really quickly, it's about like reevaluating youth and stepping them down into a more appropriate settings, right. If we have 73% of youth struggling with mental health issues. Prison isn't a place to support that. Additionally, many youth can be safely returned to their communities with other additional supports. So, of course, our families are youth. We continue to fight for the fact that we need to close prisons and you know we continue to have these issues and the abuses that are happening. The system was set to do as we just discussed that's not happening. So it's clear that the state is unfit to care for you and to protect youth and staff. And we know this is a system that doesn't work anyway. So prisons instead of counseling and community based services actually increase the chances of committing additional crimes as we talked about. So we really need to identify and work with community based programs who can support and mentor children who are returning home. You know incarcerating youth we've already said that can have extremely negative consequences, but we continue to do that and expecting a different result. We definitely need to get back on the right track, because we've heard these stories time and time again, we are excited that the juvenile justice reform Commission has begun meeting again, we are working to really coordinate the services and the systems on the end. So what what is really sad is when we continue to hear the the mayor and the city council folks or the police chief and all the district attorneys and such talk about needing more police. We definitely don't need those things we need more programs, not more money that's poured into the community and to youth and families. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Clearly the, the first answer is immediately close the facility. Take all this, take all the young people and all the staff and move them to one of the regular OJJ facilities. The, I don't think the Office of Juvenile Justice is intentionally trying to hurt children. They are been stuck they have there is certainly their perception as they've been stuck with a number of children who they don't know quite what to do with. And I just think they've been narrow in terms of thinking what can be done. I, I came up with six ideas that can be immediately implemented that would improve the situation a lot. One is have a dramatic increase in programming get lots of other people into the facility to keep those kids busy to engage them to talk to them. Bring in people lengthen the school day, keep them busy as much as possible. Second, have a clear policy that isolation will not be used as a means of controlling young people that it will be used when a young person is a danger to himself or herself, or to others, but it will not be used on a on a general basis as a way of controlling young people. Third, they need to bring in mental health clinicians. Those a lot of those children have serious mental health problems. And that's not surprising at all the research shows that across the country between 40 and 70% of young people in the juvenile justice system have diagnosable mental health problems, and a substantial portion of those children have very serious mental health problems. They need to bring more clinicians into the facility to spend time one on one, and in groups with the young people who are there. They need to change the behavior management program at the facility. Right now it seems to be based on there's a set of rules when the kids break the rules they get punished, and they get put into their rooms. It's not the way to do things effectively with adolescents, they need to bring in some positive reinforcers, many, many facilities do this. Most, most facilities that I've been in have something on Saturday night, it's usually a new movie, not a video tape that the kids have all seen for many times but it's a new movie, and they bring in pizza. That's a great way to spend a Saturday night. A sanction if a child engages in misbehavior is they don't get to enjoy the movie and the pizza. That's not locking them in their, in their rooms. That's taking away a reward, which itself is a sanction. The fifth thing is they need to look at their grievance system, a grievance system in a facility is the escape valve for pressure that builds up with young people young people need to know that if they have a complaint about what's going on in the community, they can tell someone, they will not get in trouble for filing the complaint, and that somebody will actually do something about it. And when facilities have robust grievance systems, where the kids see that the administration is responsive to their concerns, the kids are much less likely to try to get attention by engaging in violent behavior. And the sixth thing I would say is they need to take a new look at staff safety. The facilities in the facility are likely afraid of the children. That's why they're locking them up so much. We need to make sure that staff get the right kind of training, and that there are alternatives in the facility to locking these kids up. And there are very good training programs that we've recommended to OJJ and to many other jurisdictions that will train staff how to handle these situations when kids start to get excited and they don't know what to do. But that the staff have to be secure in themselves. They have to believe in the training and believe in the alternatives. Otherwise, this is not going to work. Thanks, Mark and Gina. Rachel, I want to talk to you about oversight. What changes need to be made to the oversight of youth facilities just generally to ensure that the youth are being treated well