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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?”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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