Parents and Locals Transform a Juvenile Prison
“People said it could never happen—but people underestimate the power of compassion and a commitment to justice.”
—Grace Bauer, mother of an incarcerated youth
In 1994, the state of Louisiana, with the highest incarceration rate in the world and a reputation for some of the toughest prisons in the country, opened a juvenile correctional facility in the impoverished town of Tallulah. Parents began complaining that their children were regularly abused and “warehoused” in deplorable conditions, and before long the prison was considered the nation’s most corrupt and dangerous youth facility. Then an unlikely coalition of local Tallulah residents, parents, lawyers, legislators and child advocates linked arms to successfully shut down the prison and pass the most radical reconstruction of the juvenile justice system in the state’s history.
Tallulah. Over the years, the name has meant many different things to people living around northeastern Louisiana. Folklore has it that the town of Tallulah got its name in the 1850s, when a local woman used her wiles to persuade the chief engineer to re-route the railroad through her land. Alas, by the time construction was underway, she had tired of him. Alone, brokenhearted, and not without resentment, he named the station—and by de facto, the town—Tallulah, after another sweetheart.
A hundred years later, this predominantly African-American community became a civil rights stronghold, led by black veterans returning from World War II and determined to create change at home. By the 1960s, Tallulah was still segregated but was also a trendy hotspot, attracting fun seekers for jazz, blues, and nightlife; B.B. King was a regular at Tallulah clubs. After the lumber mill closed in the late 1980s, the fun seemed to be over and forgotten, replaced by the economic hardship of its 9,000 residents. Today, Tallulah is so economically depressed it ranks among the poorest communities in the nation. With 50 percent of residents living below the poverty line, and 40 percent of adults without a high school diploma, Tallulah became a place few visited.
Then in 1994, following what many called a shady deal made in the governor’s office, Tallulah was back on the map, becoming not so much famous as infamous—as the home of a juvenile prison The New York Times warned was “so rife with brutality, cronyism, and neglect that many legal experts say it is the worst in the nation.” The Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth (TCCY)—known simply as “Tallulah”—marked the entire town with an indelible stamp of child abuse and corruption. Within a month of opening, the media were outside the gates, eagerly reporting as federal judge Frank Polozola called a state of emergency there “due to riots and an inability of the staff to control and protect youth.”
Riots notwithstanding, daily conditions were so violent it was estimated that 25 percent of the prison’s incarcerated youth required medical treatment each month. In 1995, a Human Rights Watch report singled out TCCY, finding that many children were warehoused in unsanitary isolation cells for up to 23 hours a day without adequate education, exercise, counseling, or any kind of rehabilitative programming. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the facility in 1996, finding that over a period of just 20 days in August of that year, 28 youth were treated in hospital for serious injuries inflicted by guards or other inmates.
It seems that crime—or at least punishment—does pay. Prisons are built and operated at taxpayers’ expense as a matter of public interest. They house offenders, ostensibly to rehabilitate them and return them to society. Now the privatization of prisons has become big business—among the most profitable of all industries—but at what cost?
• In the 1800s, private prisons were common, but due to slave-labor practices and brutal conditions, the practice was phased out. By 1990, there were only five privately run prisons in the United States, accounting for 2,000 inmates. In 2007, there are nearly 100,000 prisoners housed in private facilities.
• In 1992, the stock price of the industry leader, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), was $8. In 2007, shares were $52 and climbing. In 2005, CCA netted a profit of $70.9 million, a 22.9 percent increase over 2004, with revenues of $1.19 billion.
• Private prisons say they are more efficient than state or federally run facilities. According to Corp Watch, in 1985 one company attempted to site a prison on a toxic dump it had purchased for $1. According to a federal investigation, a 1994 riot at a private immigration detention center was the result of prison management reducing spending on food, building repairs, and guard salaries. Companies have also cut corners on drug rehabilitation, counseling, and literacy programs, all of which make it more likely that inmates will re-offend.
By 1998, parents of the youths held at the Tallulah facility began a campaign to close down the prison. They ran into stiff political opposition founded on the argument that the prison was a benefit to the depressed local economy. Eventually, the parents reached out to the locals and were surprised to discover that the community was not benefiting from the prison. In the end, the alliance between parents and residents led to the facility’s closure as a juvenile incarceration unit.
