LOUISIANA BOYS' PRISON IS EPITOME OF NEGLECT AND ABUSE

TALLULAH, La. -- Here in the middle of the impoverished Mississippi Delta
is a juvenile prison so rife with brutality, cronyism and neglect that many
legal experts say it is the worst in the nation.

The prison, the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, opened just four
years ago where a sawmill and cotton fields once stood. Behind rows of
razor wire, it houses 620 boys and young men, age 11 to 20, in stifling
corrugated-iron barracks jammed with bunks.

>From the run-down homes and bars on the road that runs by it, Tallulah
>appears unexceptional, one new cookie-cutter prison among scores built in
>the United States this decade. But inside, inmates regularly appear at the
>infirmary with black eyes, broken noses or jaws or perforated eardrums
>from beatings by the poorly paid, poorly trained guards or from fights
>with other boys.

Meals are so meager that many boys lose weight. Clothing is so scarce that
boys fight over shirts and shoes. Almost all of the teachers are
uncertified, instruction amounts to as little as an hour a day, and until
recently there were no books.

Up to a fourth of the inmates are mentally ill or retarded, but a
psychiatrist visits only one day a week. There is no therapy. Emotionally
disturbed boys who cannot follow guards' orders are locked in isolation
cells for weeks at a time or have their sentences arbitrarily extended.

These conditions, which are described in public documents and were
recounted by inmates and prison officials during a reporter's visit to
Tallulah, are extreme, a testament to Louisiana's well-documented violent
history and notoriously brutal prison system.

But what has happened at Tallulah is more than just the story of one bad
prison. Corrections officials say the forces that converged to create
Tallulah -- the incarceration of more and more mentally ill adolescents, a
rush by politicians to build new prisons while neglecting education and
psychiatric services, and states' handing responsibility for juveniles to
private prison companies -- have caused the deterioration of juvenile
prisons across the country.

Earl Dunlap, president of the National Juvenile Detention Association,
which represents the heads of the nation's juvenile jails, said, "The
issues of violence against offenders, lack of adequate education and mental
health, of crowding and of poorly paid and poorly trained staff are the
norm rather than the exception."

Recognizing the problem, the U.S. Justice Department has begun a series of
investigations into state juvenile systems, including not only Louisiana's
but also those of Kentucky, Puerto Rico and Georgia. At the same time,
private juvenile prisons in Colorado, Texas and South Carolina have been
successfully sued by individuals and groups or forced to give up their
licenses.

On July 9, the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, an offshoot of the
Southern Poverty Law Center, filed suit against Tallulah in U.S. District
Court to stop the brutality and neglect.

In the investigations by the Justice Department, some of the harshest
criticism has been leveled at Georgia. The department threatened to take
over the state's juvenile system, charging a "pattern of egregious
conditions violating the federal rights of youth," including the use of
pepper spray to restrain mentally ill youths, a lack of textbooks, and
guards who routinely stripped young inmates and locked them in their cells
for days.

A surge in the inmate population forced Georgia's juvenile prison budget up
to $220 million from $80 million in just four years, but the money went to
building new prisons, with little left for education and psychiatric care.
"As we went through a period of rapid increase in juvenile crime and record
numbers of juvenile offenders," said Sherman Day, chairman of the Georgia
Department of Juvenile Justice, it was "much easier to get new facilities
from the Legislature than to get more programs."

After reacting defensively at first, Gov. Zell Miller moved quickly to
avert a takeover by agreeing to spend $10 million more this year to hire
teachers and medical workers and to increase guard salaries.

Louisiana, whose juvenile system is made up of Tallulah and three prisons
operated by the state, is the Justice Department's latest target. In
hundreds of pages of reports to a federal judge who oversees the state's
entire prison system under a 1971 consent decree, Justice Department
experts have depicted guards who routinely resort to beatings or pepper
spray as their only way to discipline inmates, and who pit inmates against
each other for sport.

