Shareef Cousin was 17 when he first set foot in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary. Wrongly convicted of murder, in 1996 he became the
youngest person there...
Louisiana advocates seek better path after youths removed from Angola
prison
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Dwayne Fatherree Read the full piece here
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Friend,
Shareef Cousin was 17 when he first set foot in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary. Wrongly convicted of murder, in 1996 he became the
youngest person there, awaiting execution in one of the most notorious
prisons in the U.S.
Two years later, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his
conviction. But during that time, he experienced what it must have
been like for the children who would be moved into the prison's
former death row block a quarter-century later.
"You know, one of two things happen when you go in there that
young," Cousin said. "Either you adapt to your environment
and become a person that you're not or you become free to the
environment and still become another person that you're not. You
go in not a cruel person and you come out hard. You go in fearful, you
come out fearless. Don't think that I mean that any of this
benefits the kids that were there."
The prison - known as Angola because it occupies farmland where
enslaved African people were forced to pick cotton on a plantation of
the same name - first opened in 1901.
The repurposing of the former death row structure for use as a prison
for youthful offenders did not happen until 2022 and lasted a little
more than a year before a federal judge ordered the detainees moved.
But neither the opening nor the closing of that portion of the prison
did anything to alleviate Louisiana's problem in housing,
educating and rehabilitating its youthful offenders.
"It really was about juvenile prisons back in the late
1990s," said Derwyn Bunton, the chief legal officer at the
Southern Poverty Law Center and a longtime advocate for the rights of
detained teens. "What got us to that point was, and still
remains, this notion of incarceration as a means of treating
delinquency. They use jailing kids to treat some of the behaviors that
some of our more at-risk, more targeted youth exhibit. That began a
long, long time ago."
That philosophy cannot be viewed accurately without addressing the
obvious racial disparity in both the youth justice system and, more
broadly, society in general.
"How do you fix the disproportionate incarceration of Black and
Brown children?"
asked Bunton, adding that when he was part of a team that sued
Louisiana over conditions at the Tallulah Correctional Center for
Youth, 92% of that facility's population was Black. "How
does an institution receive kids from all over the state and end up
being 92% Black?"
Read More
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