‘Dying inside’: Chaos and cruelty in Louisiana juvenile detention

For a few days in February 2019, the back-to-back suicides flashed across the news cycle around northwest Louisiana. But inside Ware, one of the state’s largest juvenile detention facilities, children have been trying to kill themselves with stunning regularity.

There were at least 64 suicide attempts at Ware in 2019 and 2020, a rate higher than at any other juvenile facility in the state.

Behind any attempt at suicide lies a tangle of factors. But what has happened at Ware has brought into sharp focus pervasive despair among children there that no one is going to rescue them from repeated acts of physical violence, sexual assault and psychological torment, an investigation by The New York Times and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism found.

For years, Ware’s leaders have failed to report complaints of abuse, hired unqualified employees and disregarded state rules. Records offer no evidence that state regulators have ever fined or punished Ware, or threatened its contracts, even as inspectors have documented the same failings year after year. Local law enforcement officials have been largely dismissive of sexual abuse allegations at Ware.

The Times/Berkeley investigation — based on more than 100 interviews with people previously held at Ware and current and former staff members, thousands of pages of records and court documents, and hours of security footage — reveals how a place meant to offer children care and rehabilitation instead descended into chaos and cruelty. Guards beat and choked their wards. Several forced children to endure sexual abuse as the price for phone privileges. They frequently maintained control by bribing children with food to assault other children.

In interviews and documents, 42 people held at Ware over the past 25 years described being sexually abused by staff members. Many accounts were corroborated by relatives, others once held at Ware or court records. In all, they identified 30 staff members who had sexually abused children at Ware; one of the accused, a longtime manager, still works there. Yet many said they had remained silent at the time, out of fear of retaliation or the understanding that others’ complaints had been simply brushed aside.

“Basically, you can’t do nothing, you can’t go tell on them,” said Shakira Williams, who spent about a year and a half at Ware.

Ware declined to comment for this article.

Allegations of abuse at Ware have frequently received superficial scrutiny from the local criminal justice system. Year after year, records and interviews show, the sheriff’s office conducted cursory investigations, sometimes failing to interview key witnesses or rejecting out of hand allegations from children whom they viewed as incorrigible criminals.

Julie Jones, who has prosecuted three Ware guards for sexual abuse in her 13 years as district attorney, offered each of them plea bargains that kept them out of prison and off sex offender registries.

Asked if those cases gave her concerns about the safety of children at Ware, she responded: “We’re talking about armed robbers and murderers. And these girls haven’t even hit the age of 18 yet, some of them. Do I worry about their safety? No, I don’t. I think that they’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.”

In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson, sent there for nonviolent offences or infractions as minor as skipping school.

‘Last Line of Defence’

In the late 1980s, some of the most powerful men in northwest Louisiana — judges, sheriffs’ deputies and politicians from seven neighbouring parishes — began meeting at the Catfish Bend restaurant south of town to discuss a shared problem: where to send local children who broke the law.

Some of Louisiana’s larger parishes had their own juvenile detention centres. But in small parishes like Red River, officials had to hope they could snag empty beds — at considerable expense — at a centre in, say, Lafayette or Baton Rouge, several hours away.

One Catfish Bend participant was Donald Kelly, a close confidant of Gov. Edwin Edwards. As the Democratic floor leader in the state Senate, Kelly wielded significant influence over the state budget; now he would use it to secure funding for a juvenile facility serving all seven parishes.

Its director would be Kenny Loftin, a 29-year-old child abuse investigator recommended by Kelly and voted in by Ware’s founders. As one Catfish Bend participant put it, Loftin was “Donnie’s guy.”

One of the first to arrive would be Shakira Williams. On Sept. 30, 2009, nearly 300 miles to the south, Shakira woke up at Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center expecting a routine Wednesday. Instead, she recalls, she and about a dozen other girls were shackled and loaded into a van headed for Ware.

Shakira, 16 at the time, had entered the juvenile system the year before. Her mother struggling with addiction, Shakira had turned to theft to support her siblings.

At Ware, Shakira found a place that seemed to view her as irredeemable. Training materials in use since at least 2014 teach employees that “society” expects them to serve “as their last line of defence in protecting their community from those deemed unfit to live among them.”

With Ware’s new girls dormitories still unfinished, Shakira said, she was placed in a cell and put on “23 and 1” — 23 hours a day locked up, with one hour out to shower. She and other girls said they were kept on lockdown until the new housing was ready.

Eleanor Morgan, a former supervisor with decades of experience in other juvenile facilities, said she had never seen lockdown used as much as at Ware. Experts have long known that prolonged isolation is harmful to children’s neurological development. In 2013, the state limited lockdown to 72 hours. But Ware continued confining children for far longer, five people held at Ware said.

Ware’s policies prohibit “the inflicting of physical pain on a youth for punishment.” But a majority of those interviewed for this article who had been held at Ware or worked there said guards routinely punished, degraded or inflicted pain.

‘You Don’t Have a Choice’

In separate interviews, 29 people held at Ware over the past 25 years said they had endured sexual abuse by staff members. Incident reports and lawsuits reveal allegations from 13 more.

Yet former residents and employees, in interviews, said Ware’s leaders were largely indifferent, even apathetic, in the face of abuse allegations.

