Sex abuse, violence alleged at teen jails across U.S.

Girls as young as 13 say they were shackled for weeks at a time in Mississippi.

Erica was 16 when she was forced to wear leg shackles at a Mississippi detention center, she said

A Texas teen was allegedly offered birthday cake in exchange for sex.

A guard drove his knee into the neck of a frail suicidal Ohio boy after the youth was wrestled to the ground and held down by other guards who stripped him and covered his face with a smock, a state report said.

More than two dozen girls at an Indiana lock-up describe "networking" -- their term for sneaking into each other's cells to have sex, with no interference from guards.

This is a glimpse into what America's juvenile jails look like, according to lawsuits, criminal cases and experts who have spent years delving into what they call a broken system.

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As noted in my previous post, many of our jails and prisons are in deep trouble. It seems that even juvenile facilities are not immune from poor management, sadistic staff, inadequate funding, and crowding. The problems are not limited to a few jails or systems such as the Texas juvenile system, but based on this story, the problem is much more pervasive.

State and local government must change or the courts will have to take over the operations as they did in the 1980s.