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TORTURE: Who's guarding the guardians?

Published July 17, 2003 4:25 PM CDT

Suicidal girls were sometimes stripped naked and put in isolation in a poorly ventilated "dark room" with only a hole in the floor for a toilet.

One girl says she was put in a dark room for three days and her requests for water went largely unheeded.

Excessive force was commonly used against kids, ages 10 to 17. They were hogtied or shackled to poles.

Pepper spray was used for punishment when young people showed suicidal behavior or did not exercise or perform military drills. One girl was sprayed after she complained of the heat and had trouble keeping up with a group during exercise on a parade field.

Boys were being forced to run around tables for hours with mattresses on their backs. Girls were punished in the military field by being forced to run with automobile tires around their bodies or carrying logs. They complained of being forced to eat their own vomit if they threw up from exercising in the hot sun.

Horror stories, all too many. Something reminiscent of a chapter stolen from George Orwell's horror novel, "1984," or of an Iraqi prison during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Something that seems far from America, far from Mississippi. Something that wouldn't happen here, even in our worst nightmares.

But as any of us know who've picked up a newspaper or turned on a TV set this week, a U.S. Justice Department report said it did happen right here in our state. It happened at the Oakley Training Center near Raymond and the Columbia Training Center near Columbia - centers run by the Mississippi Department of Human Services, which is supposed to be protecting children, not abusing them.

"In America ... we are protected by the Constitution, and that does include kids," Danielle Lipow, attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., says. "And yet you have one of the 50 states subjecting kids to blatant torture."

DHS may blame the problem on a lack of money, poor help or staffs too small to handle our troubled children. Whatever DHS or the legislature or governor blame it on is really irreverent though.
What has taken place should never have occurred in a civilized society. The state government needs to find the money necessary to hire and train good staffs and to run proper training centers and it needs to do so quickly. It needs to punish those guilty of inflicting harm on Mississippi's children.

Every single, feeble, government excuse holds no merit when the crimes being committed by its juvenile detention centers are worse than those of the children being held in their custody.

The Constitution expressly prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Doesn't anybody in our state government ever read that document?

Source:  http://www.bolivarcom.com/NF/omf/bolivar/opinion_story.html?[rkey=0015834+[cr=gdn