In June, two years after the Justice Department began its investigation and
a year after it warned in its first public findings that Tallulah was "an
institution out of control," consultants for the department filed new
reports with the Judge Frank Polozola of U.S. District Court in Baton
Rouge, warning that despite some improvements, conditions had deteriorated
to "a particularly dangerous level."

Even a former warden at Louisiana's maximum-security prison, acting as a
consultant to Polozola, found conditions at Tallulah so serious that he
urged the judge to reject its request to add inmates.

"I do not make these recommendations because of any sympathy for these
offenders," former warden John Whitley wrote. "It shocks me to think" that
"these offenders and their problems are simply getting worse, and these
problems will be unleashed on the public when they are discharged from the
system."

THE PRIVATE PRISON

When the Profits Are the Priority

Some of the worst conditions in juvenile prisons can be found among the
growing number of privately operated prisons, whether those built
specifically for one state, like Tallulah, or ones that take juveniles from
across the country, like boot camps that have come under criticism in
Colorado and Arizona.

Only 5 percent of the nation's juvenile prisons are operated by private,
for-profit companies, Dunlap of the National Juvenile Detention Association
estimates. But as their numbers grow along with privately operated prisons
for adults, their regulation is becoming one of the most significant issues
in corrections. State corrections departments find themselves having to
police contractors who perform functions once the province of government,
from psychiatric care to discipline.

In April, Colorado officials shut down a juvenile prison operated by
Rebound Corp. after a mentally ill 13-year-old's suicide led to an
investigation that uncovered repeated instances of physical and sexual
abuse. The for-profit prison housed adolescent offenders from six states.

Both Arizona and California authorities are investigating a privately
operated boot camp in Arizona that California paid to take hundreds of
offenders. A 16-year-old boy died there, and authorities suspect the cause
was abuse by guards and poor medical care. California announced July 8 that
it was removing its juveniles from the camp.

And recently Arkansas canceled the contract of Associated Marine
Institutes, a company based in Florida, to run one juvenile institution,
following questions of financial control and accusations of abuse.

A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions and state laws have long mandated
a higher standard for juvenile prisons than for adult prisons. There is
supposed to be more schooling, medical care and security because the young
inmates have been adjudged delinquent, rather than convicted of crimes like
adults, and so are held for rehabilitation instead of punishment.

But what has made problems worse here is that Tallulah, to earn a profit,
has scrimped on money for education and mental health treatment in a state
that already spends very little in those areas.

"It's incredibly perverse," said David Utter, director of the Juvenile
Justice Project of Louisiana. "They have this place that creates all these
injuries and they have all these kids with mental disorders, and then they
save money by not treating them."

Bill Roberts, the lawyer for Tallulah's owner, Trans-American Development
Associates, said that some of the Justice Department's demands, like hiring
more psychiatrists, are "unrealistic." The state is to blame for the
problems, he said, because "our place was not designed to take that kind of
inmate."

Still, Roberts said, "There has been a drastic improvement" in reducing
brutality by guards. As for fights between the inmates, he said, "Juveniles
are a little bit different from adults. You are never going to stop all
fights between boys."

In papers filed with Polozola responding to the Justice Department experts
and Whitley, the state attorney general's office disputed allegations of
brutality and of high numbers of retarded and mentally ill inmates at
Tallulah.

In a recent interview, Cheney Joseph, executive counsel to Gov. Mike
Foster, warned there were limits to what Louisiana was willing to do.
"There are certain situations the Department of Justice would like us to
take care of," he said, "that may not be financially feasible and may not
be required by federal law."

THE ENTREPRENEURS

An Idea Born of Patronage

The idea for a prison here was put forward in 1992 by James R. Brown, a
Tallulah businessman whose father was an influential state senator.

One of the poorest areas in a poor state, Tallulah wanted jobs, and like
other struggling cities across the country it saw the nation's
prison-building spree as its best hope.