In a nation where incarceration is big business—a supposed economic boon for poor towns—the Tallulah story reveals that few communities want to bet their fiscal future on an industry based on repression. By uniting locals and parents, the Tallulah reformers showed that there is a deep hunger for creating the kind of economy that’s more optimistic than opportunistic. “The time spent working next to the folks of that community, fighting so hard to save what they and their families before them had built, gave me a whole new respect for these beautiful folks,” said Grace Bauer, whose son, Corey, had been held at TCCY. “In so many ways they too were victims of the prison.”
In an atmosphere indistinguishable from high security adult prisons, the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth was institutionalizing crime in the state by taking in mostly nonviolent youth—overwhelmingly youth of color—and churning out repeat offenders and future adult felons. The facility’s recidivism rate—the rate at which the incarcerated re-offend—was as high as 90 percent, compared with only 7 percent in Missouri’s education and counseling-based facilities.
Private prison deals are rife with corruption, and Tallulah was no different. The prison functioned quite well as a cash cow for the private for-profit corporation who won the state contract to open and operate the facility back in 1994. In May 2001, the state’s legislative auditor found that between January 1995 and April 2001, three members of Trans-American Development Associates, cronies of then-Governor Edwin Edwards, pocketed $8.7 million dollars from the deal. Even after lawsuits forced the state to seize control of the facility in 1999, the three continued to put away up to $600,000 each fiscal year until the legislature finally ceased all payments, except those which covered the lease of the facility. These annual lease payments by the state are scheduled to continue until construction bonds for the facility are paid off in 2012, after which the three men—not the state, parish or town—will retain ownership of the physical plant.
From Xochitil Bervera, “The Death of Tallulah Prison,” Colorlines, June 24, 2004.
Most of the 400 Tallulah inmates were classified as nonviolent, often transferred from other faraway facilities for behavioral problems, most stemming from a lack of treatment for existing mental health problems that were exacerbated by isolation and abuse. Parents and grandparents often faced drives as long as 400 miles to visit their children. But not all were transfers, as Xochitl Bervera, co-director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), points out. Many of the children were unwittingly placed there by the parents of troubled youth. “The facility also ran a Boot Camp for troubled teens, which some parents thought might be a good experience for their kids,” Bervera told us. “What parents did not understand was that once they sent these kids to Boot Camp, they had effectively lost custody of their own children, who were transferred straight from Boot Camp to prison.” Very few youth ever “graduated” from Boot Camp.
Once kids were transferred to the “prison side,” they were in for a much longer stay than the Boot Camp had called for. It was a shocking transition for kids and their parents. As Bervera recalled, “Once inside the facility, it was a dangerous place. Youth-on-youth violence, guard-on-youth violence, sex was rampant between guards and youth. There was never even any denial of those facts. That level of corruption was well known.”
A fledgling legal advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), was determined to make changes at TCCY. Director David Utter started JJPL, along with Shannon Wight and Gabriella Celeste, in 1998. As he said, “We wanted to put pressure on the defender’s system, the way they were so poorly represented. We wanted to get better advocates, better treatment, better facilities and ultimately, to shrink the system and the number of kids in secure care. That was our mission statement. The facility at Tallulah was bad, but in fact all the youth facilities were bad.” JJPL filed a class action suit on behalf of the children incarcerated at the Tallulah facility, in an attempt to improve conditions.
The group’s steady work chipped away at the brutal conditions, though bringing to justice those responsible for conditions there proved far more difficult. The organization helped obtain early release for those inappropriately incarcerated, and reduced those held in isolation cells by 66 percent. Soon after filing the class action lawsuit, the DOJ also filed legal action over the conditions, making Louisiana the first state ever to be sued by the federal government on the basis of their juvenile justice system.
The attorneys’ work put them in touch with parents of children incarcerated at Tallulah. Gina Womack, the office administrator, spent a good part of her days fielding a steady stream of calls from scared, confused and outraged family members. Many parents wanted to do something more than just challenge conditions, and in 2000, with help from Womack and others at JJPL, a small group of parents gathered at the home of Earnestine Williams in Baton Rouge. The gathering determined to be as much a political advocacy organization as a support group. Over the next year or so, its members would come from across the state, eventually settling on the name Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.
