A.D. Nachalo
In the US, being tossed out of the workforce and into a life of subsistence-crime starts young. A recent Propublica report exposed a Knoxville Tennessee youth detention facility for its use of solitary confinement against children, in particular children accused but not convicted of any crime.
The Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service center is run by a tyrant of the same name. Bean bragged to Politico about the days when he was able to beat children, sometimes having five guards pin the child down while he applied his preferred method of assault. Bean still boasts today how he treats each child as a murderer, regardless of their alleged offense. No longer legally able to use the policy of assaulting children, Bean now implements an even worse method—solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement has been proven to cause long-term mental and physical illnesses among the victims which include depression, anxiety, psychosis, and diminished hearing and sight. People already suffering from the effects of poverty on mental and physical health are the most likely to be placed in solitary confinement and the least likely to be able to re-adjust either to an environment of incarceration or society if they are released.
The detention centers, often attached to courts, cultivate repeat offenders among the youth who become trapped in a cycle of oppression and anti-social behavior. This is by design: the amount of youth offenders serves to financially bolster the repressive state and to make the general population live in fear of crime and support the police when it is this system that manufactures offenders to begin with. In US society, the targeting of youth often follows lines of racial prejudice, disproportionately affecting Black youth, although there is no shortage of youth inmates of other groups.
Some youth are fighting back. In Louisiana, the youth detention centers have turned into a battleground. In November, five teens at the Swanson Center for Youth at Monroe fought back against the abhorrent conditions of the facility by removing metal pipes from the ceiling and using them to break cameras and assail their guards. The youth attempted to liberate themselves from the center before being captured again and transferred to the notorious hell-hole Angola Prison, an adult facility which has been modified to also lock up teens.
Nearby and also in Novemebr, two teens successfully liberated themselves from the East Baton Rouge Juvenile Detention Center before being captured again a few days later. Both of the teens are only 17 years of age.
In April of last year at another Louisiana facility, 8 youths escaped from their cells and fought the guards for over two hours until police backup arrived.
The situation in Tennessee and Louisiana are in no way worse than the other Youth Detention facilities throughout the South, and in most of the US the same issues prevail. Treating youth like animals has no rehabilitating or socially beneficial effect, offering nothing more than a backward malice in a society still unable to move forward under the fetters of the capitalist class. Capitalism, unlike socialism, requires unemployment to keep wages down, and crime to keep the repressive forces of the capitalists flush with public and private funds.
