In a town the size of Canton, South Dakota, population 3,195,
plenty of people knew that 14-year-old Gina Score liked to steal
things.
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Gina Score was 14 when she died at a military-style
boot camp for girls in South Dakota
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She stole Press-N-Go fingernails worth $2.99 from the ShopKo
in Sioux Falls, stole four Beanie Babies from Brower's Gifts and
Collectibles in Canton, stole $60 from a sleepover girlfriend,
even stole candles from her Lutheran church. Outwardly, Gina
didn't seem troubled--she babysat for neighbors, wrote cute
poems, and smiled radiantly for pictures. But she confided to
social workers what they surely guessed: Kids can be cruel to
eighth grade girls who weigh 224 pounds. Sometimes Gina cried
herself to sleep.
Supported by her parents, Gina endured years of programs and
punishments intended to change her behavior: community service,
individual and family counseling, group care, house arrest,
fines, restitution, probation, juvenile detention. Nothing
really worked. Finally, in June of last year, after yet another
parole violation, a judge placed Gina in state custody until age
21 and sent her to a military-style boot camp for teenage girls
located at the State Training School in Plankinton.
Like boot camps in two dozen other states, the Plankinton
boot camp and a counterpart for boys in the town of Custer were
set up to treat children like military recruits. Kids were
forced to rise before dawn, perform rigorous exercises, and
march like soldiers. Phone calls and visits from parents were
prohibited for the first month, and the slightest rules
violations were met with swift punishment. As in many other
states, the South Dakota boot camps were part of a political
campaign by a tough-on-crime governor; Bill Janklow, a popular
Republican and ex-Marine now in his fourth term, promoted them
as a commonsense solution to juvenile crime. Despite widespread
abuses at boot camps from Florida to California, many
politicians and frustrated parents have found salvation in the
camps' simple goal: to reduce troubled teenagers to their
emotional core, back to frightened children, so that their minds
will open long enough to imagine a life without drugs, crime and
self-hatred. As a boot camp warden from Texas explains, "We want
to turn their lives upside down."
Five days after Gina Score arrived in Plankinton, she and 15
other girls from Cottage B began a mandatory 2.6-mile jog at
about 6:30 a.m. on the gravel roads outside Plankinton's
razorwire fences. What happened that morning is detailed in
medical reports and eyewitness accounts by inmates and staff
members at the boot camp. The girls trotted past sprawling farms
of corn and soybeans and a small community cemetery; but it's
doubtful that Gina appreciated the pastoral scenery. She must
have been panicked. Gina was severely overweight and "hated to
run," as her mother later recalled. The temperature and humidity
were both around 70 and climbing.
Within a block or two, Gina started lagging behind. As the
girls reached each corner of the rectangular route, where they
were allowed to rest briefly and drink water, they waited for
Gina to catch up. Two youth counselors repeatedly shouted for
Gina to keep moving, sometimes interlocking their arms with hers
just to keep her going forward down the dusty roads. At roughly
7:45, after the other girls had reached the front gates, Gina
staggered and collapsed 500 feet from the finish. Several girls
tried to help her up, but staff members, believing one inmate
who said Gina had acted this way before at a halfway house, were
convinced they had a "behavior problem."
"Quit faking!" several girls recall a supervisor shouting.
"You're embarrassing us." Everyone knew the boot camp credo:
Quitting Is Not an Option. When four girls encircled Gina to
giver her shade, counselors ordered them to back away.
A staff nurse who checked on Gina at 8:05 said her vital
signs were normal and that she was simply hyperventilating. An
hour later, Gina struggled to her feet and began slowly walking
back to her cottage. A few hundred feet later, within sight of
her air-conditioned cottage, she collapsed again. Her eyes were
dilated, her skin pale, her lips purple. She urinated on herself
and began frothing at the mouth. Her eyes rolled back in her
head. Even when a farmer's manure truck rumbled down the road
beside her, Gina didn't budge. The staff still thought she was
faking; several girls recall them laughing and telling jokes as
Gina lay on the ground. The camp's director came out to assess
the situation, but he told the staff to "wait out" Gina, so no
one called for an ambulance.
"I was crying," says Chris Battis, a former inmate. "All the
girls were crying....How could she be faking it when she was
pale blue and wasn't even brushing the flies off her?"
Finally, at 10:47, three hours after Gina collapsed, two
physicians happened by and ordered that an ambulance be called.