but also that they're getting high quality therapeutic interventions that would enable them to return to their home and school and eventually find success and stability in their lives? Well, thank you for that question. The reality is there should be some oversight. I mean, there really isn't any. You know, I'm incredibly grateful to the work that Gina and Flick have done to get the Juvenile Justice Reform Act Commission back up and running. It would not be running at all if it weren't for Flick because it was completely dormant for so many years. But the truth is that when it comes to the secure care facilities that the commission doesn't have a whole lot of peace. And that is why, you know, this facility was able to open without telling anyone and that there was so little transparency around what they're doing because the commission can call Bill Summers up to come in front of the commission and testify in front of them but they don't really have a lot of authority over the facility. And so that's a real problem. There really needs to be some sort of system of independent monitoring of the facilities, all of them. And there needs to be some strict standards for what kind of care is appropriate and consequences for failing to meet those standards. We do have that in place for our Juvenile Attention Center. For the Juvenile Attention Center, the pre-trial facilities that hold youth before they're adjudicated that are operated locally, they have to be licensed by the Department of Children and Family Services. You know, I mean, it's not a perfect system. We had, you know, tragically two children die by suicide at the where facility. So obviously, there are major problems with that system as well. But, you know, it is something. And, and when, when something happens, you know, you can look to that system and say that's something we can fix. We can at least figure out how to improve that system of oversight. Here there is, there is nothing to even, you know, say who's watching because no one is watching. No one is watching. There also needs to, there needs to be limits on, you know, what could be there needs to be limits on who, on the use of incarceration, the size of the facilities, how long kids spend in there. You know, I think that these really long lengths of day are contributing to some of these behavior problems. Kids are just really, you know, losing, you know, they're losing their sense of hope that they're going to get out there. Their reason to behave because they're, they have no sense that anything they do really matters. The ages of kids that can be confined needs to be looked at. And there needs to be, you know, some, I think, legislated mandates around conditions of confinement, including a ban on solitary confinement, chemical agents like pepper spray and shackling. And so, you know, my organization is bringing legislation this year to prohibit solitary confinement in juvenile facilities, with an exception for the situation that Mark described where if a child is posing an imminent threat of physical harm to himself or others. So that is solitary confinement can be used until he regains control, you know, and as soon as he regains control his, as soon as the child regains control their behavior, that they should be returned taken out of the confined space but it should not be used for any other circumstances and so we hope to pass that legislation this session. I mean, I'd like to mention one other issue that we haven't covered yet. The, in Martin say Martinville, they need to reduce the population, the population is only about 10 to 12 kids. We've been told that over time 52% of the population is young people who have been committed for violent offenses but that means that 48% of the population are in there for nonviolent offenses. Some of the children who are in there are not because they committed serious crimes, but because they're in there for quarantine for COVID. Now surely there's another place within the state that young people can be put to quarantine for 10 days or two weeks however long it is for COVID. But many of the kids are in there for property offenses or for, or for drug offenses and there are other alternatives for that. But across the state of Louisiana judges are sending a lot of kids to OJJ custody. And so we need to look at some of the sentencing practices in parishes around the state. It's a, it's a two way street and it's, it's fair that OJJ says that they are concerned about judges who are committing kids who are not charged with serious offenses, but it is a two way street. OJJ needs to create more alternative community based programs and services that will be available because if you ask judges, they will say well I would put them in a different place, but it doesn't exist and that becomes a circle. And so we have to break that circle, have OJJ create those kinds of programs, and then we can go to the judges and say they're there. Those spaces are there, send the kids there instead of locking them up when it's not necessary. Yeah, I did want to mention that as well and I failed to do it earlier that that the St. Martinville is currently being used for quarantine and for intake purposes as well now. So the idea that it's necessary because it's being used for kids who are out of control and unable to be housed in other parts other facilities due to their behavior is not true. Thanks Rachel. I want to turn to Gina and ask about rehabilitation for kids. What does successful rehabilitation look like? Yeah, thank you. That's a great question is definitely going to piggyback on what Mark and Rachel just mentioned. You know, parents recognize that their children need to be held accountable