This is a shame. A bill in Florida to allow juveniles serving life sentences without parole a chance to be paroled after eight years if they were under 15 at the time of the crime and had a clean record before the crime, is dead. Even Jeb Bush and state prosecutors gave "tentative endorsement" to the bill. So what happened? Strictly a party line vote--with Republicans voting against the bill.

Election-year politics made the bill a tough sell, [state sen.] Geller said. ''No elected official has ever lost reelection because they were considered too tough on crime,'' he said.

That is just sick. But what can you expect from a prison nation led by Republicans?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently published a series of articles on punishing juvenile offenders as adults. They are included in Throwing Away the Key , which begins with a description of the transition from juvenile facility to adult prison and its devastating consequences for the juveniles.

Check out this graph, which shows that of the more than 600 juveniles sentenced as adults under Georgia's Senate Bill 440 since 1994, nearly 83 percent were black, according to state records.

Here's the story of one more juvenile offender the system failed at first, but thanks to a caring deputy district attorney, was allowed to withdraw his plea and be sentenced as a juvenile. He stayed in juvenile detention until age 21. He recently completed his GED, with honors.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has an extensive series on Youth, Mental Illness and Abuse. It consists of 10 articles in two days plus a follow up the 3rd day. Yesterday, we wrote about the paper's investigation into abuse at juvenile treatment facilities. Sunday's article reported on parents who give up their kids as a last resort. The entire series is available here.

The Ohio legislature is paying attention and reform bills are underway. The editorial board of the paper weighs in here.

Today's hall of shame award goes to Ohio. An investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer resulted in a new report that finds:

At Ohio psychiatric centers, workers molested children, denied them food or gave them alcohol and drugs. Some kids suffered broken bones. Others lived in homes so dirty they urinated on the floor by their beds. Taxpayers shell out $160 to $1,000 a day for each mentally ill child who lives in these private treatment centers.

Why are these kids in private facilities subsidized by the state? Because Ohio closed all its juvenile hospital facilities:

...the state closed most of its mental institutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and created few programs to replace them. Ohio once operated 17 mental hospitals caring for more than 20,000 children and adults. Today, the state runs nine hospitals caring for 1,100 adults - and no children.

If this article doesn't ruin your day, nothing will.

by TChris

Earlier this year, TalkLeft called attention to the California Youth Authority's dismal treatment of incarcerated children. Here's the first person account of a young man who entered the system at age 10 and stayed for five years on a two year sentence.

When they put me in YA, they didn't sit down with me and say, 'We're feeling what you're going through, we want to help you.' It wasn't like that. What they did was lock me up, throw me in the cage, take me to the psychologist, he diagnosed me as crazy, and they gave me drugs. That was the solution.

The purpose of YA is to rehabilitate you. But they didn't rehabilitate me, and they don't rehabilitate other people. There are people who work for YA that are more criminally minded than the young people in there. You've got staff sleeping with wards, you've got staff secretively bringing drugs for wards. Some staff would beat up wards.

When you are in that predicament it seems hopeless. There was a sense of hopelessness in everybody. Everybody was gang banging. You're in an atmosphere where you have to protect yourself, where you had to become somebody that you weren't.

California would benefit by listening carefully to kids like J.T.

Bump and Update: The 14 employees suspended last week have now been fired.

The Department of Juvenile Justice moved Wednesday to dismiss 14 workers for failing to assist Omar Paisley as he died a slow, torturous death from a burst appendix in the Miami-Dade juvenile lockup. The deputy secretary of DJJ, Francisco ''Frank'' Alarcon, also stepped down from the agency on an extended leave -- two weeks after his boss, Secretary W.G. ''Bill'' Bankhead, went on medical leave, expressing regret over the teenager's death. Alarcon is not expected to return.

The moves culminated a remarkable overhaul of the department since Paisley, 17, died last June while pleading for help from a detention center staff that either ignored his agony or told him to ``suck it up.''

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Original Post: 3/8/04 6:20 pm

In January, we wrote about two nurses charged with murder in the case of a 17 year old Florida boy who died of a burst appendix at a Florida detention facility. The prosecutor was insistent that the nurses left this poor boy in agony for three days and did nothing. He finally died sitting in a chair.

Today, Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice suspended 14 employees at the prison where the boy died.

A department report said several Miami-Dade Regional Detention Center officers failed to provide emergency care to Omar Paisley in June after he was found balled up in his cell vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. "I am outraged by the across-the-board inaction by so many at the Miami-Dade Regional facility," said interim Secretary C. George Denman. "That no one reached out to save a person in our care is profoundly disturbing."

Paisley had complained he was ill just one day after being jailed for cutting a neighbor with a soda can. The report cites 11 officers, three supervisors and a nurse for rule violations. It also said officers failed to provide CPR even though they were trained to do so, and one officer used other juveniles to clean Paisley's cell because he didn't want to expose guards to what he believed was a dangerous virus.

Jeb Bush's reaction at the time? He "retains confidence in Department of Juvenile Justice secretary Bill Bankhead" but will take the report into account.

Sickening.

A Palm Beach grand jury has issued a scathing report of treatment of girls in Florida prisons:

With inadequate and virtually untrained staff and poor state oversight, a 100-bed prison for hard-to-manage delinquent girls became a nightmarish place where girls were injured and sexually abused, a Palm Beach County grand jury wrote Monday in the latest rebuke of Florida's juvenile justice system.

The Florida Institute for Girls, operated for the Department of Juvenile Justice by a private company called Premier Behavioral Solutions, was beset by violence. As staff struggled to cope with the violence, the treatment center became a dismal place where girls frequently were locked in their rooms and denied activities, exercise and even an education. Premier was paid $5 million per year by DJJ to run the treatment center....

