State-Sanctioned Child Abuse in the Rotten State of Florida

“The head of Florida's juvenile justice department defended her agency's oversight of private prison contractors before a state Senate panel on Wednesday amid allegations of violence and mistreatment inside the nation's third-largest juvenile corrections system.”

Having tracked this story for months, the self-serving statements, denials, and cover-ups of Wansley Walters, Secretary of Florida’s Division of Juvenile Justice, offends me to the core.  The story begins with one James F. Slattery, the CEO of Youth Services International, a private, profit-driven prison enterprise that has run afoul of authorities in Florida, New York, Maryland, Nevada and Texas.  Here are the facts in a nutshell, Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Record Of Juvenile Abuse and Lax Oversight Enables Systemic Abuse At Private Youth Prisons:

• Over 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have been incarcerated in Slattery’s prisons, boot camps, and detention centers;
• An 18-year old inmate in one of Slattery’s boot camps came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor.  Accused of faking it, the teen was forced to do pushups in his own vomit until he died - after nine days of medical neglect.
• A boy was forced to give oral sex to a male guard on three different occasions.  First reported on March 2010, a Pembroke Pines police officer noted six months later: “This is the third time this victim has alleged sexual abuse.”
• Slattery’s company failed to disclose reports of beatings, broken noses and broken bones, extreme negligence, slapping and choking, unsanitary food (such as maggots in undercooked chicken served bloody and raw), and outright assaults against teen inmates;
• Slattery’s company had the highest rate of sexual assault in Florida and the highest rate in the nation;
• Slattery hires inexperienced and untrained personnel who are paid wages below the poverty level;
• Monitors from the state found that Slattery’s prisons were holding youth past their scheduled release dates in an effort to generate more revenue — a serious violation of Florida law and Slattery’s contract with the state;
• Slattery exploits lax oversight, pulls out of contracts BEFORE the state investigates alleged abuses, and leans on powerful allies within the government to keep contracts and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue flowing;
• Slattery has donated more than $276,000 to the Florida State Republican Party and paid more than $400,000 to state politicians, including Senate President Harry Haridopolos, an avid supporter of private prisons, who received $15,000.

A 2010 lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to one of Slattery’s prisons as a “frightening and violent place” where: “Children are choked and slammed head first into concrete walls, their arms and fingers bent back and twisted to inflict pain for infractions as minor as failing to follow an order to stand up,” the lawsuit states. Slattery settled the lawsuit in 2011; the terms remain confidential.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics rolled up in a package,” said Evan Jenne, a former Florida state representative who toured one of Slattery’s facilities after public defenders raised concerns. “You’re talking about society failing children. It’s politically motivated, and it’s money-motivated.”

Florida has an especially notorious record of incarcerating youth under hellish conditions dating back to the turn of the century.  In the early 1980s, lawyers with the ACLU investigated reports of horrendous conditions and mistreatment inside three “training schools” for juvenile delinquents. One institution on the Florida panhandle, The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, had gained a reputation for extreme brutality: Forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida have identified an estimated 50 unmarked graves on the grounds of the closed facility.

In December 2011, the state closed Dozier, citing budget cuts.  On January 4, 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott issued this reply to the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, stating:

“We respectfully, but firmly disagree with the unsupported suggestion that the issues identified … are systemic throughout the DJJ.  The issues investigated by your office were confined to the closed facility, and do not constitute a sufficient, sound or fair basis for concluding that an entire state agency and its employees are failing to properly administer the juvenile justice system in Florida.

This officious denial from the felonious Governor Rick Scott mirrors the bogus claim of Wansley Walters, who states:  "We are looking at every level of our system to make it a system that will be healthy for the children that we serve," she said.

If these abuses and self-serving denials - past, present, and ongoing - offend you, wait for Part Two of this post:  State-Sanctioned Slave Labor in the Rotten State of Florida.

Kill me once, shame on you

Kill me twice? 

What do you say about a "religious" couple who have so much faith that they let their 2 year old die in 2009 because they thought prayer was making him better and again letting their 8 month old die from diarrhea last week because, you guessed it, the power of prayer was better than Immodium or God forbid, a trip to the pediatrician.

Well, I won't tell you what I'd say, I'll say it. Maybe it's true that Gods don't kill people -- people kill people, but maybe it's also true that faith is dangerous and maybe faith kills and maybe it kills all the more because we worship faith itself and give special status to people who believe in such dangerous superstitions instead of charging them with manslaughter.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible have been teachers in and members of the First Century Gospel Church in Philadelphia, PA where 'faith healing' is promoted.  A church that receives taxpayer support for convincing people to let their children die rather than receive medical attention.  First Century indeed.  In the 21st, it's unacceptable, it's shameful, it's ignorant, it's murder. Yes, I believe in religious freedom, but not in the freedom to inflict dangerous superstitions on other people, particularly minor children.  I fully support the freedom of people like the Schaibles to jump off cliffs to prove that faith will support them as long as no one is forced to hold hands with them in the attempt.