The parents’ goal in 2000 was not just to change the conditions at Tallulah, but to shut it down forever. “That was fascinating,” Utter recalled with a smile. “The best part about the ‘Close Tallulah’ story is the fact that the idea to close came from parents. It wasn’t the lawyers that did it.”
The parents’ group understood they needed to attract some attention to their campaign. Xochitl Bervera, who began as an intern working with FFLIC, remembers, “It was Avis Brock, granddaughter of a local civil rights leader, who brought the idea to the group, saying, ‘This is New Orleans, let’s do something truly New Orleans.’ And what better than a traditional jazz funeral, with a brass band, coffin, hearse, horse-drawn carriage, all of it?”
Rooted in African cultures, jazz funerals are a specialized New Orleans tradition, a celebration of life that accompanies death. Brass bands mournfully lead the funeral procession to the grave, but once the casket is laid to rest, rousing Ragtime or Dixieland jazz tunes such as “When the Saints Go Marching In” are played.
In September 2001—gathering more than 150 marchers, including the staff of the Juvenile Justice Project, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Juvenile Court Judge Mark Doherty—the FFLIC used this symbolic tradition to mourn the untold losses of childhood suffered by their incarcerated children and to “bury” the prison itself. The march led all the way to Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. It was the leading story in many news outlets around the state, officially setting off the campaign to “Close Tallulah Now!”
Over the next two years, the work continued. There were dozens of legal hearings that attempted to close the prison from a variety of angles, including trying to get the legislature to strip the facility’s funding from the state’s finance bill. Despite coming close to victory more than once, the coalition was unable to find the right hook to shutter TCCY. Meanwhile, FFLIC continued to expand its statewide outreach to build the coalition’s numbers and to keep the issue in the media, often linking the hearings with media-friendly actions.
Grace Bauer’s son Corey was incarcerated at the Tallulah facility in 2001. She became active in the fight to close the prison and now directs the Lake Charles chapter of Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC). This is her story.
Tallulah was so far away, it took 10 hours round trip to visit him for less than 2 hours. We did not know Tallulah was a prison; we were told it was a place where our son would get the help he needed. Our first look at the place scared us beyond words. Driving up to the high locked gates the first time, I remember thinking we must be in the wrong place. When guards were physically searching us, including our daughters, I remember thinking, “This is all a mistake, because this is a prison for bad people and our son isn’t bad, just sick.” Corey was a skinny kid, weighing less than 90 pounds when he arrived. My first trip to see him inside Tallulah, he was beaten so badly he was in the infirmary. His face was bruised and swollen, one eye swollen shut. An imprint of a guard’s ring was tattooed on the right temple of his head. The guard’s size 9 shoe imprint still bruised into his rib cage.
On January 5, 1998, my mother passed away. This set off a series of events that put us on a direct path into the juvenile justice system. We were a family of six, including myself, my husband, Robert, my son, my two daughters, Robyn, 7, and Caroline, 5, and my mother, who lived right next door. We were all very close to Momma. Corey, then 11, had just entered into middle school. He was already having a difficult time adjusting to the move into a new school environment. He had trouble getting his locker open, keeping track of all of his books and belongings and getting to so many different classrooms. He had never been in trouble. He was an honor roll student and, according to his teachers, was very bright and an excellent reader.
The night my mother died, Corey had nightmares and wet the bed. A month later he was suspended for smoking on the school campus. From then until Corey was taken into custody of the state in March of 2001, we did everything that we could think of to hold onto him. After numerous suspensions and several expulsions—all for smoking or possession of tobacco—the school system refused to let him back in. He picked up a couple of petty charges for shoplifting and possession of tobacco by a minor, which brought him to the attention of the juvenile justice system.
All the while, his attitude and behavior became more erratic and troubling. He was now drinking and using marijuana. I know now he was extremely depressed and much of what we did during this time only seemed to make the problems worse for him instead of giving him what he needed. There were counselors that were provided for him with military backgrounds, unlikely to ever serve the needs of a child labeled with Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
During the next two years, I became accustomed to sleeping on the floor in his room to keep him from leaving the house during the night. There were many days I sat in school with him to keep him from being suspended. Some days he would just take off from school and be gone for hours, eventually being brought home by his friends who would drop him off at the end of driveway, passed out. There were too many nights to remember being afraid to fall asleep for fear of him vomiting in his sleep and choking to death. It was an agonizing time for him, he felt so alone and felt awful for the trouble he was having and bringing to the family.
