LA- Panel OKs closure of Louisiana youth prison

5-21-2008 Louisiana:

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is supporting a plan to shut down a state juvenile prison near Louisiana’s capital city and send its teenage inmates to facilities better equipped to educate them.

A Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday approved a bill that would close the Jetson Center for Youth, in rural East Baton Rouge Parish, by June 2009.

The prison has long been the focus of criticism because of violence and inadequate educational and job training capabilities. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Don Cravins Jr., said the lockup “looks like a 1949 prison” with its decaying buildings, cell blocks and razor wire.

Richard Thompson, Jindal’s juvenile justice chief, said his Office of Youth Development would gradually reduce the number of youths locked up at Jetson, probably beginning this summer. He planned to offer more details at a Friday meeting of the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission, which oversees the shift from prison-like facilities to smaller ones more focused on education.

As of Tuesday, 202 youths were held at Jetson.

It was not clear what Jetson’s buildings, including an up-to-date medical center, would be used for if it ceased to be a juvenile lockup. Thompson said it might be turned over to the state’s adult corrections division, as happened to another former juvenile prison in Tallulah when it closed in 2004.

“There is no plan to just close it down, lock it up and let the roof fall in,” Thompson said.

Thompson said the most dangerous prisoners at Jetson would be transferred to a similar facility in Monroe, which under Cravins’ bill would become Louisiana’s only high-security prison for juvenile convicts.

“Under no conditions are we going to sacrifice public safety to follow through on these reforms,” Thompson said.

The measure would also change OYD’s name to the Office of Juvenile Justice, which Thompson said is the name used by most other states.

The bill by Cravins, D-Opelousas, moves to the full Senate. ..more.. by The Advertizer.com