for the mistakes that they've made. They have those same parents actually turned to the system to get the help and they couldn't get the support that they need it, right? And so some a lot of what Rachel mentioned about the oversight. Interesting enough, our young people brought those that same issue up because that's also a part of like being restorative like hearing from youth and making sure that their peers are cared for. And so we talked a great bit about that with Representative DuPlace's about young people being able to be able to visit and see what's happening and did a call to action to other folks, even some of the systems stakeholders that are working. And like, what are they going to do and can do to support young people to make sure that we're able to see what's happening inside of the facility because we also know that, you know, people have to have a lot of power to be able to and want to make sure that they are able to utilize that to be able to hold those systems accountable right and I think making though their demands known is very important around that. And again, it's all of this is part of the work that was laid in the blueprint and reform as Mark mentioned, stepping young people down and clearing the facility is the same work that we did when we passed the reform and close to Lula right. And so we continually calling for an investment in alternatives, a community based programs that can be successful to hold kids accountable from rehabilitative in a child centered approach right that would be very restorative and that will help you to heal from the harm that they kill the harm that they cause and change their behavior moving forward. So while everyone is different, we also have heard from many survivors who want the harm done to them to be acknowledged, repair to the extent possible, and prevent it from happening again, which is why organizationally, we find that continually the fight for the blueprint that's already there and looking at the gaps that existed from their law and bridging those gaps with making sure we have done an assessment. So, again, locking a child in prison doesn't accomplish the goals earlier stated so many of survivors really want to choose alternatives if offered more. Thank you, Gina. Beth, we spent a while trying to get insight into what was going on at St. Martinville, but there was an absolute lack of transparency. What could shine a light on what is going going on at secure care facilities, what data needs to be collected and what kind of monitoring needs to be done so that the public understands what's happening. Is that for me, because I think part of for Beth, but Gina, why don't you hop on. Oh, I'm so sorry, sorry, but but just can I just add like, in regards to the juvenile justice reform at implementation commission, we're setting up some committees that's bringing together the systems players, right, that are charged with fulfilling the, the law of the reform act, as well as community programs and not only just one system, the ideas to bring the all of the systems together and the various tables, because we continue to work in silos and be redundant. And part of that is the data collection. You need to have data and we've developed a work plan that we are going to be able to utilize and bring to every meeting because what ends up happening is that they do certain work. And they make plans but it's filed away somewhere on some website, and it's not looked at again. So the idea is to have the folks that are doing the work at the tables with the community. And all the different systems participating, and then report back to the JJ RIC, so that we can be transparent, because that's what's really missing. And it will be a lot harder, we hope that we know the questions to ask. Different when you have youth and families participating, because the then the responses have to look very differently, because you can't say that you're really educating my child, when I know you're not. I was just, I mean, Gina knows probably better than anyone, what needs to happen on a granular level on the ground. I think from the point of view of data collection. I think you alluded to this, she and I think there's a lot of things the state's supposed to be doing. But I'm not sure that a lot of it is actually happening so for instance there's a form that they're supposed to fill out every time they put a child in solitary confinement. We requested those forms and we did not get any of them. So, does that mean they're not filling them out. I mean we know these kids were in solitary confinement. I don't know what it means. I guess what I what I can say though is that if you treat something like that, like an event that's worthy of documenting. Then that reflects the seriousness of that choice right if you're going to put a kid in solitary confinement, you better write that down. You got to tell their parents, you got it is a big deal. And I think the same is true for a lot of the things that that are taken for granted. So like for instance the use of pepper spray, you know, anything like that. If a teacher doesn't come for a day, like that's not something that you just kind of shrug and don't mention like all of that needs to be documented and and and counted. And I know that that the legislature did ask the legislative auditor to take a look at the use of solitary confinement in facilities, and that's ongoing. That's a multi year project because they had to go back and dig so much for the information how much is the state using it how many kids are held in solitary confinement for how long. That stuff should be I mean that should be at their fingertips like that's very serious to use that