The Loveshade Family Blog

Shackling teens for 12 hours a day; physically and sexually abusing teen girls and teen boys; stripping teenage girls naked and forcing them to eat their own vomit: These are correction methods that have been investigated by various agencies, including the U. S. Department of Justice.  Now the Columbia Training School of Columbia, Mississippi, which has been the site of much of this controversy, is being shut down.

While many of the 13,000 claims of abuse for juvenile correction centers made in America from 2004 to 2007 are likely bogus, it's still a staggering number.  This is especially considering there were about 46,000 detainees in 2007.  Assuming the number of detainees and reports was more-or-less constant for those three years, that's about one report per ten teens per year.

But is the problem just with juveniles, or with the whole system?  The flawed mission of the adult correction system was perhaps intentionally pointed out by Ana Margarita Compain-Romero of the praised Missouri Department of Social Services.  "It's just a different approach that we take. It's a treatment approach.  In other states, they take a more punitive approach, more like corrections."

In other words, so-called adult correction isn't treatment, it's punishment.  But don't you treat something in order to correct it?

See the article "13,000 abuse claims in juvie centers" by Associated Press writer Holbrook Mohr at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080302/ap_on_re_us/juvenile_detention.

(Alden Loveshade contributed to this report)