More walls, more bars, the county supervisor said to me. That’s how people know we’re taking thugs off the streets.
The county had filled its jail. The sheriff had to release all but the most violent of offenders. I asked the supervisor about alternative treatment programs. A sizable number of the prisoners were in on nonviolent offenses related to a drug addiction.
“Why not focus on solving the underlying problem?” I asked.
He laughed at me and muttered something about journalists not having to run for re-election.
More walls, more bars. Taxpayers need to see their tax dollars in action. Who cares what happens behind those walls? Get thugs off the streets-even the young ones. Just put them away, behind walls and bars.
Put about 200 girls and boys in Columbia Training School, located between McComb and Hattiesburg. Put over 300 boys in Oakley Training School, just outside of Jackson. Put them through boot camp.
Teach them military discipline. If boot camp can make high school dropouts into Marines, it can make those delinquents into, well, something better than what they are.
But the U.S. Justice Department says Mississippi has gone too far.
The civil rights division visited the two training schools two times each during 2002. Turns out military discipline means hogtying kids as young as 10 to poles for talking in the cafeteria. The Marines do not put their recruits in restraint chairs for not saying “Yes, sir.”But that’s how the kids at Oakley and Columbia were treated, reported the Justice Department.
There’s no money to train the corrections officers not to abuse children, protested the schools’ administrators. There’s no money to hire officers, period, they said. Vacancies are at 39 percent at Oakley and 30 percent at Columbia, according to The New York Times. More walls, more bars. All that new prison construction is expensive, you know.
As for treatment? That’s a dirty word to the training school administrators. Just ask 15-year-old Jason.
Jason, according to the Times, suffers from bipolar disorder. He wrote a letter to his father, pleading for a transfer to a mental hospital.
“I never see a counselor but for two minutes,” Jason wrote. “I was supposed to come here for punishment and help. Well I had my punishment, now I need help.”
Bipolar disorder was Jason’s underlying problem. He needed medical attention. Boot camp wasn’t going to do much for him.
Jason was never getting treatment at Oakley. The medical facilities at the training school are a cruel joke, the Justice Department found. A nurse at Oakley was seen immunizing two children for Hepatitis B with the same needle. Mouse dung and dead roaches littered Oakley’s dental clinic. Expired medicines lined the shelves.
But money is tight in Mississippi’s corrections budget. The prison population is booming. According to another Justice Department report, the prison population increased 3.7 percent in 2002-triple the rate from a year ago. More walls, more bars.
At least the kids are off the street, right? They must have committed some horrible offense to be sent to training school.
No, said the Justice Department. According to the report, most of the children (75 percent of the girls) are in for status offenses: truancy, running away, under-age drinking and smoking, to name a few.
A 1974 federal law barred imprisoning status offenders, but it was amended 10 years later to allow children who violated a court order to be incarcerated, according to the Times.
Sixty-six to 85 percent of the children at Oakley and Columbia have mental disorders like Jason. State law says they are not supposed to be in a training school. The mentally ill children are supposed to be in state-run mental hospitals, but what legislator is going to increase funding of mental treatment for chidren in training schools? They don’t have a special interest group, and they’re too young to vote.
The voters want corrections money to go to only one thing-yeah, you guessed it.
More walls, more bars. They also separate us from what we’ve done to the kids.
Wilson Boyd is a senior economics major. He can be reached at [email protected].