Nobody paid much attention amonth ago when WisconsinGov. Scott Walker visited the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba,which President Donald Trump has sick, twisted dreams of restoring as a “blacksite” of torture and abuse.
Walker already is responsiblefor two of the nation’s most horrific prisons, where inmates are regularlysexually assaulted, suffer broken bones and amputations from violent guardattacks, spend months in torturous solitary confinement for minor infractionsand repeatedly get drenched in blistering pepper spray intended for wildanimals.
If that sounds like anoverstatement, it’s not. It’s even more cruel because the prisons aren’t foradults. They’re Wisconsin’s prisons for children, Lincoln Hills School for Boysand Copper Lake School for Girls.
Walker created the facilitiesin 2011 out of sight and out of mind in a remote Northwoods location, afterclosing Ethan Allen School for Boys and Southern Oaks Girls School in Waukeshaand Racine counties, respectively.
The primary motive was to cutspending. The disadvantage, perhaps intentional, was moving mostly minority urbanyouth three and a half hours away from any family support or oversight.
The isolated location alsoassured a mostly white staff with very little training or real-life experiencewith black and brown kids from Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods.
For two years, we had somehope of federal action against Walker and the state for failing to correcthorrific abuses first reported in 2012 to the governor’s office by a RacineCounty judge who refused to send any more children there.
In 2015, state and federalagents raided the prisons to seize records and the FBI and Civil RightsDivision of the U.S. Justice Department started a criminal investigation intoallegations of physical and sexual abuse of children, negligence by officialsand destruction of public records.
But, of course, all bets areoff now that those agencies are under the control of a president who openlyadvocates torturing prisoners and violating constitutional rights.
Walker traveled 90 miles offthe coast of Florida to visit a prison where U.S. waterboarding and othertorture are now outlawed, but he’snever bothered to visit his own youth prisons, where reports are rampant ofsimilar violent, inhumane and illegal treatment endangering the lives ofWisconsin children.
Suicide Attempts, Solitary Confinement,Pepper Spray
When citizens can’t dependupon their state or federal governments to protect children from assault, theyturn to the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, just as concernedcitizens nationally are hoping the ACLU can stop Trump’s unconstitutional banon Muslims entering the country.
The state ACLU and theJuvenile Law Center of Philadelphia filed a federal lawsuit in Madison onbehalf of juvenile inmates seeking to protect children from excessive force andviolations of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishmentand due process.
“The way we, Wisconsin, aretreating these children is not just illegal, is not just wrong, it is immoral,”saidLarry Dupuis, state ACLU legal director. “It inflicts terrible damage onthe youth, it inflicts terrible damage on the guards and it inflicts terribledamage on our society.”
The ACLU found solitaryconfinement, defined as torture by the United Nations, was routinely used on upto 20% of the juvenile inmates at a time, often lasting for months.
President Barack Obama bannedthe use of solitary from federal youth prisons, citing “lasting psychologicalconsequences … Prisoners in solitary are more likely to commit suicide,especially juveniles and people with mental illnesses.”
Over eight months in 2016, a14-year-old was kept in solitary confinement for all but two weeks. After theboy tried to commit suicide with an electrical cord, he was transferred toMendota Juvenile Treatment Center.
Replaying the grisly civilrights protest song “Strange Fruit,” suicide attempts at both juvenile prisonshave become so common guards call the knife they use to cut down hangingchildren “the 911 knife.”
There were 135 attempts ofself-harm in the first 10 months of last year by girls at Copper Lake, aboutone every other day in a facility that only holds 20 to 35 inmates.
Children are let out ofbarren 7- by 10-foot solitary cells for an hour or at most two when they’rechained to classroom desks. When children are not in solitary, the routinemethod of control is burning pepper spray. In the first 10 months of 2016,pepper spray was used 198 times, often for minor infractions such as failing tofollow an order.
The spray used sayseverything anyone needs to know about the attitude of thestate toward children in its custody.
Commonly called bear spray,reviews describe it as “blisteringly irritating” with a chemical base “thatactually opens the pores to increase the stopping power.” Warning to ineptguards, “If not used properly, it can disable the user rather than theattacker.”
A state that views itschildren as savage animals rather than human beings can’t be expected to treatthem with human decency.
