SacBee.com
Rights group sues youth hall
Suit claims abuse and neglect, asks
for reforms
By Hudson Sangree -- Bee Staff
Writer
Published 12:01 am PDT Tuesday, August 29, 2006
 A
lawsuit filed Monday by a prisoners rights group claims that
Sacramento County juvenile hall is filthy and overcrowded and that
its staff members routinely douse teens with pepper spray and grind
their faces into the floor.
The San Quentin-based Prison Law
Office filed the suit in Sacramento Superior Court. It is asking a
judge to put a stop to the practices and order reforms, including
improvements in food and education.
The county Probation Department,
which runs the hall, referred the case to the county's lawyers and
would not discuss its specifics or address the allegations, said
Assistant Chief Probation Officer Suzanne Collins, the department's
spokeswoman.
She said only that the county would
fight the claims. "We will be defending the suit," she said.
The Prison Law Office has had success
in recent years suing the state's youth and adult prison systems to
bring about changes through the court system.
Its lawyers have turned their
attention to county juvenile halls, where they say physical abuse
and neglect are widespread and reforms are badly needed.
In April, Prison Law Office attorneys
sued the state agency that oversees county juvenile halls. They next
sued San Joaquin County's juvenile hall. Sacramento's juvenile hall
was next on its list.
Lawyer Sara Norman filed the suit on
behalf of taxpayers and said she wants them to know their money is
being misdirected.
"Their taxpayer dollars are not being
spent to help kids," she said.
In addition to crowded and unsanitary
conditions, staff members regularly use pepper spray without
sufficient cause, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit claims that guards
routinely engage in a practice called "dipping," which Norman called
a sadistic version of a common control measure.
According to the suit, the guards
take hold of the teens, twist their arms behind their backs, push
them to the ground and rub their faces into the floor or slam their
heads against the hard surface.
Sacramento County is expanding its
juvenile hall because of overcrowding. Spokeswoman Collins said the
population at juvenile hall was reduced to below-capacity levels in
July.
She also pointed out that the
county's $93 million renovation, now in progress, will add a new
90-bed wing to the hall and remodel its older wing, built 43 years
ago.
Norman argued, however, that the new
spaces would go only so far to alleviate the overcrowding and would
do nothing to curb the allegedly abusive practices by hall staff
members.
"It's not about whether the building
is new or old," she said. "It's how people act within the facility.
Unless they're cleaning up their act, it's not going to make a
difference."
Norman said many of the problems at
juvenile hall are exemplified by the experience of Candace Waters,
one of two named plaintiffs in the suit.
Waters said her 16-year-old son,
Orlindo Myles, has been a ward at the juvenile hall for the past
year while awaiting trial on criminal charges.
Waters' son is being identified by
The Bee because he is being prosecuted as an adult on five felony
charges, including burglary, robbery and rape.
The boy is developmentally delayed
and suffers from a variety of physical and emotional problems,
including epilepsy and a bipolar disorder, his mother said.
Yet staff at the juvenile hall have
refused to discuss his condition with his mother, even after he
tried to commit suicide, Waters alleged.
The boy had been in the hall for a
few months, when Waters made one of her regular visits to her son.
He told her he had tried to hang
himself with a bedsheet. It was the first she'd heard of it.
"He said, 'Mommy, I tried to kill
myself,' " she said. "No one told me."
A staff member Waters spoke with
later on the phone told her she hadn't been informed because her son
had not been successful in hanging himself and it had not seemed
important, she said Monday.
She said her son told her he was
"dipped" one time by a female guard, who slammed his head into the
ground.
Norman said she would like to see the
county bring in outside experts to train staff.
The Prison Law Office has been
negotiating a series of reform proposals with the California Youth
Authority, the state's youth prison system, after waging a
successful legal challenge to abuse and neglect of teens there.
Teams of outside experts were called
in to reduce violence and improve rehabilitation efforts. The same
plans could be applied to county juvenile halls such as
Sacramento's, she said.
"Take those plans and use them," she
said. "It's easy."
This is not the first time the
county's juvenile hall has been sued. In July, Sacramento County
agreed to pay $6.28 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over
strip searches of teens at juvenile hall.
Sacramento lawyer Mark Merin, who
filed that suit, said the Prison Law Office's case was a broad legal
challenge that would depend largely on what they are able to find
out as the litigation progresses.
"It's going to have to come down to
depositions where persons abused describe what happened to them," he
said. "They're going to have to show that the problems are pervasive
or policy . I'm sure there's going to be a fight against everyone of
the allegations."
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