Nation - Indiana Fed probe finds sex abuse at state juvenile center USA says state could face lawsuit unless it does more to protect teens

By Charles Wilson Associated Press Writer INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Indiana prison officials said Tuesday they have taken steps to improve conditions at the state's juvenile facilities since a federal investigation found that male guards sexually preyed on female inmates at a now shuttered facility in Indianapolis. The state closed the Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Facility in November and relocated the teens to a new center in Madison, a move that was largely a means of addressing problems, Indiana Department of Correction spokesman Doug Garrison said. The old juvenile center was converted into a women's prison. "We eliminated the facility so we could recreate conditions and better conditions for the juveniles," Garrison said, adding that the move had allowed the state to hire mostly new staff and increase the percentage of female guards. The Department of Justice investigated the Indianapolis facility in 2008, but it wasn't made public until January. The investigation found that the state failed to protect girls from sexual abuse by staff, adequately investigate the alleged abuse and provide adequate female staffing. Investigators also determined that staff used excessive force, including one case in which a mentally ill 17-year-old girl was forcibly strip-searched by five male guards who held her down and cut off her clothes. "That's not what's going on in our facilities today," Garrison said. In a 47-page letter to the governor dated Jan. 29, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez detailed the investigation and said the state could face a lawsuit unless it did more to protect the teens from sexual abuse at the facility. "The sexualized environment at the facility appears rampant," Perez wrote. It wasn't clear why the letter was written two months after the facility closed. Department of Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar said in an e-mail Tuesday that the state was formally advised of federal investigators' findings a year earlier at the close of the investigation. "The concerns and proposed remedies expressed in our letters have significance in all of Indiana's juvenile facilities," Miyar wrote. A separate government study released in January found that about 23 percent of the girls at the facility said they had been victimized either by another inmate or a staffer. That was nearly double the national average cited in that report. Perez's letter, which was first reported Monday by WRTV-TV, said girls were sometimes forcibly removed from their cells by teams of male guards dressed in SWAT gear. It also said guards used methods such as chemical spray and restraint chairs typically used only in adult prisons. In another case cited by Perez, a girl who had reported a male guard had abused her was confronted by two officers, including the man she had accused. She recanted, after which she was charged with making a false accusation. The letter said the handling of that complaint was "grossly inappropriate." The letter cited one inmate as saying, "Kids have sex with kids, staff have sex with kids, staff have sex with each other. This place is messed up." That climate was caused in part by the fact that nearly half of the center's guards were male, the letter said. Sometimes, a single man would be tasked with supervising a unit of about 25 girls, investigators found. Garrison, the state prisons spokesman, said the shift to Madison alleviated most of the problems the Justice Department found at the Indianapolis facility. He said the juvenile center in Madison has a mostly new, locally hired staff and a new superintendent, and the setting is more like a college campus. "It's not a prison-like setting. It's more of a setting that we believe is more therapeutic and more conducive to rehabilitating these girls," he said. The Department of Corrections also has increased the percentage of female guards from about 60 percent to around 70 percent, and male guards are no longer allowed in girls' dorms unless a woman is present, he said. The department said it had already made improvements at juvenile centers at South Bend and Logansport following similar Justice Department probes. The Justice Department has begun investigating conditions at Pendleton boys' juvenile center, where a government study found about 36 percent of inmates reported being sexually abused, Miyar said. Garrison said the Corrections Department is taking pre-emptive steps to enforce zero tolerance for sexual contact in the prison. Published: Thu, May 20, 2010

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