In separate interviews, four women said a supervisor named Mallory Parson II had raped them. Another said he would enter her cell and strip-search her. Three others said he had sexually harassed them.

In an interview, Parson, who left Ware in 2013, described his accusers as criminals “from the streets” who should not be believed.

Gabryell Hardy, sent to Ware in 2009 at 14, was often locked in a holding cell where she came face to face with Parson.
“Sometimes you just let him touch you, you just let him, because you don’t have a choice,” she explained. Reporting him seemed futile, because his conduct was an open secret. “That’s their house,” she said. “Whatever they say goes.”

Two women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Parson recalled reporting it to Ware’s administrators. Three employees — a guard, a supervisor and a teacher — said that they, too, had reported Parson for inappropriate sexual conduct. None of the five recalled any kind of investigation in response to their allegations, which came between 2005 and 2011.

Among the 30 staff members accused of sexual abuse at Ware — in incident reports that Ware submitted to the state, as well as court files and interviews — was the detention centre’s longtime manager, Raymond Lloyd Jr., who has worked there since it opened. Two women said Lloyd had groped them; one of them said he had stuck his fingers in her vagina. Four more described physical abuse.

There is no evidence that any outside regulator looked into the accusations against Lloyd, who continues to work at Ware.

Lloyd declined to comment.

In 1997, David Adkins, a Red River Parish sheriff’s deputy, learned that a Ware supervisor, Ronald Peace, had been sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the laundry room.

Adkins was quite familiar with Ware. He was one of its founders and remained a board member.

Ware’s assistant director, Joey Cox, took the victim’s statement. Ware’s director, Loftin, was permitted to weigh in on what charges to bring.

The judge was another board member, Lewis Sams, and after Peace’s conviction, he sentenced him to three years in prison. “Ron will be out in one to one and a half years max,” Adkins wrote in his journal after the sentencing, adding, “It doesn’t help to try to keep kids from being sexually abused in Red River Parish.” In an interview, Sams said that he had informed Peace’s lawyer that he was on the board, and that he had later stepped down to avoid possible conflicts. He declined to comment on the sentence.

The case would become emblematic of Red River Parish’s handling of allegations of abuse at Ware. In fact, of the four guards convicted of sexually assaulting children at Ware, Peace would be the only one imprisoned.

“If there wasn’t video or an eyewitness, there wasn’t a lot we could do,” said Johnny Taylor, a former sheriff’s detective. “Most of the girls in there, it’s hard to believe what they say. They’re not in there for going to church on Sunday.”
Jordan Bachman, a 17-year-old from Colorado, had arrived at Ware in 2019, charged with disturbing the peace and resisting arrest while on a road trip with friends in Louisiana.

His mother, Patricia Bachman, drove to Ware to see him. He seemed uncharacteristically sad and subdued, she recalled.

On Thursday, Feb. 7, he was put in his cell after fighting in school, said Lawrence Chisolm II, a classmate.

The shift supervisor that night was Travis Howard, who in the past had been disciplined for failing to report using force on a child; Ware’s leaders had promised regulators that he would be monitored to “ensure appropriate interactions with juveniles.”

It is not known what time Jordan hanged himself. He was found at 11:45 p.m.

The next morning, Ware’s assistant director, Staci Scott, reported to state regulators that she and Lloyd had reviewed video and that room checks had been conducted every 15 minutes as required.

Those assurances were false. When state officials reviewed the footage, they saw that no one had checked on Jordan between 10 p.m. and 11:45 p.m. They also discovered that guards had falsified the room check log.

Howard, the shift supervisor, said that it hadn’t been his responsibility to check on Jordan. He denied the earlier allegation of assault.

Solan Peterson was at Ware that night — at 13, one of the youngest and smallest children there.

Solan had mental health struggles — attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and anxiety, as well as trauma from his early childhood, before he was adopted. But he had never been in legal trouble until the week before, when he lit a roll of toilet paper on fire at school and was sent to Ware. “I was assured that that’s one of the safest facilities around,” his mother said.

Several days later, Solan, a boy who loved to tinker and take things apart, disassembled the light in his cell and picked the lock on the door. When he was caught, he was placed in isolation.

Under state rules, isolation should not exceed four hours. By Saturday, Feb. 9, Solan had been in isolation for four days.
Although Jordan had died two nights earlier, guards once again skipped the required 15-minute checks. Video shows the shift supervisor, Jhanquial Smith, checking on Solan at 9:13. Then, for more than an hour, nothing. At 10:45, Howard, once again on duty, walked by without checking, records show.

At 11:30, Smith finally looked in on Solan. He had hanged himself.

The suicides touched off the usual round of regulatory inquiries. Investigators cited Ware for improper supervision, the seventh time in just over three years. For the third time, the state found a failure to do timely mental health assessments. Also for the third time, it found that Ware was keeping children in holding cells too long.

But as with all the other citations, these carried no financial penalty or other actions against Ware’s license or leadership. Questioned about the suicides at a public meeting, a senior official with the Office of Juvenile Justice said the state’s investigation “didn’t find concerns.”

Five months after the suicides, the agency awarded Ware a new $450,000 contract — to supervise at-risk youth.