NYT big expose on Ware Youth Center in Coushatta?

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Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said this week that he was calling for an investigation into one of the state’s largest juvenile detention centers, after The New York Times documented a long record of repeated abuse, lenient oversight and, in recent years, a surge in suicide attempts. Three children have died by suicide there since 2017. “We’re going to take a hard look and see what is happening there,” Mr. Edwards said after a public appearance in Lafayette on Monday. He said the state would examine “what actions, if any, we need to take” to protect children at the Ware Youth Center in Red River Parish, in northwest Louisiana. On Tuesday, the governor’s office said it was asking the state’s inspector general to undertake the investigation. The inspector general’s office was not immediately available for comment. The Times examination, published over the weekend in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, was based on thousands of pages of state records and court documents and interviews with more than 100 people who were previously held at Ware or who have worked there. In all, 42 people held at Ware over the last 25 years described being sexually abused by staff members; 30 employees were identified through interviews and records as having sexually abused children at Ware over that time. A majority of those interviewed said that guards had routinely punished, degraded or inflicted pain. In only a few cases have Ware guards been convicted of sex crimes against children held at the facility, most in the last 13 years under the current district attorney — who, in all instances, negotiated plea deals that kept the guards out of prison and off the sex-offender registry.

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