Louisiana needed a new juvenile prison because the number of young people
being incarcerated was rising steeply; within a few years it more than
doubled. Adding to the number, mental health experts say, were hundreds of
juveniles who had no place else to go because of massive cuts in
psychiatric services outside of jail. Mental health authorities estimate
that 20 percent of juveniles incarcerated nationally have serious mental
illnesses.

To help win a no-bid contract to operate a prison, the company Brown formed
included two close friends of Gov. Edwin Edwards -- George Fischer and
Verdi Adam -- according to a businessman involved in the venture's early
stages, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

None of the men had any particular qualification to run a prison. Verdi was
a former chief engineer of the state Highway Department. Fischer had been
the governor's campaign manager, cabinet officer and occasional business
partner.

Tallulah opened in 1994, and the town of 10,000 got what it hoped for. The
prison became its largest employer and taxpayer.

>From the beginning, the company formed by Brown, Trans-American, pursued a
>strategy of maximizing its profit from the fixed amount it received from
>the state for each inmate (in 1997, $24,448). The plan was to keep wages
>and services at a minimum while taking in as many inmates as possible,
>according to the businessman involved in the early stages.

For-profit prisons often try to economize. But the best-run companies have
come to recognize that operating with too small or poorly trained a staff
can spell trouble, and experts say state officials must pay close attention
to the level of services being provided.

"Ultimately, the responsibility belongs to the state," said Charles Thomas,
director of the Private Corrections Project at the University of Florida.

State officials say they monitored conditions at Tallulah and first
reported many of the problems there. But in fiscal year 1996-97, according
to the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Tallulah still
listed no money for recreation, treatment or planning inmates' return to
society. Twenty-nine percent of the budget went to construction loans.

By comparison, 45 percent of the $32,200 a year that California spends on
each juvenile goes to programs and caseworkers, and none to construction.
Nationally, construction costs average 7 percent of juvenile prison
budgets, Dunlap said.

"That means either that Tallulah's construction costs are terribly
inflated, or the services they are providing are extraordinarily low," he
said.

THE INSIDE

Hot, Crowded, Spartan, Neglectful

Part of Tallulah is a boot camp, with boys crammed so tightly in barracks
that there is room only for double bunks, a television set and a few steel
tables. Showers and urinals are open to the room, allowing boys who have
been incarcerated for sexual assault to attack other inmates, according to
a report in June by a Justice Department consultant, Dr. Bernard Hudson.

The only space for the few books that have recently been imported to try to
improve education is a makeshift shelf on top of the urinals. Among the
aging volumes that a visitor saw were "Inside the Third Reich," "The Short
Stories of Henry James" and "Heidi."

>From their wakeup call at 5:30 a.m., the inmates, in white T-shirts and
>loose green pants, spend almost all their time confined to the barracks.
>They leave the barracks only for marching drills, one to three hours a day
>of class and an occasional game of basketball. There is little
>ventilation, and temperatures in Louisiana's long summers hover
>permanently in the 90s.

The result, several boys told a visitor, is that some of them deliberately
start trouble in order to be disciplined and sent to the other section of
Tallulah, maximum-security cells that are air-conditioned.

Guards put inmates in solitary confinement so commonly that in one week in
May more than a quarter of all the boys spent at least a day in "lockdown,"
said Nancy Ray, another Justice Department expert. The average stay in
solitary is five to six weeks; some boys are kept indefinitely. While in
the tiny cells, the boys are stripped of all possessions and lie on worn,
thin mattresses resting on concrete blocks.

The crowding, heat and isolation are hardest on the 25 percent of the boys
who are mentally ill or retarded, said Dr. Hudson, a psychiatrist, tending
to increase their depression or psychosis.

Although Tallulah has made some improvements in its treatment of the
emotionally disturbed over the past year, Hudson said, it remains "grossly
inadequate."

