Jetson Center secretly transfers juveniles

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Only a small cadre of state officials knew beforehand about a plan to close Jetson, a juvenile prison in Baker since the 1940s, and secretly move its 76 inmates out of the facility just after midnight Sunday, the Office of Juvenile Justice officials said Sunday afternoon.

Nearly everyone else — the inmates, the 154 employees at Jetson Center for Youth, and the employees at the two other state-operated juvenile prisons where the juveniles were taken — Swanson Center for Youth in Monroe and Bridge City Center for Youth in New Orleans — were kept in the dark until just before the move, Mary Livers, deputy secretary for the Office of Juvenile Justice, said Sunday afternoon.

The parents of the inmates were told later Sunday morning about the move, she said.

Livers said the move was kept a secret to maintain a high level of security when the juveniles were moved to the Monroe and New Orleans’ facilities, which took place between midnight and 2 a.m.

She said that Jetson is being closed because it’s an “obsolete, unsafe, and costly physical plant” … and “it does not fit into our reform efforts.”

Closing Jetson was necessary, Livers said, so the agency can move forward with its effort to reform the way its prisons, called secure care facilities, are operated. For years, OJJ has been working to implement a therapeutic model called the Louisiana Model for Secure Care, or LAMOD, that was adopted in 2009.

LAMOD is an offshoot of the nationally recognized Missouri Model that favors therapy and family involvement over running a facility like an adult prison and punishing its juvenile offenders.

Livers said the dormitory configuration and the large size of Jetson, which is on 800 acres, does not allow for “appropriate supervision of youth by staff.”

She said the movement of youth has been hard to monitor at Jetson due to the location of the buildings, which occupy about 25 acres of the property.

Jetson’s employees will be allowed to transfer to other facilities, Livers said.

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