In response to news about multiple lawsuits alleging abuse at an East Baton Rouge youth prison, Gina Womack, Co-founder and Executive Director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) issued the following statement:
Every time we hear about allegations of abuse in facilities, it is deeply troubling and heartbreaking. We know what these systems do because our families have lived it. When children are abused, traumatized, or neglected in custody, the damage doesn’t stay behind prison walls. It follows them home, into the families, relationships, schools, and communities. The scandal goes beyond the abuse itself– it speaks to a whole system that repeatedly harms children and then acts shocked when the next crisis emerges.
That is exactly why reopening Jetson is the wrong answer. Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) was founded by parents whose children survived Louisiana’s brutal youth prison system, and our movement helped win the closure of notorious youth prisons because we knew these institutions were causing harm, not healing. For more than two decades, families, youth, and advocates have warned that prisons do not make children safer, they expose them to more trauma while draining resources from the supports that actually help young people thrive. The lesson from these lawsuits is not that we need a different prison, a newer prison, or a reopened prison. How many times are we going to let history repeat itself at the expense of children’s lives? Families fought hard to shut down Jetson because we saw firsthand the abuse, trauma, and damage these institutions caused. Reopening it risks repeating that history with a new generation of young people.
The reality is that this is a fundamentally harmful system for children. The solution is to invest in families, mental health care, education, and community-based supports. Louisiana’s children deserve better than another prison, and our communities deserve investments that create safety, healing, and opportunity instead of more trauma.
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