LOUISIANA BOYS' PRISON EPITOME OF NEGLECT, ABUSE

TALLULAFI, 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 Tallulab 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.

Few psychiatrists

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
vio-lence against offenders, lack of adequate education and menial 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 off-shoot 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 In-crease in juvenile crime and
re-cord 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."

Moved quickly

Mier 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 hundred
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 whe 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 Tallulali so serious that he
urged the judge to reject its request to add Inmates.

Worst conditions

"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."

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 Tallulali, 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
esti-mates. 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 un-covered 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 Assoc-ated 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 slate
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 Tallulali's owner, Trans-Anierican Development
Associates, said that some of the Justice Department's demands, such as
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 Tallulab.

Warning about limits

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 he required by
federal law." 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, Tallulab wanted jobs, and like
other struggling cities across the country. It saw the nation's
prison-building spree as its best hope.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett