Jackson Free Press

Decades of abuse—physical, mental, emotional and sexual—of young people sent to Mississippi's juvenile training schools may have ended last week when Mississippi reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, agreeing to stop doing unthinkable things the state never should have been doing in the first place.

The 26-page settlement stated in part: "The State shall ensure that youth are protected from violence and other physical or sexual abuse by staff and other youth."

"The State shall ensure that abusive institutional practices such as hog-tying, pole shackling, 'sitting in a chair,' 'guard duty,' making youth eat vomit, making youth run with tires around their bodies, or run with mattresses, cease immediately."

The state is promising to provide adequate health care, suicide prevention and mental services. It is also vowing to provide young people the "due process" they are guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

"This is win-win for the state and certainly for the children," said Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, after the May 5 press conference. Flaggs is the chairman of the House Juvenile Justice Committee who piloted the 2005 Justice Justice Reform Act.

The DOJ brought a lawsuit against the state in 2003 after releasing a thick document detailing shocking abuses of young people in the Columbia and Oakley facilities, detailed in a Jackson Free Press cover story in January. The state Legislature this session passed a comprehensive juvenile justice bill that would overhaul the state's juvenile-justice system, and turn over much of youth detention and rehabilitation to community-based programs throughout the state—a strategy that has proved much more effective in lowering recidivism and helping problem children become productive members of society.

"I am satisfied," said Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta, who also worked with Rep. Bennie Thompson in Washington to fashion the settlement.

The settlement allows the state's training schools to continue paramilitary programs that the feds had complained were grossly over-used against the state's weakest young people, including mentally ill children and young girls. Paramilitary programs have been shown by research to have little, if any, rehabilitative benefit for young offenders.

The parties agreed, though, that Mississippi shall not place young people who may be physically or psychologically harmed into those harsh programs. That includes seriously mentally ill and retarded students and kids under 13. Hood said that a mutually agreed upon monitor, Joyce Murrell, will watchdog the paramilitary program for abuse.

Col. Don Taylor, director of the Department of Human Services, said the paramilitary option will only "be rehabilitative, not punitive." He added: "We investigate abuse, not perpetuate it."