Six minutes later, paramedics were giving Gina oxygen, but on
the way to the hospital, her heart stopped. In the emergency
room, they sent chilled IV fluids through Gina's rigid body and
packed her in ice, but a rectal thermometer peaked at 108--the
highest it would go. Internally, she had literally begun to
cook.
With her organs shutting down, repeated attempts to restart
her heart were futile. At 12:37 pm, Gina was declared dead. "It
was," said emergency room physician Jerome Howe, "the worst case
of heatstroke I've ever seen."
Gina Score's death shocked the sensibilities of South
Dakotans, who trusted state-run boot camps to protect and
educate troubled children as well as to straighten them out. But
for those familiar with the juvenile justice system nationwide,
the scandal was simply the latest outrage in a decade-long tale
of abuse at boot camps. There are currently and estimated 4,000
kids in approximately 50 military-style camps nationwide. At
least half a dozen children have died in detention, and numerous
state and federal investigations have concluded that hundreds of
others have been subjected to physical and emotional abuse.
Juvenile boot camps got their start in the mid-1980s, when
officials in Louisiana and Georgia experimented with putting
teenage boys in military-style settings. At first the camps
housed young burglars, drug abusers, and auto thieves, but
before long they were filled with a surprising number of truants
and petty shoplifters, like Gina Score. The burr-headed
ex-military men who usually ran the camps may have rubbed
liberals the wrong way, but at first glance, they hardly seemed
like sadists. Like many voters who supported boot camps, they
genuinely believed that for kids immune to other forms of
correction, nothing short of a radical departure from their
lives would get their attention. "Nobody can tell me from some
ivory tower that you take a kid, kick him in the rear end, and
it doesn't do any good," declared then-Governor Zell Miller of
Georgia, and ex-Marine and early proponent of boot camps.
Politicians eager to appear tough on crime could soon point to
images on the local TV news of previously smart-mouthed
teenagers marching crisply, doing push-ups, and shouting, "Sir,
yes sir!"
Yet in state after state, public officials have ignored
persuasive evidence that most boot camps don't work. A growing
body of research, from private studies to federal
investigations, has shown the camps rarely reduce recidivism or
save the fortunes their promoters promise, and often permit
horrific abuses of kids by underpaid and undertrained staff.
A study by the Koch Crime Institute in Kansas found that "the
fear of being incarcerated at a boot camp has not deterred
crime," noting that nearly three out of every four children who
pass through the camps are back in detention within a year. The
National Mental Health Association concluded that "employing
tactics of intimidation and humiliation is counterproductive for
most youth" and has led to "disturbing incidents" of abuse. In
Georgia, U.S. Justice Department investigators found kids being
forced to crawl on their hands and knees to lunch, clean floors
with their T-shirts, and run in summer heat while carrying
tires. "The paramilitary boot camp model is not only
ineffective, but harmful," the investigation concluded.
Abuses have been both far-reaching and extreme. At the
Arizona Boys Ranch, a military-style boot camp that enjoyed wide
political support, the staff made an incontinent 16-year-old
boy, Nicholaus Contreraz, sleep in soiled underwear, eat meals
on the toilet, and carry a yellow trash basket filled with his
own vomit. On March 2, 1998, Contreraz collapsed repeatedly
during strenuous physical training, prompting one staff member
to say he deserved an Academy Award for faking. He died that
evening from a massive, undiagnosed infection. According to the
Los Angeles Times, the Boys Ranch had sparked nearly 100
complaints of child abuse in the previous five years, including
reports that staff members hit one boy in the head with a shovel
and burned another with hot water so severely that he needed
skin grafts.
In Maryland, where Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
championed military-style boot camps for kids, a yearlong
investigation by the Baltimore Sun revealed how guards at the
Savage Leadership Challenge routinely kicked, punched, and
brutalized teenage criminals. When new inmates arrived at the
camp, guards dressed in military fatigues would yank the
shackled teenagers off the prison van and drive their faces into
the dirt with a forearm to their backs if they so much as wiped
a tear.
The harsh punishment in boot camps has often outweighed the
crime. Many states have placed not only gang members or others
guilty of violent crimes in their facilities, but also those
known as "status offenders"-runaways, truants, and curfew
violators. In the social service jargon of South Dakota, such
kids are called CHINS, children in need of supervision.
"Incarcerating CHINS goes against every moral, ethical
expectation about what is right for children," says Dr. Susan
Randall of the South Dakota Coalition for Children.
News reports and lawsuits have prompted several waves of
reform. Camps have been closed or their methods drastically
altered in Louisiana, Georgia, Arizona, Maryland, North Dakota,
Colorado, Oregon and Utah. Dozens of guards and corrections
officials have been fired or prosecuted. All but a handful of
states have stopped locking up status offenders. And some camps
now place greater emphasis on drug and alcohol treatment,
intensive counseling, basic education and training in life
skills.
But many facilities continue to rely on the kind of abusive,
veins-buldging, in-your- face humiliation that their political
sponsors apparently believe is still the norm at real boot camps
run by the U.S. Armed Forces. The military realized some years
ago, however, that explosive anger and unfair, degrading
punishment develop neither esprit de corps nor mature soldiers.
Yet child advocates who suggest that shouting and bullying might
not work well on abused and troubled kids have been all but
drowned out by the boot camp industry's tough-love mantra: We
must break kids down to build them back up.
"I've heard that one before," says Paul DeMuro, a corrections
expert in New Jersey who has been appointed by courts to
evaluate juvenile institutions in more than 20 states. "It might
work if they're middle-class kids free of deep psychological
problems. But with kids who have been abused and neglected,
educationally deprived, subjected to summary punishment-it's a
disaster waiting to happen."
As a teenager, Bill Janklow would have been a likely
candidate for a boot camp. Growing up in a small South Dakota
town in the 1950's, he once fired shots at the town water tower,
he says, "just to hear the bong." He often skipped school, and
made enough of a nuisance of himself that a judge advised him to
enter the Marines at age 16. Janklow credits the Corps with
straightening out his life--but his troubles weren't over. As a
legal-aid lawyer on a South Dakota Indian reservation, he was
charged with assaulting a 15-year-old girl with the intent to
rape. Janklow denied the accusation, and the prosecution was
eventually dropped, but a tribal court barred him from
practicing law on the reservation. (Years later, when author
Peter Matthiessen detailed Janklow's time on the reservation in
his book "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse", Janklow sued, keeping
the book out of print for years.) The assault allegation didn't
hurt Janklow's political career, however. In 1978, after serving
as state attorney general, he was elected governor.
Janklow inherited a state with a reputation for progressive
juvenile facilities; for years, other states sent juvenile
justice officials to study South Dakota's vocational,
wilderness, and job-skills programs for kids. But during his
third term, Janklow became determined to set up boot camps that
harkened back to his days in the military. He demonized juvenile
criminals, calling some of them "scum" and speaking of kids and
their families in dismissive tones.
"Most of them come from a lousy home," the governor told
Mother Jones. "No discipline, no respect for others or
themselves, huge problems in school, can't read or write." In
1996, the state opened its first boot camp, a facility for boys
in the western town of Custer. The Plankinton facility for girls
followed in 1998.
Janklow was undeterred by the dismal track record of boot
camps in other states. "Everybody in America debates whether or
not they work," he declared. "We in South Dakota have always
been able to make things work."
But from the beginning, serious mistakes plagued the
facilities. Janklow hired a former Marine drill instructor and
lumber salesman to run the boot camps, and a loyal Republican
county prosecutor to head the state Department of Corrections.
Neither man had any experience running prisons or working with
juvenile prisoners. In turn, the two hired staff with little or
no background in social work, paid them little more than $7 an
hour, and called them "counselors." Contrary to virtually all
recommendations by child-advocacy groups, South Dakota placed
CHINS and other status offenders in the camps, including many
children who were emotionally disturbed or sexually abused.
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Don Jones, former Plankinton counselor, says
counselors who oppose harsh discipline at South Dakota
Boot Camps were fired. Staff members screamed at girls.
"I saw one induction, and that was enough" says Jones.
"I thought it was barbaric."
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At Plankinton and the boot camp for boys in Custer, drill
instructors used a manual that spelled out their goal for the
first-day induction: "overwhelming the students with stress and
anxiety." A videotape of the induction process shows five cowed
teenage girls standing at attention in the Plankinton gym, just
as Gina Score did, as staff members scream within inches of
their faces. "I saw one induction, and that was enough," says
Don Jones, a former group counselor at Plankinton. "I thought it
was barbaric."