Too bad you can't make people blow into a meter and determine their faith level, but any level that allows children to die to prove their parents' devotion to asking gods for favors rather than doing what can easily save their lives -- is too damn much. 

Oh, and by the way, if this is a "Christian Nation" why aren't we indicting the Federal Government?  Why not the First Century Gospel Church? Why not Jesus as a co-conspirator, an accessory before and after the fact?  If he could have acted and didn't -- if in fact he exists, isn't he guilty too?  

If you're going to give me some crap about 'Heaven' and God's 'mysterious' ways, or God giving us free will,  don't bother to blow into the Faith-O-Meter.  You're already proved how full of it you are

Abused Nation Syndrome: The Abuse of Politics and the Politics of Abuse

Alice Miller (1923–2010), the preeminent and influential Swiss psychologist, devoted her life to spreading this message: The roots of violence are known. No child, she says, is ever born violent. Violence is driven by nurture, not nature. Violence exists because most children on this planet are raised in violence … often beaten, humiliated, and broken in the first years of their lives.

Consider the options available to a battered child. If a child runs away, who will provide food and shelter? Self-defense is no option because fending off an overpowering adult is more likely to result in further mistreatment. How can a child resolve the contradictory experiences of adult as caregiver versus adult as tormenter? A child may try to be perfect, but perfection never works.

In most corners of the world, child abuse is sanctioned - even held in high regard as long as it is defined as child rearing. Thus, abusive practices are allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation often under the cover of righteous piety and administered with this injunction: This is for your own good.

The normal emotional release for anxiety, pain, and resentment is forbidden to battered children, who will suppress their feelings, repress all memory of trauma, even put their abusers on pedestals and idealize them. The life of an abused child turned adult may take many paths. Some may turn their repressed rage against themselves in the form of addictions, anxiety disorders, and depression, even suicide. Others may turn their suppressed rage against their own children ... or against society as criminal offenders.

The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world.

If we write a history of tyrants through the ages - along with their adherents, adulators, and henchman - what should we write about them? Shall we focus on recorded events, on the mass murder of their victims, and their legacy as villains of history? Or might we gain more insight in studying the abuse and violence that shaped their lives?

Joseph Stalin. From historical accounts, Stalin’s father, Vissarion, was a cobbler whose alcoholism led to business failures, domestic violence, and frequent relocations that left his family in poverty and deprivation. A family acquaintance recalls: “Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father.” Thus, the brutal and ruthless dictator remained faithful to his father’s example.

Adolph Hitler. Numerous biographies recall the Führer’s obsession with doubts over his family lineage - the illegitimate birth of his father, Alois Schicklgruber, and the true identity of his paternal grandfather. The presumptive fathers of Alois were two brothers, Johann Hüttler or Johann Georg Hielder. A third possibility was a Jewish family from Graz who employed the maternal grandmother during her pregnancy and paid her support money for 14 years. For Alois, the stigma of being born illegitimate, and part Jewish in a time of rising anti-Semitism, was a source of intolerable shame. Alois projected his self-loathing upon his sons, especially Adolph, in the form of daily beatings that once left the boy unconscious and near death at 11 years old.  Later, Adolph Hitler would write:

I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel (…) They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them.

More to the point, Hitler avenged his father’s shame upon the political stage … culminating in the Final Solution.

In the biographies of dictators, there is a consistent thread of early abuse in the lives of Ceausescu, Franco, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein, as examples.  Furthermore, brutal tyrants have an uncanny ability to mobilize the suppressed rage of followers, presumably abused as children, who become their adherents, adulators, and henchman.

It should come as no surprise that brutal tyrants and serial killers share common traits. Neurologist Jonathan Pincus interviewed violent criminals on Death Row to study the long-term consequences of severe childhood mistreatment. His findings:

• Every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and emotional abuse by at least one parent or caregiver;
• Each homicide reflected the same kind of brutality that the murderer had endured in childhood;
• Those who experienced extreme cruelty as children directed their anger at others as a form of retaliation;
• None of the convicts incriminated their abusers, even when consciously aware of the abuse;
• The pathologies of convicted murders were similar to the pathologies of their abusers;
• The biography of each and every convict represents a feedback loop of terror directed back at society.

The research of Jonathan Pincus shows that aggressive impulses accumulated in childhood play a role in causing developmental brain damage, usually as a consequence of long-term brutal mistreatment.