Inside, he was beaten repeatedly, bullied, sexually assaulted, and neglected. Corey ceased being the little boy we raised during his time there. He became terrified and his daily function in life was about survival. He learned to sleep in the daytime when there were more guards on duty and less chance of being attacked. He learned to steal food and protect with his fists what he was given. His beloved books were taken from him and education was non-existent. Eventually, Corey refused to come out of isolation. Although I did not know it at the time, I suspect this was after the rape he endured. In isolation, he began to have a mental breakdown. When the guards would try to force him out of the isolation cell, he would spit on them, curse and physically fight them. This behavior would earn him more time in the “hole”. This served his purpose of staying safe. With tickets for such behavior he would have never earned release.
I naively believed in the system and folks that said they were going to help our boy. Within a month of Corey’s arrival at Tallulah I began looking for help. My first stop was a private attorney, who at least had the decency to tell me the truth. It would be 4 months before I came to realize the full extent of what was happening there and how many children it was happening to. By September of 2001, I knew about the fight going on within the state to shut Tallulah down and went to New Orleans to meet with the folks that were pushing for the closure and became involved.
Today, Corey is 20 and sits in the Franklin Parish Detention Center in Winnsboro, Louisiana. He is still as handsome as ever and still loves to read. He reads to his cellmates that can’t read and writes letters for those that can’t. He has four months to do on a three-year sentence for stealing quarters out of a soda machine. This was his third simple burglary charge in two years. He steals to support his addiction to drugs. His addiction began after his release from Tallulah in 2002. In three years of incarceration inside an adult facility, beginning when he was barely 17, he has grown up a lot. He no longer believes he will ever have a childhood or do the things that teenagers do and he has given up on his childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian. Despite all he has witnessed, experienced, and lived through, he still has hope that he can do something good with his life.
Interview by Tamara Wattnem
The coalition’s work ignited a media firestorm before the May 2, 2002 Senate Judiciary hearing. The hearing, originally set up to be an educational session about the prison, quickly became much more than that. “Our legislative champion, Donald Cravins, led the fight before the Judiciary committee,” Utter said. “He turned it into a fight to get the facility de-funded.”
On that day, parents from all over the state were bussed in, and packed the hearing room and the overflow room. Impassioned testimony from parents helped facilitate a legislative field trip to Missouri to examine the much-touted education-based juvenile justice system there—which was not only cheaper to operate, but far more effective at rehabilitation.
When the delegation returned from Missouri, coalition members were shocked to hear one conservative legislator tell the media that Louisiana must “close all of its secure-care facilities” in favor of the Missouri-style model. It was a high point in a campaign that was gaining momentum. The coalition even managed to make the closure a key issue in the governor’s race that year. As Utter recalled, “It became an education campaign in June and July of 2003. We started working with all the gubernatorial candidates to close Tallulah before the date proposed in the Bill.” All of the candidates pledged to do so.
Meanwhile, local residents of Tallulah had been offended by the campaign’s slogan, “Close Tallulah Now!,” believing it reinforced the notion that Tallulah was only a torturous prison, not a community of proud people. Through all of the media frenzy, the image of the Tallulah residents had been painted with the same evil brush as the facility that shared its name. After all, didn’t the cruel guards come from the local population? Wasn’t it the town that allowed the facility to exist at all, and didn’t locals thrive on the well-paying jobs that came at the expense of children’s suffering?
As Tallulah resident Moses Williams told us, “Parents were against Tallulah folks, thinking it was Tallulah folks that treated their kids that way, and we took offense to the way they painted our town. It was just natural animosity.” Grace Bauer thinks back to the long journeys to visit her son in Tallulah, and remembers hating the whole town. “Back then I would cross the Mississippi state line and buy food and gas there rather than patronize their businesses,” she told us. “To me, Tallulah, Louisiana and the Tallulah Correctional Facility for Youth were one and the same.”