The Palm Beach grand jury, which began its investigation of the program four months ago, heard testimony from 39 witnesses, including therapists, staff members, police officers and detainees. Grand jurors also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of records, including incident reports from the prison. The grand jury said the incidents were properly investigated by staff from DJJ, the state Department of Children & Families, and local police. However, the report said neither the private company nor DJJ took the necessary steps to correct the problems the reports identified.

We hope you have noticed and clicked on the ad for the movie "SIX" on the right side of TalkLeft. It's a documentary by Dr. Helen Smith (who happens to be married to Instapundit and law prof. Glenn Reynolds.) It's a remarkable film that raises important issues society should be addressing with respect to violent juvenile crime. Dr. Smith points out:

"The bigger issue is-- ”we've got dangerous people out there in society, what do we do about it? We look at it and say--”these people just sort of did this and we don't know why. We do know why. We don't do anything about it. We don't deal with the mentally ill. If somebody's sick, we don't keep them in a hospital. The police don't deal with them. The schools don't deal with them.

"If the systems won't deal with them and the families are having problems themselves--"what do we do? We need to decide to deal with it as a society--”or we just say, no, it's not our job but we are going to allow this to happen. And we're not going to be surprised about it."

Check out the movie's website . We've watched the film and it is quite compelling. You can order a copy from the website.

We first reported last week on a new report blasting the California Youth Authority for keeping kids in cages and ignoring mental health issues.

New reports to be released this week show how dire the situation is in California's youth prisons:

Reports to be released this week offer a chilling look into how the state handles incarcerated kids, depicting the California Youth Authority as operating violence-plagued institutions where some wards are kept in cages or forced to spend hours on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs.

Teens with mental health problems are made worse, not better, by a system that is failing in its mandate to rehabilitate kids who commit crimes, according to the reports by independent experts. The reports suggest the state is running a system that provides little help for young offenders who want to change their ways, prison watchdogs say.

"Instead of rehabilitating and treating kids, they're pushing them out the door in worse shape than when they came in,'' said Don Spector, director of the Prison Law Office. "It's like a factory for prisons.''

The LA Times reports "Inmates and staff are in danger, experts say, and medical care and counseling fall short." The LA Times Editorial, Junkyard for Young Lives, says:

Experts who studied the miserable lives of juvenile inmates in the charge of the California Youth Authority released reports this week showing a system in worse shape than most outsiders could have imagined. The state subjects its charges to the harshest punishments of any juvenile detention system nationwide, leaving teenagers confined in steel-mesh cages when guards aren't prying them from their cells with mace and tear gas.

There is a 90% recidivist rate among juveniles, the highest in the country. There is a failure to provide oversight and rehabilitation programs.

Bump and Update: We are glad to see this case make the national news. We just listened to the prosecutor on CNN. She was emphatic that the nurses left this poor boy in agony for three days and did nothing. He finally died sitting in a chair.

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Original Post 10:54 a.m.

This is sickening. We need changes in our juvenile detention facilities.

Two nurses at a juvenile jail were charged with murder Tuesday, accused of failing to treat a 17-year-old inmate who died of a burst appendix after three days in pain.

In a scathing attack on the juvenile justice system, a Miami-Dade County grand jury said the women skipped examinations or falsified medical records on Omar Paisley, who spent his last days "in agony lying on a concrete bed."

Following a nine-month investigation, the grand jury noted in frustration that the state Department of Juvenile Justice is immune to criminal indictments. The panel called for wholesale changes at the jail to "prevent another unnecessary death."

The nurses, Gaile Tucker Loperfido and Dianne Marie Demeritte, were expected to surrender Wednesday. They face up to nine years in prison on charges of third-degree murder and aggravated manslaughter of a child. It was not immediately known if they had attorneys.

The nurses weren't the only ones involved in the death. The Grand Jury report says:

Keeping with our theme of how we are failing our youth a little longer, a new report on the California Youth Authority says the state is failing to provide adequate mental health care in the juvenile penal system:

Juvenile convicts suffering mental illnesses are often over-medicated and improperly punished and cared for by inadequately trained clinicians who tend to intervene only when crisis strikes, a state-funded report on the California Youth Authority concludes.

The report, obtained by The Times on Tuesday, described a patchwork state system of care that is inconsistent from facility to facility. It cited a failure to track the effects of mind-altering drugs and an over-reliance on punishment — segregation in a wire-mesh cage, for example — for youths who need therapy instead.

The report was conducted as part of a class-action lawsuit filed by wards, as young convicts are called, alleging unconstitutional conditions within the Youth Authority, once a national model for rehabilitation of wayward juveniles. Its authors, experts on psychiatry and corrections, were jointly approved by lawyers for the wards and the state, which paid for the review.

Two teens who shared a cell hung themselves with sheets last week at the Preston Youth Correctional Facility near Sacramento.

These suicides put a human face on the tragedy of what happens when we do not pay attention to the mental health needs of incarcerated teenagers," said Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of an oversight committee on corrections. "The Youth Authority has a crisis in its health-care delivery, especially when it comes to meeting mental health needs."

Update: The AP has this report.

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Arizona is coming under fire as a result of new report by the Justice Department faulting juvenile facilities over suicides:

In an investigation spurred by three suicides at Arizona juvenile corrections facilities, the U.S. Department of Justice has found numerous civil rights violations that affect the well-being of youths in the state's care.

A lack of suicide prevention, inadequate mental health care, medical care and special education services and instances of sexual and physical abuse are among the findings in the 39-page report expected to be released by the federal agency today.

The report documents widespread mismanagement and communication failures in the department, which may have contributed to the suicides. It also points to abuse by juveniles or staff members in which appropriate investigations and disciplinary actions were not taken.