Three prison officers are rubbing their hands, elated at what they’re about to see.
They have a book in front of them, an informal betting odds ledger that has your name in it.
What you don’t know is in that book you’ve been pitted against another young guy in a fight. The
officers have made sure you’re going to meet in an area of the prison where there are no cameras.
They’ve also managed to start a rumor that you’ve bad-mouthed this guy they want you to fight.
Unbeknownst to you, when you walk out of your cell this day, it won’t be long
until you are set upon by a young man that let’s say has an outstanding and frightening history
of violence. Let’s be honest, you don’t stand a chance, and that’s why the other guy is a 10-1
favorite to smash you to pieces. Welcome to gladiator school.
We guess some of you are thinking, c’mon Infographics Show, nothing like that goes on
in Juvenile Prison, aka, juvey. No way would officers stoop that low. They have ethics;
they want nothing more than to see young men rehabilitated. Surely we’ve come a
long way since the ancients watched with glee as their prisoners tried to kill each other.
We regret to inform you that we aren’t telling tall tales here; what we just described is not
sensationalized, and in fact, as you’ll find out during this show, much worse has happened.
But let’s stay with informal betting for now. Where in this wonderful
world would prison officers entertain themselves by watching young men fight,
and in some cases, almost kill each other? Ok, so let’s start with Palm Beach Juvenile
Correctional Facility and recent reports that made the place sound like something
from an 18th century workhouse in the darkest depths of industrial England.
The fighting here was one thing, according to former inmates who
came out and talked about the place, but the conditions of the prison were another.
In 2017, the Miami Herald reported that teens were walking around in filthy clothes
that were almost dropping off them. Those kids didn’t even receive enough toothpaste
or soap to keep themselves clean. There were maggots in their food, the toilets overflowed,
and the walls of the building were crumbling. If those kids complained, they might
find themselves being choked out or punched in the face by the officers
that were supposed to be protecting them. Worse than that, as one parent of an inmate
attested, were the fights her child had to endure. Notice we say “had”, because her child didn’t have
much choice. That wasn’t because backing down would be seen as weak and open the kid up to
bullying, but because the officers arranged the fights. They forced the kids to fight.
For the officers enjoyment, the teens put on what were a kind of gladiatorial games. The loser,
like that parent’s child, would suffer. In his case a broken nose and a broken eye socket were
the injuries of gladiatorial fighting. The officers would pick out a so-called gladiator
and they’d tell him who he had to fight. The officers then sat back and made bets.
This led to a long investigation, and the report from that investigation would reveal
that this particular lock-up was hell on Earth. We’ll give you an example
of official depravity that was in the report. A video shows a kid meddling with a surveillance
camera so it won’t record what is about to happen in a room. There are five kids
in the room, but what they don’t know is that there’s another camera watching them.
They are the predators, waiting for their prey. In walks another young man, holding a tray filled
with cookies, which you might think was a kind gesture. At the moment that guy walks in the room,
all the lights go out and he is pummeled in the head and chest by the other five boys. The
light comes back on and you can see the bloodied kid on the floor, along with scattered cookies.
What’s the twist to this story? The answer is that it was a member
of staff that had set the whole thing up and was controlling the lights. One of the perpetrators
of this beating later testified that the officer had said to him, “You all need to beat his ass.”
So, that’s one reason why getting through Juvenile Prison can be very difficult.
If you end up at the wrong place, it’s not only the other inmates that you have to fear,
it’s the guards, too. At that prison some kids said that guards had turned the place into a
boxing ring for their own enjoyment. One of those kids wrote in a letter, “I’m starting to
feel unprotected. And I feel that I am going to get seriously hurt if this continues.”
Does this only happen in the USA? The answer is a resounding NO.
If you’re partial to watching prison podcasts you might know that it happens in the UK, and it’s no
better than we have just described to you. One such former prisoner by the name of
Pepsi Watson has been very vocal about his life in juvenile prisons.
He knows what he’s talking about because from the age of 14 on that’s where he mostly lived.
He said that at one particular facility the alarm bell went off on average eight times a day,
but worse was the fact that when he was 15 years old and he’d just arrived there,
the other boys stood outside his cell saying when he came out you’re going to get
your stuff taken and receive a beating. What does a person do in this situation?
As you might know, if you don’t fight back in prison then you make yourself
vulnerable to even more violence, so even if you think you’re not much of a fighter,
the advice ex-cons usually give is just hit back. Take your beating, but make an effort at least.
What ex-cons also say is keep your head down, don’t act tough, don’t ask silly questions,
and basically try and keep out of trouble. That’s when they’re talking about adult prison.
Things are different there, for various reasons we will explain later. Keeping out of trouble in
a juvenile prison is next to impossible. Back to Mr. Watson; he explained that
he told the bullies he’d take their challenge and meet them in the showers
where there was a “blind spot” from the cameras. He never had a chance, because as soon as he
entered that room he was struck violently over the head with a sock containing large batteries. Other
kids then joined in, hitting him over the head with what he called a “Chelsea Brick.” Chelsea
relating to a football club and hooliganism, and the brick part relating to how hard you can
make a newspaper if you roll it up very tight. This is how he explained what happened next:
“I grabbed his face and bit into his eye with my teeth and did not let go. I could
taste his blood and his eyebrow in my mouth. Blows continued to rain down on me and I tried to smash
this kid’s head into the radiator just as all the screws rushed the showers. Outcome? I was
adjudicated for ‘assault’ 7 days CC in the seg.” So, just how rehabilitative was all of this?
