Youth Project: Oakley Making Little Progress

Courtesy Bear Atwood

Mississippi Youth Justice Project Director Bear Atwood says it's time to close the training schools.

The Mississippi Youth Justice Project released these findings today, which bolster its case that Mississippi's youth training schools should be closed. Verbatim:

JACKSON, Miss. – The Mississippi Youth Justice Project (MYJP) today called for the state to abandon the use of large youth prisons following a report showing that after almost four years, Oakley Training School has made virtually no progress in ensuring youth held at the prison are safe and receiving effective suicide prevention and mental health treatment. “It is time for Mississippi to face the facts – large training schools that warehouse children do not work,” said MYJP Director Bear Atwood. “They are an expensive and ineffective relic of the past. We must stop wasting the taxpayers’ money and actually start helping these youths.

The state spends $300 a day per child at Oakley, where approximately 76 percent of the children are non-violent offenders. A substantial number of these children could safely go home and receive treatment in their community at a cost of about $23 a day – a more efficient use of tax dollars during the current economic downturn.

The Mississippi House of Representatives’ Juvenile Justice Committee will examine a variety of youth justice matters during hearings scheduled for Nov. 24-25 at the Capitol.

“Chairman Earl Banks and his committee have a tremendous opportunity to show our children and their parents that Mississippi lawmakers will not tolerate a broken, abusive, wasteful, juvenile justice system,” Atwood said. “Our youth court judges should also be aware that these children are not getting the help they desperately need when they are sent to Oakley.”

Nearly four years ago, Mississippi agreed to stop the abuse and neglect of children detained at its youth prisons. The latest report by court monitors inspecting Oakley to determine if the state is meeting the conditions of a consent decree with the Department of Justice was filed Nov. 12.

The report found the state is in “substantial compliance” with only 16 percent of the consent decree’s provisions almost four years after the agreement. This is a 1 percent increase since March 2008. It also found the prison has been stagnant on 69 percent of the provisions – showing neither progress nor decline.

Among the report’s findings:

Oakley still does not have adequate staff to monitor and supervise its residents. The report noted the staff is “creating an unsafe environment, and encourages a culture in which youth become afraid and instinctively resort to violence.”

Oakley is in compliance with only 22 percent of the suicide prevention provisions. It found that “youth are not being appropriately identified at risk of suicide” and that treatment plans for suicidal youths are not being developed. The report also noted it is unacceptable that the director of program services described the daily assessments of suicidal youths as a “work in progress.”

Oakley is in compliance with only 4 percent of the provisions for mental health care and rehabilitative services. The monitor noted that mental health staff is not aware of what occurs in psychiatric treatment, and individual behavior modification plans are not being written. Also, not all of the youths requiring individual therapy are receiving it.

Only 69.5 percent of the youths referred to substance abuse groups are receiving treatment, the report found.

Four months after the last inspection of Oakley, it remains in a state of disrepair. The report found that the “cottages are in such disrepair that if they cannot be repaired to proper specifications, they should be demolished.”

The monitors toured the facility during the last week of September and into early October. Their previous visit was in early June. This was the first monitors’ report since the closing of the Columbia Training School, which came in response to a lawsuit filed by MYJP.

The consent decree with the Department of Justice lawsuit came after a 2003 department study that found shockingly inhumane conditions at Oakley. In addition to being hog-tied and left for days in pitch-black cells, children ages 10 to 17 were sometimes sprayed with chemicals during mandatory exercises and forced to eat their own vomit. Others were forced to run with automobile tires around their necks or mattresses on their backs.