Despite the parents’ testimonies and media attention, the hard working advocates, the handful of sympathetic judges and legislators and DOJ charges leveled against the facility, those who lobbied in defense of the prison could always fall back on one familiar refrain—the fragile Tallulah economy needed those jobs. But no one among the anti-prison campaigners had thought to ask residents what they felt about the effort to close the facility, or about the jobs. No one had asked the residents of Tallulah if they wanted a prison in the first place, nor how once the deal was done, construction occurred on the African-American side of town—an echo of Jim Crow.
A booming prison economy including new jobs had been promised, but in the end, the positions required educational degrees or special skills not in large supply in the community. The jobs that did materialize for the locals were mostly low paying. As Moses Williams recalled, “When the prison came, it did provide some jobs, but they weren’t the best. Because it was privately run, there was no thought to who they hired, how they hired. There were no true benefits for the community. The company was just trying to make a profit. They weren’t concerned with juvenile justice. They were just warehousing kids and making money doing it.”
Even after 18 correctional officers walked out in protest of their $6-per-hour pay, leading the state to wrest control of the facility and increase salaries, the staff turnover rate remained at a staggering 84 percent. Pay increased for those that retained their jobs, but state qualifications were also instituted that did not benefit the community. “So the state took over and began changing things. Suddenly workers had to be this and that, have that degree or that certification, and the locals were replaced by more people from the region,” Williams told us. “In addition to job loss, it affected our schools. There was an out-migration of certified teachers from the local school system to the prison. The prison boasted a 97 percent certification rate, bringing our public schools below 50 percent.” An already poor school system began deteriorating rapidly.
Over time it was as if the physical presence of the barbed wire and cement had imprinted on the town itself, weighing heavily on the community like invisible leg irons of shame. Although the parents didn’t know it, the advocates didn’t know it, and the legislators didn’t know it, Tallulah locals wanted something different too. They were also ready to fight for change.
The young FFLIC organizer Xochitl Bervera was instrumental in bridging the locals with the advocates and parents, a step that would prove key to the campaign’s success. Xochitl, now FFLIC’s co-director with Gina Womack, recalled the scene: “Tallulah officials were opposed to the closure idea, so was Senator Jones, on the basis of preserving jobs. We began to reach out to the community to see what our options were.” They were surprised at what they learned.
By the spring of 2003, the existing coalition of parents and advocates discovered that while many residents were initially opposed to the closure based on the jobs issue, others were now ready to talk. Thinking back, Bervera said, “They talked about how the prison was just dropped on their black community, just two blocks from the junior high, and how it had drained the good teachers from the local school with the lure of better pay. They talked about how they felt slandered by the campaign slogan and media, and about how becoming a prison town had resulted in lost businesses. They wanted to make sure that they could have say in what happened next.”
Despite the poverty of the community, the residents knew firsthand that the promises of the prison industrial complex were empty. Like most prison economies, nothing of community value was gained, just the gloomy pall of barbed wire and cinder blocks.
The locals had some better ideas for local economic development. They proposed that an educational facility replace the prison, one that would provide jobs with dignity. The Tallulah residents also suggested using some of the savings from this transformation to fund educational, community-based programs.
No other prison community had ever proposed such a plan. But then again, it’s rare for anyone to ask prison towns how they would deliver change, or to have a community such as Tallulah so ready with an answer. The locals brought a powerful new dimension to the discussion. Their opinions immediately removed from the debate the pro-prison argument that maintaining the facility was about helping the local economy. Residents were rejecting that notion, but beyond just saying “no” they were ready to explain what they wanted.
Meanwhile, the coalition’s many-pronged approach for the 2003 legislative session was developed, and though it was led by the JJPL lawyers, particularly David Utter, everyone had a role to play. Bervera explained what was essentially an “inside-outside” approach this way: “What we learned was that you need to have more than one way to go about it even in a legislative strategy. We had several different bills, so if one died you could move on another.” They also cultivated allies within both political parties and on both the Senate and the House floors, “because although there are times you can control what happens in a hearing, once it reaches the floor, outsiders have no voice, so you need champions there who believe in your cause.”
That was the inside work. Outside of the legislative process, the grassroots were also busy. “We spoke to our own legislators, while others made drops of information packets regularly to key legislators,” Grace Bauer said. “We spoke to media folks and others wrote articles that laid a foundation. In many direct action activities, parents were the key because of our sheer numbers and our ability to tell what was happening to our children from a place that made the public identify with us.” Tallulah residents, although they were not part of the hearings, were beginning to tell the community’s story—that despite living in a poor community, they rejected the prison. That view was something no one expected.