to use solitary confinement with children so that's the kind of thing that the state should be tracking very closely. You know, to reflect the seriousness of it. I could just really quick say that that is absolutely true, and that's why the legislation that we filed with asks for all of that data to be collected and reported regularly. And the report that you're talking about is supposed to come out at the beginning of April so hopefully we'll have that information soon. So thank you so much all for this really rich conversation I'm going to hand over the mic now to Connor who's going to help guide the Q&A. Yeah, thank you guys that was really wonderful. Now we're going to pivot to audience questions. We've had a ton of questions come in. Again if you if you want to ask one please just type it in at the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen, and we'll try and get to it if we can. But I'd like to start with some folks who are interested in knowing more about this facilities at St. Martinville. Perhaps Annie or Beth you could address this what was what was the original intent behind the facility and was it was it in use before was it sitting empty. How did it come to be in the hands of state officials. Annie, do you want to, I can answer if you want. So, so the way that the system works in Louisiana and in many states is that each parish, which is Louisiana's word for county runs its own jail so the sheriff in each parish is in charge of its of their own jail. And the St. Martin parish sheriff had this facility that was sitting empty for something like 10 plus years. And when OJJ decided they had this emergency situation and they needed a place to put these kids. What officials at OJJ told us is they just started calling around kind of desperate to find some place to put the kids and the sheriff and St. Martinville said, I've got a space you can rent it. And we got copies of, you know, various contracts they went back and forth via email here's how much it's going to cost to house the kids here and then, you know, they just signed on the dotted line and move the kids in it all happened very fast it seemed. And just to give you a little more context or background about St. Martinville St. Martinville is a really small town it's like nothing compared to New Orleans or Baton Rouge are only about 6000 people who live in this town. It's just a couple miles south of Lafayette in central Louisiana and its main economies for the most part are sugarcane and crawfish so very Louisiana. But at one point it also had a thriving jailing detention economy, because the local sheriff's department actually built a jail with a capacity of 850 beds, which is disproportionately larger than the population of 6000 people that it serves. So back a couple decades ago the sheriff's department actually was profiting from hefty immigration detention contracts. And so just a couple miles away from the downtown where that main facility is the sheriff's department department also has this kind of juvenile detention training facility that has been unused for a while, but that's the 24 cell jail or facility that has that we are referring to when we talk about St. Martinville. And is the sheriff's office, are they profiting from the opening of this facility or if they're not profiting is someone else profiting the documents that we got only reflect how much the state is paying the sheriff to use the facility. So we can't say for sure, you know what the sheriff's overhead is and you know whether they're profiting exactly how much but I think one can infer from this arrangement that they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't benefiting them. And then, can you talk a bit about why these kids were there to begin with like what sort of offenses where they had where these first time offenders. What was what was that make up like what were the kids actually that we even spoke with were in there for car burglary or carjacking related crimes which is relatively common in Louisiana right now. And, you know, like many of the other panelists have said tonight, these kids would be in more community facing programs if they didn't have other risks going on if they didn't have mental health stuff behavioral issues. So they're kids with the highest needs of all of the kids in the system in the state. There are only 350 kids in secure care in Louisiana in total, which has dropped exponentially from what the numbers used to be even 10 years ago. Yeah. Rachel or the reporters perhaps you can speak to one person was curious about the racial makeup of the of the people there of the kids there was that how did that map on to the larger juvenile justice system and compared to those who are at St. I can talk a little bit about St. Martinville so black children are overrepresented at almost every step of the criminal justice process in Louisiana. You know, as I mentioned before there are 350 kids in secure care facilities, more than 80% of those kids are black. And in contrast Louisiana State is only 33% black so you can see the enormous disparity there. So if you're ready from these figures you know you, you can kind of opine that you know we have a criminal justice system here that over criminalizes kids over polices black kids from the moment of arrest to the moment of lock up. When we got the demographics for the St. Martinville facility. We had about the same proportion as the rest of the state secure care population. So about 80%. Yeah, and I'll just add, you know, being from New Orleans, and working in that system, you know, I think it's not exaggerating to say that almost every single kid is black in the New Orleans juvenile justice