Photo credit: WisBar.org
Larry Dupuis, the Wisconsin ACLU’s legal director, said the state tried to fake compliance by changing the name of solitary confinement.
Let’s face it. Many adults today just don’t like kids very much. Teenagers with smart mouths and attitude aren’t nearly as endearing as the sweet children they once were. And when black kids or brown kids walk down the street together, they can be downright scary. Maybe that’s why children imprisoned in juvenile facilities are held in such contempt. Plenty of adults are ready to write off the entire lives of such children before they’re even capable of making adult decisions.
It was a long time coming, but finally last June, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson ordered Wisconsin to stop physically and psychologically torturing children at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls in Northern Wisconsin. The injunction was the first legal action aimed at restoring human decency to a horrific youth prison complex intentionally created by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators as far from public attention as possible.
Until President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions took office, the FBI and U.S. Justice Department were actively investigating those prisons after reports of children being sexually assaulted and receiving broken bones and amputations from violent physical assaults by guards. Judge Peterson issued his injunction in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center on behalf of inmates repeatedly drenched in blistering pepper spray for minor rule infractions and held for months in psychologically damaging solitary confinement.
Child Abuse Continues
But that federal court injunction has done little or nothing to relieve the serious child abuse taking place in Wisconsin’s juvenile prisons. An attorney for the Walker administration claimed in an update to Peterson that the state was making strides, but he said it couldn’t comply with the court order because of the unruly behavior of the inmates. Golly, I wonder why kids who are living in constant fear of being physically abused and assaulted would get unruly?
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Actually, I know why: Violence begets violence.
Many children who end up in prison have already had plenty of violence in their lives and more of it doesn’t improve them. What the state calls making strides to improve conditions looks like the tiniest of baby steps by officials who have no intention of ending cruel and inhuman treatment of children.
Judge Peterson ordered the state to stop overusing blistering pepper spray—a substance created not for use on human beings but for protection from wild animals. In 2016, before Peterson’s order, pepper spray was used on children at Lincoln Hills 220 times, an average of 18 times a month. The state’s reduction was fleeting. In June when Peterson issued his order, pepper spray was used only 10 times. That immediately increased to 27 times in July and then to 36 times in August.
Peterson also ordered Wisconsin to reduce solitary confinement, which former President Barack Obama banned from federal youth prisons, citing lasting psychological damage and increased risk of suicide among children.
Larry Dupuis, the Wisconsin ACLU’s legal director, said Wisconsin tried to fake compliance by changing the name of solitary confinement. Dupuis said inmates were rotated “for weeks and months on end” between various forms of isolation with different names such as “administrative confinement.” Before Peterson’s court order, as many as 20% of the inmates at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake were held in isolation at one time; since the order, that percentage has been only slightly reduced to up to 15% of the population at a time.
Benjamin A. Sparks, the attorney for the state, said “significant unrest among the youth at Lincoln Hills School and Copper Hills School” made “immediate implementation [of the federal court order] difficult and, at times, dangerous for staff and non-disruptive youth.” There’s no mystery what fosters dangerous behavior within a prison. Corrections professionals know the best way to improve order within such facilities—for adults or for children—is to create positive incentives for good behavior instead of feeding a culture of violence. We all respond better to positive rewards than harsh punishment, but the Walker administration prefers “tough love”—the kind of “love” abusive parents show by throwing gay kids out of the house. Tough love looks a lot like hate.
Sharlen Moore and Jeffrey Roman, co-founders of Youth Justice Milwaukee, have joined Milwaukee County judges and other local officials calling on the state to close down Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake and return children to facilities in their own communities with local oversight and support from families and loved ones. “We’re amazed that the adults who are supposed to be in charge of rehabilitating young people can’t see the fact that [the kids] are acting out because they are being abused,” Moore and Roman said in a joint statement.
Instead of ending its horrific child abuse, the state is blaming the victims. It’s trying to use the behavior of abused children to justify continuing that abuse.