The Tallulah locals formed the Louisiana Delta Coalition for Education and Economic Development and named Moses Williams as president. As Williams said, “We just started having meetings with local officials, community leaders, different folks, just talking things through. We tried to be positive about what we wanted to do. We were frank about where we were as a community and what we needed.” Within a couple of months, the group had encouraged the Tallulah city council, mayors from many surrounding communities, and the local school board to pass resolutions in support of the closure campaign. Most stunningly, they convinced Senator Jones to not only reverse his position on the prison closure, but to sponsor legislation creating the learning center. The residents were on the move to take back their community from the prison they too felt trapped in.
Ultimately, there were seven legislative vehicles devised that could have closed the prison. The bill that did the job was a fairly complex 52-page document. As Bervera explained, “The bill included provisions for creating a culture that moved away from the punitive model toward rehabilitation. It created some bodies to oversee reform, and created a pot of money for community-based programs. It mandated studies, things like that. So it doesn’t just end when the Governor signs the bill.”
The bill passed one year after being introduced. Thanks to the combined efforts of the parents and the local residents in the year that followed its introduction, the bill also set aside 40 percent of the savings from the prison’s conversion to an educational facility. That money would be used for community programs, with input from residents themselves directing its distribution. Even though some tensions still existed on both sides, the Tallulah residents and parent advocates began to work together to formulate a common plan for transforming the prison into something that supported the economy and the values of the community. “We brought a group of these folks together and had a strategy session that gave rise to a pretty comprehensive strategy that everyone felt ownership of,” Bervera said.
That money has gone back into the community to develop alternative juvenile counseling programs in lieu of incarceration. The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 stands unquestionably as the most comprehensive and radical juvenile justice reconstruction in the state’s history.1
On June 4, 2004, with the assistance of the governor’s office, the Tallulah youth prison closed its doors to children—ahead of schedule.
On that day, the coalition members gathered across the street from the gates of the closed juvenile facility to hold a press conference. For the first time, large numbers of parents and residents came together, as Bervera recalled, “to make peace and support one another.” A lot of changes had taken place since the campaign’s beginning, and it had taken an emotional toll on parents and local residents.
• Incarcerated youth are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and eight times as likely to commit suicide while confined.
• Seventy percent of confined youth are rearrested within two years of release. Alternatively, rehabilitation models including counseling, education, group homes, and day reporting centers have far lower re-arrest (recidivism) rates.2
• Only 4 percent of youth arrested in 2003 were arrested for violent crimes. There were 109 times as many juvenile arrests for running away as for homicide.
• Incarceration, particularly for juveniles, is an expensive proposition. Building costs average $100,000 per cell and annual operating costs typically exceed $60,000 per cell. In comparison, more effective community options such as drug treatment or counseling rarely exceed $15,000 and often cost less than $5,000 per year.3
• Black and Latino youth are three times more likely to live in poverty than are whites and statistically receive harsher sentencing for comparable crimes. For violent offenses, whites are incarcerated an average of 200 days, African-Americans an average of 250 days, and Latinos around 300 days. For drug offenses, African-Americans are almost 50 times more likely to be imprisoned.4
• Youth of color are over-represented in the juvenile justice system. They are more likely to be locked up than white youth, even when charged with the same types of offenses. While they represent about one-third of the adolescent population in the country, youth of color make up two-thirds of the juvenile inmate population.
• Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, juveniles included. Approximately 800 of every 100,000 Louisianans are in jail. Even though African-Americans constitute barely one-third of the state’s population, they represent around 78 percent of juveniles behind bars.5
Statistics compiled By Tamara Wattnem
Grace Bauer shook her head in disbelief, recalling, “In 2001, if someone would have told me I had common ground with the community folks in Tallulah, I would not have believed it. Working side by side in this campaign helped me to see the things we shared, and that made all the difference.” Pausing, she added, “For the first time, I came to see the bigger picture and saw how much hurt, loss and devastation this prison had brought to our sons and our communities. Before the trip, I had lots of self-doubt and anger; anger that often served little purpose. After that trip, that anger became resolve, and it continues to serve a purpose today in my work.”