Well, Watson said by the time he was 18 years old he’d learned how to make weapons and learned
how to cause someone a grievous injury. He said at all the institutions where he stayed, bullying was
endemic; it was part of the day, every day. For that reason, self-harming was also prevalent. He’d
done it to himself after spending weeks at a time in isolation at the notorious Aylesbury prison.
What! You’re thinking, surely kids are not locked up in isolation cells for 22 to 24 hours a day.
The answer is yes, they sometimes are, in the UK and the USA and we expect many other countries.
A report undertaken by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch included interviews with
people who had experienced this in prisons and jails all over the U.S. Yes, said the report,
some of those kids had committed terrible crimes, but keeping them in solitary was
not the way to rehabilitate them. Many of the adolescents interviewed said they had been sent
to solitary more than once and a third of them said they’d spent between one and six months in
solitary confinement before they turned 18. You see, adults suffer psychologically from
solitary confinement, but there is ample evidence that tells us that during the years that you are
still growing up, such confinement is much more damaging to mental health.
And it’s like this, imagine some kid hits you over the head with a sock full of batteries,
or perhaps some kid is threatening to take all your belongings. You’ve been told that you have
to fight back or you’ll just become a victim again, and so you fight to protect yourself.
Maybe you win, and the other kid ends up with two black eyes and a busted nose. What now? Well,
maybe you’ll be viewed as out of control and sent to solitary. It could happen;
it could happen to anyone, even you dear viewers. When there is little to no framework to protect
you against other kids, you just might find yourself in a cell all day for weeks or more.
Back to bad prison officers and men whom Watson said would sometimes be “sadistic and barbaric.”
He said some of them would come into work stinking of booze, and what they had in mind was one thing:
who was going to get a beating that day. You see, this officer-inmate violence
happens more often where adolescents are locked up than it does in adult prisons.
Young people are just more vulnerable, some don’t know their rights, others are scared,
and it has to also be said, youth prisons can also be a lot more stressful for guards given
just how violent they are. The guards sometimes fight back, even though they know it’s wrong.
We found cases where officers were imprisoned themselves after being found guilty of crimes
against young offenders. Some years back in Rikers Island, guards were using tough teenage inmates to
keep control of the prison by telling them they should beat certain inmates and they would turn a
blind eye. They called this system, “The Program.” It consisted of turning inmates on inmates and
giving the perpetrators of beatings impunity. In 2019, a young inmate in a prison in Georgia
threw a TV remote at an officer. That’s not such a huge crime, but the
officer seemed to think it was. He kicked the teen in the shin, and then in handcuffs he dragged him
back to his cell. There he proceeded to smash the kid’s head against the cell wall... twice.
Ironically, this happened at a place called the, “Youth Development Campus.” We are quite sure that
the only thing the youth developed was a headache and perhaps a distrust of authority figures.
We don’t need to tell you that this kind of treatment is not in the officer’s prison manual.
It’s illegal, and it’s the kind of thing you find happening in facilities for younger people
more than you do in adult prisons. Over 60 officers were fired for using excessive
force on young inmates from 2015 to 2018 in Georgia alone. Another of them lost his job
for neglecting a kid who tried to hang himself and another went for setting up gladiator fights.
Before we tell you the worst story, there’s something we need to point out to you.
Younger people do tend to act up more than adults when they are confined to a prison or in general.
They fight more, they throw stuff around more and they have more tantrums. It’s not an easy job
working at one of these places, that’s for sure. But a lot of these kids are in there due to the
fact they have been physically and emotionally abused by parents or acquaintances on the outside.
The same is true for adults, but it’s not so easy to shake off trauma when you are still young.
You are still trying to make sense of that trauma and it’s hard to stand outside of it.
One of the reasons for this is that the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex
doesn’t stop developing until you are in your early to mid-20s. Some say 25,
but there’s no exact cut-off point. Why is that important, you might wonder.
Well, this part of the brain is said to be responsible for your “executive functions”.
It supervises behavior. You have stimulus, perhaps some guy treads on your toes,
and the part of your brain responsible for anger, the amygdala, fires up.
Now what do you do? You step back and think. Hmm, if I hit him,
this will happen, and if that happens, this will happen. You have impulse control,
more so when you are older. Because young people’s brains are less developed they have
terrible impulse control. They lash out easily. Sticking with neuroscience, we should also
say that trauma can affect the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
The amygdala can become hyper-active, and the frontal cortex hypo-active,
meaning it’s retarded, less alert. So it’s a perfect storm when a bunch of kids
are behind bars. They are not only establishing pecking orders, they not only have little life
experience, but they also have brains ready to fire up and commit their bodies to violence.
It doesn’t help matters when you have officers only too happy to lay down
bets on you and watch you fight. We said we’d give you perhaps the
worst story, and here it is. It’s from the year 2000,
but from what we can see, prisons in the UK have only gotten worse over the years.
This happened at a place called Feltham young offender institution. There officers would play
a special game of Gladiator, and that would consist of making sure a large, tough prisoner
would fight a smaller, weaker prisoner. The winner was the officer that correctly guessed how long
the small kid would last. It was later said in court that they found this game, “amusing.”
On this occasion they decided to put a small Asian kid in the same cell as a large caucasian kid
who had a long history of extreme violence and was outspokenly racist. They put the victim in
the cell and locked the door, after which the larger kid beat the small guy to death.
The kid who died would have been released just hours later if the guards hadn’t played
that “amusing” game. He was finishing a six-week sentence for theft and interfering with a vehicle.
These are some of the reasons why being sent to juvenile prison can be absolutely terrifying.
Now you need to watch, “Jail vs Prison - What's ACTUALLY The Difference?. Or,
have a look at, “Why You Won't Survive NAVY Seal Training.”