The prison still does not properly screen new arrivals for mental illness
or retardation, he reported. The part-time doctor and psychiatrist are
there so infrequently that they have never met, Hudson said. Powerful
anti-psychotic medications are not monitored. Medical charts often cannot
be found.

And the infirmary is often closed because of a shortage of guards, whose
pay is so low -- $5.77 an hour -- that there has been 100 percent turnover
in the staff in the past year, the Justice Department experts said.

Other juvenile prisons that have come under investigation have also been
criticized for poor psychiatric treatment. But at Tallulah this neglect has
been compounded by everyday violence.

All these troubles are illustrated in the case of one former inmate, Travis
M., a slight 16-year-old who is mentally retarded and was also treated with
drugs for hallucinations.

Sometimes, Travis said in an interview after his release, guards hit him
because his medication made him sleepy and he did not stand to attention
when ordered. Sometimes they "snuck" him at night as he slept in his bunk,
knocking him to the cement floor. Sometimes they kicked him while he was
naked in the shower, telling him simply, "You owe me some licks."

Travis was originally sentenced by a judge to 90 days for shoplifting and
stealing a bicycle. But every time he failed to stand for a guard or even
called his grandmother to complain, officials at Tallulah put him in
solitary and added to his sentence.

After 15 months, a judge finally ordered him released so he could get
medical treatment. His eardrum had been perforated in a beating by a guard,
he has large scars on his arms, legs and face and his nose was so badly
broken that he speaks in a wheeze. A lawyer is scheduled to file suit
against Tallulah on behalf of Travis.

One reason these abuses have continued, Utter said, is that juveniles in
Louisiana, as in a number of states, often get poor legal representation.
One mentally ill boy from Eunice was sentenced without a lawyer, or even a
trial. Poorly paid public defenders seldom visit their clients after
sentencing, Utter said, and so are unaware of conditions at places like
Tallulah.

Another reason is that almost all Tallulah's inmates are from poor families
and 82 percent are black, Utter noted, a problem that afflicts prisons
nationwide to one degree or another. "They are disenfranchised and no one
cares about them," he said.

THE NEW GUARD

A Retreat From Brutality

In September, Tallulah hired as its new warden David Bonnette, a 25-year
veteran of Angola State Penitentiary who started there as a guard and rose
to assistant superintendent. A muscular, tobacco-chewing man with his
initials tattooed on a forearm, Bonnette brought several Angola colleagues
with him to impose better discipline.

"When I got here, there were a lot of perforated eardrums," he said.
"Actually, it seemed like everybody had a perforated eardrum, or a broken
nose." When boys wrote complaints, he said, guards put the forms in a box
and pulled out ones to investigate at random. Some were labeled, "Never to
be investigated."

But allegations of abuse by guards dropped to 52 a month this spring, from
more than 100 a month last summer, Bonnette said, as he has tried to carry
out a new state policy of zero tolerance for brutality. Fights between boys
have declined to 33 a month, from 129, he said.

In June, however, Ms. Ray, the Justice Department consultant, reported that
there had been a recent increase in "youth defiance and disobedience," with
the boys angry about Tallulah's "exceptionally high" use of isolation
cells.

Many guards have also become restive, the Justice Department experts found,
a result of poor pay and new restrictions on the use of force.

One guard who said he quit for those reasons said in an interview, "The
inmates are running the asylum now. You're not supposed to touch the kids,
but how are we supposed to control them without force?" He has relatives
working at Tallulah and so insisted on not being identified.

The frustration boiled over last week, during a tour by Sen. Paul
Wellstone, D-Minn., who is drafting legislation that would require
psychiatric care for all incarcerated juveniles who need it. Despite
intense security, a group of inmates climbed on a roof and shouted their
complaints at Wellstone, who was accompanied by Richard Stalder, the
secretary of Louisiana's Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Stalder said he planned to create a special unit for mentally ill juvenile
offenders. One likely candidate to run it, he said, is Trans-American --
the company that operates Tallulah.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)