Today, much has changed for youth in the state of Louisiana. Instead of having five facilities holding 2,000 kids behind bars, there are only three facilities and 500 children in detention. The change wrought by the coalition will not stop youth from getting into trouble. But now, those that do will have a second chance at a life after incarceration: a chance that Grace Bauer’s son, Corey, was not given, but one that she has helped create for the next generation. Bauer, who now directs the Lake Charles chapter of FFLIC, told us, “The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 made a tremendous difference in the system. It is not that all is right with the world, but there was a definite attitude shift in leadership toward our children. Children are more likely to receive an education and be given services that make a difference. Children are less likely to be removed from their homes and communities.”
The campaign’s successes have also had an impact on the conditions in the state’s remaining secure care facilities, which in the old days were often comparable to those at TCCY. “Sure, there are still problems, but it’s very different now,” Bervera said. “When I go to the other facilities at Swanson and Angola, kids talk about how the food sucks and school is lame, but not about having their jaws wired shut, not about black eyes.”
Bervera reflected on the campaign’s successes and shortcomings, “The bill certainly had flaws, but it is one of the most impressive wins in criminal justice organizing that this country has seen in years.”
Van Jones, a national civil rights and juvenile justice reform leader, agrees: “This was probably the biggest win that we’ve had. Subsequent events have diminished it somewhat, but this was a truly significant victory.”
Back in Tallulah, the struggle continues. The fight to transform the prison into a community-based project has been undermined, at least temporarily, by the corporate interests profiting from the facility at the state’s expense. As Bervera told us, “Currently, the TCCY site is housing adult DUI offenders, but there is movement toward transferring ownership of the facility to the state.”
With a shake of his head, Moses Williams explained how the complicated corporate ownership and state partnership scheme is to blame for the red tape that seems to have developed into a very expensive venture for taxpayers. “Supposedly, now it’s a substance abuse treatment facility for the Department of Corrections. That is what we’re told: that if the state did not continue to operate some kind of facility there, the property would default to a bond. So while they are still figuring out what the future use of the property should be, the state has spent $13 to 20 million a year to maintain a facility that supposedly has 150 staff for only 200 inmates. Of course, you can’t count 20 people from the community that work there.”
Yet the community remains hopeful—as well as vigilant. “Education and workforce training is the cornerstone of [the governor’s] plan to eradicate poverty. What we’re doing is right in line with that,” Williams said. “We’re hoping [the governor] will stay true to what she has been talking about, what she campaigned on, her promises to convert the facility.”
Given the current staff-to-inmate ratio, the residents’ 2006 feasibility study on converting the prison into a learning center looks to be a winner. Built into the plans is a move toward cleaner, greener jobs with the opportunity to build skills along the way, and the development of a community foundation.
While the media spotlight is no longer on the facility, the community does have help with keeping up the pressure. A national funders’ collaborative of a dozen or so major philanthropic foundations picked up on the issue, and are underwriting work in the community. “They made our project one of only five ‘demonstration sites’ they selected across the country,” Williams said, “The number one strategy of the collaborative is the diversion of this facility to an educational facility.”
Part of the Tallulah plan includes helping victims of Hurricane Katrina. “Out of tragedy arises opportunity,” Williams said. “We have a plan to build modular homes up here, to bring people up from southern Louisiana to do the training. We can build the homes that can be transported to the Gulf, where they have a shortage of construction. We can help them get back in the game, and get some economic benefit and training up here.”
That kind of thinking shows how the Tallulah residents are looking to the next economic wave: green building and creating triple-bottom-line enterprises. Moses Williams explains it this way: “It’s the future. We want to make it a part of our plan to experiment with green building, using more affordable recycled materials, building the modular homes using the latest in energy efficiency. It’s good for the environment, and good for people too.”
The community has also considered their social values as part of the economic package. “We don’t have to make a huge profit,” Williams told us. “We won’t be driven by pure money values. We can keep costs down, and because it is a training program, folks can get skills to take with them to other jobs. Those folks will build the new school, and it is all tied into the success of the learning center.”
Now residents have an opportunity to define what they want for their community. It seems that Tallulah, whose name has meant so many things over the years, may now stand for innovation and community-driven prosperity: a model for others to follow.