But it wasn't until Gina Score died that the public started
to pay attention to abuses at the boot camps. State Rep. Pat
Haley, a former Democratic chairman of the State Corrections
Commission and once a prison guard himself in Minnesota, began
receiving anonymous calls about boys being molested at the
Custer facility. "I was always very careful about these
allegations," says Haley. "It's an easy issue to politicize. But
when I started checking into things, I couldn't believe what was
going on."
What Haley learned, now confirmed by children, staff and
videotapes, is that kids in the boot camps who were considered
discipline problems were shackled by their wrists and ankles to
beds or concrete floors-a restraint called "four-pointing"-
sometimes for 24 hours a day. Male guards often took part in
cutting off the clothes of girls who were four-pointed,
ostensibly to prevent suicide. Male guards also patrolled the
showers, a particularly traumatizing practice for the 75 percent
of Plankinton girls who reported to counselors that they had
been sexually abused as children. Some kids were pepper-sprayed
naked in their cells and denied medication. Children considered
violent were kept in total isolation, more than 23 hours a day
in small cells, for as long as two weeks.
Kids responded by rioting, slashing themselves with shanks
and broken lightbulbs, and trying repeatedly to commit suicide.
"Because of the incredibly punitive culture, kids and staff were
at war with each other," says Marc Schindlere, an attorney with
the Youth Law Center in Washington, D.C. "They pushed and pushed
the kids until all they wanted to do was resist."
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State Rep. Pat Haley "couldn't believe" the abuses.
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South Dakota has instituted some better-late-than-never
reforms in the wake of the scandal: Janklow closed the
Plankinton boot camp in June, citing "management problems" and
the state has placed stricter guidelines on punishment
throughout the system. But the Custer boot camp remains open,
and the governor praises it as a "model facility."
Earlier this year, the Youth Law Center filed a class-action
suit against the state on behalf of several children. "We've
filed lawsuits against juvenile facilities in 19 states over the
last 20 years, but some of the practices and policies in South
Dakota are the worst we've ever seen," says Schindler. "We've
never seen girls four-pointed spread-eagle on their backs and
their clothes cut off. And the isolation cells- that's as bad as
anything we've ever seen. It's unconscionable."
The snarling crackle of a Harley's warm exhaust pipes fills
the parking lot of the First Congregational Church in downtown
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on a warm July evening. A mammoth man
with a reddish-blond beard, sunglasses, and "Bad to the Bone"
T-shirt steps off the bike.
"Where's Margaret?" he asks.
Rick Anfinson, the biker, is here with Vicki, a petite soccer
mom; Ralph, an auto-body repairman; Bill, an 81-year-old
consumer activist; and Edith, a grandmother. They are all
waiting for Margaret Gramkow, an energetic, ruddy-cheeked mother
who last year started the Parents Who Care Coalition, a group of
130 parents whose children have spent time in the state's
juvenile facilities. As the meeting begins, their stories pour
out.
Rick's son Henry, a 16-year-old who was incarcerated at the
Custer boot camp, says guards shackled him to a board upside
down in nothing but his underwear for refusing to do push-ups.
Vicki's 16-year-old son used to sneak out his window of their
home at night. "Once he was gone 10, 11 days," she recalls. "He
had taken our car out of state. We called the police, but the
minute you tell them your child is missing, your child is
designated as a CHINS." The boy was sent to the boot camp for
four months and placed in state custody until he turns 21. "My
husband and I did what we thought was right," Vicki says. "I
regret the day I called anyone at the state. I tell everyone
now, 'Don't ever call."
Ralph's son, Jeff Kitchen, is a strong, stocky 18-year-old
who used to wrestle on school teams and play Little League
baseball. Ralph says Jeff has been on medication since he was
seven for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that he
committed several petty crimes, including vandalizing some
school band equipment. After spending a month at a psychiatric
treatment center, Jeff was sent to the boot camp in Custer.
"I just about shit in my pants," Jeff recalls of his
induciton day. "There's no way to describe how I felt." Jeff was
given the standard burr haircut and issued khaki pants and
shirt, socks, T-shirt, boots, and sneakers. He admits that when
guards got rough with him he clawed, punched and kicked them.
"Once, the drill instructor took away my journal that we were
supposed to write our thoughts in and read it to the platoon,"
Jeff says. "He made fun of me. I told him to go to hell."
The teenagers became tight allies. "No one went anywhere
alone, because the guards would beat you," Jeff says. "They'd
pepper-spray you for cussing."
