"Basically, we had a situation where we have very vulnerable females -- females that are incarcerated, females that don't have any stable home life -- that were being groomed by these youth services managers for sex," Brizzi said.

La Shawn adds:

Those girls were children, for crying out loud! Where's the outrage? Watch the video. It gets worse. (Well, not really worse than rape, but you know what I mean.) More than one in four guards at the same facility have criminal convictions. That's 24 of 88.

Where I disagree with LaShawn:

Stunning. I can't prove it, but I attribute these and other atrocities to affirmative action hiring.

I would think it has more to do with the culture of prison guards in the juvenile environment. Abuse is happening in these facilities all over the country because so many of these kids are abandoned by their own parents and a system that has no idea how to deal with them. They have no one to speak for them. Juvenile prison guards are underpaid, and I suspect, inadequately trained and supervised.

Sit though a juvenile court day in your town sometime. They handle hundreds of cases, there are very few lawyers there, just the kids, many in oversized orange jumpsuits and their parents. In Denver, the law student interns often handle many of the bail hearings for the PD's office. When I taught them, they would recount the how sad it was when they could have gotten bail but the parents told them they wouldn't take the kid back because they couldn't handle him or her. I've had young clients who have begged to be transferred from juvenile facilities (boot camps) to adult prison because of the cruelty of the other kids. It's beyond sad that besides having to defend themselves against other juveniles, these kids are subjected to abuse by prison guards. We owe these kids so much more than that.