By James Finn
The Advocate
BATON ROUGE, La. — Eight teens held at a Baton Rouge youth jail escaped from their cells last week, sparking a two-hour melee that resulted in smashed doors and windows and left staff unable to restore order until Baton Rouge police arrived, according to documents related to the case.
The new details paint a more dire picture of the latest ruckus at the aging East Baton Rouge Juvenile Detention Center than an account initially provided by officials. At the time, officials said only that three teens sustained non-life threatening injuries in a brawl, but did not describe youth inmates breaking out of their cells for an extended period.
The city-parish classifies any incident at the facility that doesn’t result in serious injuries or escapes, including the one on March 25, as “non-critical.”
Baton Rouge police responded to a 911 call from the center around 9 p.m. that Friday, records obtained by The Advocate show. When BRPD officers arrived, though, a supervisor said no help was needed and staff had the situation under control, records show. So, the officers left.
But later, police were sent back to the facility when a second call came in saying youth wards were destroying windows and doors in their housing unit. When they returned, the BRPD officers found that eight youths had broken out from their cells in the commotion, were breaking windows and doors, and that staff couldn’t restore order.
In an initial statement, city-parish spokesman Mark Armstrong described the scene as a “youth to youth brawl.”
After arriving for the second time, police entered the detention center and eventually restored calm. Three of the eight teens were taken to a hospital with injuries inflicted in the brawl, officials say, though none of the wounds were deemed life-threatening.
Armstrong said some of the teens will face new charges because of the incident. Those include an allegation of second-degree battery by one of the wards, East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III said.
The violent outburst is the latest in a string of cases where incarcerated teens have taken control from staff at the 70-year-old youth detention center, part of the city-parish’s sprawling juvenile justice complex in an isolated area near the Baton Rouge airport.
In July, two teens broke out of the center and went on the run for almost two days. Three months later, the facility was breached again when five teenagers overpowered a staff member guarding a dormitory, stole his keys and attacked two more guards, causing one to be hospitalized as the youths escaped.
In February, three boys leveled “verbal threats” at staff and ripped out ceiling tiles during a two-hour ruckus.
Armstrong said after each incident that the facility meets state standards for youth detention centers. He added Friday that the city-parish takes any behavioral incident at the jail “with all seriousness.”
But the district attorney has said repeatedly that not enough is being done to protect staff and youth alike, calling for the city-parish to rebuild the aging facility.
East Baton Rouge chief administrative officer Darryl Gissel told The Advocate Friday that the city-parish entered a contract with an outside firm to see how much it would cost — and how much space it would take — to rebuild not only the youth detention center, but also the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. The two complexes sit about a mile away from each other on Veterans Memorial Boulevard.
The firm, JFA Institute, is a nonprofit that, according to its website, “works in partnership with federal, state, and local government agencies, and philanthropic foundations to evaluate criminal justice practices and design research-based policy solutions.” Gissel said the study is nearly done, but that many details about the prospective rebuild aren’t yet clear.
Blaming the center’s recent struggles on Louisiana’s “raise the age” law, a rule enacted in 2019 that sent more 17- and 18-year-olds to youth facilities rather than adult jails, Gissel acknowledged that the building is no longer equipped to house the population it now incarcerates.
The facility was not designed to accommodate older youth charged with violent crimes, Gissel said. And, he added, efforts at pouring money into cosmetic fixes at the building — costs the city-parish administrator pegged at $500,000 in the past several years — can only do so much.
“It’s a matter of trying to change the landscape of a facility designed for an age group that it is no longer serving,” he explained.
Passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 2016, the “raise the age” law in some cases injected political momentum into revamps of aging youth lockups, as people in the criminal justice world feared growing pains from the law. In Avoyelles Parish, for example, a stalled plan to open a youth prison — one that planned to focus more on rehabilitation than punishment — finally came to fruition in 2018.
The law went into effect at a time when the state’s youth justice system had undergone crippling budget cuts and was reeling from a rash of escapes.
On Friday, Moore called the JFA study a “good sign,” but pointed out that chatter about rebuilding the East Baton Rouge youth lockup — and the local jail — has circulated for years.
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