system. Extremely rare that is there as a kid in the juvenile detention center in New Orleans that's not black. Connor if I could jump into what Annie has described and Rachel has described is not unusual throughout the country. Children of color are overrepresented at key stages of the juvenile justice system at arrest at detention commitment to secure facilities transfer to adult court. So that's really going on. There's a wonderful new book out that your audience might be interested in by Professor Kristen Henning of Georgetown called the rage of innocence, how America criminalizes black youth. It's a superb work. It just came out, and it covers this kind of this issue in such wonderful detail and explains how we end up with a system that is largely a system for young people of color, especially black youth, especially black males. Excellent book. I'd like to bring you in. So this comes from a person who's they've they've helped develop plans for youth facilities in various parts of the world. And they noticed that they felt like Louisiana had a problem specifically with the management culture there. And they wanted to know if, you know, what steps can be done to change this culture. And if there's anything involved in the in that commission you're a part of it. Is there anything you're doing there that addresses this. Yes, definitely thank you so much for asking. So I'm, you know, like again, the from our perspective flick has been working and talking about the different issues and so looking at poverty. Right, I'm looking at the mental health, health care and educational issues. You know, that's the, the culture of the way we're managing our system by depriving our families and our youth of those equitable opportunities to be able to get to that. They're, you know, families and youth have always been on a front for the change. You know, so young people in organizations like step up Louisiana they're doing a lot of work on leading a campaign to fight for 15 campaign to, you know, do better around the living wage perspective. Again, from the perspective of a member of the juvenile justice reform Commission, you know, we have put together a vision, which is one that is to create a court made a systems of care that is child centered and emphasizes prevention assessment, early intervention treatment rehabilitation and proper development of civic values learning competencies and like coping skills for children rather than the punishment and so that's definitely that's definitely a culture shift to be able to get a system that's going to be, you know, child centered. And so from our also from the perspective, you know, we continue to work and support the leadership development of our most impacted young people and their families to be able to work to get them to have seats at the table so that the decision making tables, having those voices is just going to be imperative to be able to shifting any of the culture and being able to ensure that things are done from a family and youth center perspective. And so, you know, prison makes it harder for the young people to finish school, and to get the jobs in the future. And so we want to definitely be able to shift that so that, again, we are preparing and setting up our children for success. I think we might have lost Gina. Well, let's continue on mark I wanted to ask you. Have you seen examples across the country that of successful rehabilitation programs or perhaps programs that are child centered like Gina just mentioned. Yes, there are a number of states that have terrific programs and I start in Maine where I work where they've developed a whole series of they've developed alternative programs to get children out of incarceration. And it's been an involved process it took and we were involved in it was really a three year process, but has really been successful the state of Massachusetts has been a national leader since the mid 1970s in closing down large correctional facilities for young people and creating a wide array a continuum of community based services. You know it's not just that we try to create services and we put them in the community. We want to, we want a continuum of services of supervision, what will provide adequate people to protect the community and what programs will provide the treatment education skill development that they need. And we need an array of services from less restrictive to being at home with with some supervision to being in programs in the community some residential some non residential to increasing levels of security in terms of taking care of the young people. And Missouri has a wonderful system there. They don't they do not have any large facilities in Missouri they've been the leader in that no facilities there has more than 40 beds, and they have dormitory style arrangements. Well trained staff, the working for the department use services in Missouri is such a good job that people major in criminal justice policy in college, and then go right to working for the department of use services. The state of Illinois has gone through a lot of reforms recently, and has really changed its system the state of Utah doesn't lock up kids in large facilities their facilities are basically very small so it's, you know, it can be in rural areas and suburban areas, it can be in any part of the country. We know what makes for good programs, and we know what's good for kids, and it's not locking children up in large facilities. Patrick McCarthy the former president of the Annie Casey Foundation, which has been involved in this area for 25 years calls large juvenile correction facilities factories for failure. Okay, well that's a great note to end on Mark.