After Jeff was moved to a facility for boys at Plankinton, he
says, he experienced some of the same abuses that took place at
the boot camp. He was four-pointed for entire days and was
locked away in solitary confinement on at least five occasions
for more than a week at a time. "The cell was about 5 by 10 feet
with a concrete bed, no mattress," he adds. "The only thing you
got was a small blanket and your underwear, and you only came
out for two cold showers. Now books. No exercise. No school."
Jeff says he was so despondent, he once attempted suicide by
taping a bread wrapper over his face. After nearly two years he
was transferred to the state hospital, where he finally received
the psychiatric care he needed. He was placed on medication, his
father says, and quickly became "a model patient."
I wondered how a kid who needed psychiatric counseling and
medication survived being locked away for all but minutes of the
day. "Did you at least have a window in your cell?" I asked
Jeff.
"Yeah," he said. "But it was against the rules to look
outside."
Staff members who have disagreed with the culture of
punishment in Governor Janklow's boot camps say they soon found
themselves ostracized by supervisors. Don Jones, who worked at
the juvenile facilities at Plankinton for 17 years, says a dozen
teachers and counselors were fired earlier this year and that
most, like Jones himself, have found it impossible to get
another job in the state system. "We're blackballed," he says.
As the crisis in South Dakota's juvenile detention system
unfolded, Janklow took the offensive. He denied reporters, state
legislators, and federal investigators entrance to the boot
camps. He retaliated against an outspoken mother of an
incarcerated kid by releasing unfavorable information from the
child's juvenile record to a TV reporter. To underscore why he
called imprisoned kids "scum," Janklow used an official state
government Web site to post daily incident reports that prison
staff filed against violent and disruptive kids. But the
detailed descriptions of assaults against guards, suicide and
escape attempts, fighting, and vandalism had the unintended
effect of confirming what Janklow's critics had been saying all
along-that his failed policy of punishment over rehabilitation
was making kids more violent. "The culture of violence in South
Dakota's juvenile facilities was not created by the kids," Says
Rep. Haley, "but by Bill Janklow."
Ted Klaudt, a Republican legislator, managed to get into the
Plankinton boot camp and talk to girls about the abuses
firsthand by showing up unannounced. Janklow responded a few
days later at 10 p.m. by calling the staff member who allowed
Klaudt in and threatening to personally fire him if he did it
again. Then about 15 minutes later the governor rang up the
girls' cottage at Plankinton and ordered staff to awaken two
children who had spoken with Klaudt so he could question them.
He talked to them without their lawyers or parents present, even
though he knew they would likely be witnesses in civil and
criminal cases.
"He would ask a girl if she was four-pointed." says Klaudt,
who listened in on the phone conversations through a three-way
connection. "He must have had their files in front of him
because he would say something like, 'Did you throw that soap at
the guard? Don't you think you should be punished?' Can you
imagine being a 15-year-old girl and this voice says on the
phone, 'This is Bill Janklow'? I think he sort of intimidated
them. I thought it was very unethical."
Janklow defends his late-night questioning, saying, "I'm
hands-on. I want to know what the facts are." When I suggested
that some might interpret his calls as witness tampering, he
responded angrily. "I would do it again this minute," the
governor told me. "How would they be intimidated? I was on their
side."
The governor's call to imprisoned girls is one of many issues
being examined by the U.S. Justice Department, which has opened
both civil and criminal investigations into the treatment of
youths in South Dakota's juvenile detention system. "They're
looking all the way up the ladder," says a source familiar with
the federal investigation. "All the way to the top." Two female
guards who were present during Gina Score's forced run have been
charged with four counts of felony child abuse, involving Gina
and other girls. The guards have pleaded not guilty.
It would be comforting to think that the exposure of
systemic, state-sanctioned abuse in South Dakota boot camps
might prevent the harsh mistreatment of children at other
facilities across the country. Yet for the past decade, despite
the repeated failure of boot camps, state officials like Bill
Janklow and their political supporters have clung to the
misguided idea that foundering kids can be reclaimed with little
more than relentless discipline. And as state after state has
made the same errors in treating troubled kids, the most basic
of lessons has been lost. "The common denominator in all these
situations is the objectification of kids," says DeMuro, the New
Jersey corrections expert. "It gets almost spiritual, but the
ability to punish humanely has at its core the notion that this
person is me, and I am them."
http://www.nospank.net/gina.htm