Is it possible for a nation, a society, and a culture to follow a similar path?  When demagogues and hacks strut their hypocrisy, hysteria and lies upon a national stage, why shouldn’t we regard these as analogous to abuse?  When citizens brandish guns, or imply Second Amendment remedies as an alternative to civil discourse, why shouldn’t we assume their purpose to bully, stifle debate, and suppress the rights of others? Does the impulse to win by any means and win at all cost remind you of the tactics of tyrants? Are these the signs and symptoms of Abused Nation Syndrome?

Assassinations, Arson, and Bomb Attacks,

Slaughter in a Unitarian Church,

Three Police Officers Killed in Precinct Attack,

Holocaust Museum Guard Shot and Killed,

Hispanic Family Murdered by White Supremacists,

If Ballots Don't Work, Bullets Will,

Don't Retreat, Reload.
(chilling - have a listen.)

Tucson Shooting Rampage - An Act of Political Terrorism

Lethal Bomb at MLK Parade in Spokane

An Interactive Map of Terrorism Since 2008

Is this the kind of society in which we want to raise our children - and the legacy we want to leave for future generations?

Open for comments …

Lady Blah-Blah

Contrived extrapolations from the trivial and inconsequential event to gross generalizations, sweeping condemnations and general non sequitur makes up so much of the right wing blather that I'm tempted to say that blissful silence would ensue if it were to stop, and inclined to pray for it.

What kind of "journalist" would pounce upon small children for giving away lemonade because they didn't truly understand the concept of profit? Lady Blah-Blah herself, Terry Savage, of course. Jumping from her car, she writes, she admonished them for not being capitalists and likely scared hell out of them. Of course that only constitutes being rude, self important and nasty and the verbal abuse of children. Yes, that's a prerequisite for being a Republican pundit, but what elevates her to the ranks of the truly despicable, is her blowhardian expose in the Chicago Sun-Times in which she rants about welfare, government subsidies for things other than oil drilling and the decline of America. She tilts at all the usual windmills with all the same old cliche arguments having nothing to do with the innocence of Kindergarteners and the righteousness of profits and all at the expense of some cute little kids who have yet to learn just how nasty, pompous, self-righteous, dishonest, stupid and bad at their jobs Right wing columnists can be.

"If we can't teach our kids the basics of running a lemonade stand, how can we ever teach Congress the basics of economics?"

The government does not exist to make a profit, and if, as you say, unemployment benefits will only impoverish the employed, you owe us an explanation of why your version of capitalism has done exactly that, why no new private sector jobs were created by it in 8 years and why each Republican administration has brought us ever increasing expense and debt and ever decreasing standards of living. Never mind tiny tots and lemonade -- explain that.

Sorry, Terry, perhaps some of the 6 quarts of botox you pump into your aging face every morning has leaked into the parts of your brain concerned with basic human decency and has totally paralyzed any notions of honesty. Yes, Terry, we can teach our children about economics - they're already learning thanks to your having driven us over a cliff. No Terry, these are just babies, and sorry, we all know what a profit is and no we're not having a recession because we try to help struggling Americans and keep them from the Dickensian hell you dream about every night.

We're suffering high unemployment because of your insistence that Giving the very rich a tax break will create new jobs, raise government revenues, reduce the tax burden on the middle and working classes; because of your insistence that businesses will resist cheating and corruption and fraudulent activities if we no longer test their claims, audit their books and make fraud itself legal. We're suffering not because some kid you made cry hasn't been reading Ayn Rand, but because you're still reading it while each and every one of your and her bogus axioms has been proven false over and over and over again. At least the girls you're exploiting are giving away real lemonade instead of the toxic and even lethal witches brew you're giving away.

"The Declaration of Independence promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It didn't promise anything free. Something to think about this July 4th holiday weekend."

Stop me if I'm wrong, but it didn't say anything about subsidizing Oil Drilling or looking the other way while our resources are stolen; while we're sold fraudulent securities by fraudulent corporations, while the government starts wars for profit and gives away billions to friends of the Vice President either. It didn't promise corporate feudalism and it didn't suggest a Randian denial of responsibility or a great many other things you're trying to work into the discussion of a lemonade stand. If that's the best you can do, perhaps it's time to shut the hell up and send the RNC their check back.

A decent human being -- and by that I mean someone other than you -- would simply have given the girls a dollar and told them they would earn some money to replace their stolen bicycle by charging, but no, not you. You made it into a baseless condemnation, a sales pitch for calamity and a caustic attack on the innocence of childhood. You found it more important to bear false witness against your country than to protect the feelings of small children who will doubtless remember the nasty witch screaming NO! from her car for the rest of their lives.

If people like you can call our President Pol Pot and Hitler in the same breath simply for talking to them about making the future a better one, I can certainly call you worse for trying to perpetuate the same twisted economic madness that's brought us to our knees as it did in 1929 and screaming it at our kids. I can call you all kinds of things with a clear conscience but none can be so damning as the name you've made for yourself.