Camp Fear
News: Gina
Score was the latest teenager to die at a juvenile boot camp. Why do
so many states still insist that humiliation and abuse will
straighten out troubled kids?
By Bruce Selcraig
November/December 2000 Issue
In a town the size of Canton, South Dakota, population 3,195,
plenty of people knew that 14-year-old Gina Score liked to steal
things.
She stole Press-N-Go fingernails worth $2.99 from the ShopKo in
Sioux Falls, stole four Beanie Babies from Brower's Gifts and
Collectibles in Canton, stole $60 from a sleepover girlfriend, even
stole candles from her Lutheran church. Outwardly, Gina didn't seem
troubled -- she babysat for neighbors, wrote cute poems, and smiled
radiantly for pictures. But she confided to social workers what they
surely guessed: Kids can be cruel to eighth grade girls who weigh
224 pounds. Sometimes Gina cried herself to sleep.
Supported by her parents, Gina endured years of programs and
punishments intended to change her behavior: community service,
individual and family counseling, group care, house arrest, fines,
restitution, probation, juvenile detention. Nothing really worked.
Finally, in June of last year, after yet another parole violation, a
judge placed Gina in state custody until age 21 and sent her to a
military-style boot camp for teenage girls located at the State
Training School in Plankinton.
Like boot camps in two dozen other states, the Plankinton boot
camp and a counterpart for boys in the town of Custer were set up to
treat children like military recruits. Kids were forced to rise
before dawn, perform rigorous exercises, and march like soldiers.
Phone calls and visits from parents were prohibited for the first
month, and the slightest rules violations were met with swift
punishment. As in many other states, the South Dakota boot camps
were part of a political campaign by a tough-on-crime governor; Bill
Janklow, a popular Republican and ex-Marine now in his fourth term,
promoted them as a commonsense solution to juvenile crime. Despite
widespread abuses at boot camps from Florida to California, many
politicians and frustrated parents have found salvation in the
camps' simple goal: to reduce troubled teenagers to their emotional
core, back to frightened children, so that their minds will open
long enough to imagine a life without drugs, crime, and self-hatred.
As a boot camp warden from Texas explains, "We want to turn their
lives upside down."
Five days after Gina Score arrived in Plankinton, she and 15
other girls from Cottage B began a mandatory 2.6-mile jog at about
6:30 a.m. on the gravel roads outside Plankinton's razor-wire
fences. What happened that morning is detailed in medical reports
and eyewitness accounts by inmates and staff members at the boot
camp. The girls trotted past sprawling farms of corn and soybeans
and a small community cemetery; but it's doubtful that Gina
appreciated the pastoral scenery. She must have been panicked. Gina
was severely overweight and "hated to run," as her mother later
recalled. The temperature and humidity were both around 70 and
climbing.
Within a block or two, Gina started lagging behind. As the girls
reached each corner of the rectangular route, where they were
allowed to rest briefly and drink water, they waited for Gina to
catch up. Two youth counselors repeatedly shouted for Gina to keep
moving, sometimes interlocking their arms with hers just to keep her
going forward down the dusty roads. At roughly 7:45, after the other
girls had reached the front gates, Gina staggered and collapsed 500
feet from the finish. Several girls tried to help her up, but staff
members, believing one inmate who said Gina had acted this way
before at a halfway house, were convinced they had a "behavior
problem."
"Quit faking!" several girls recall a supervisor shouting.
"You're embarrassing us." Everyone knew the boot camp credo:
Quitting Is Not an Option. When four girls encircled Gina to give
her shade, counselors ordered them to back away.
A staff nurse who checked on Gina at 8:05 said her vital signs
were normal and that she was simply hyperventilating. An hour later,
Gina struggled to her feet and began slowly walking back to her
cottage. A few hundred feet later, within sight of her
air-conditioned cottage, she collapsed again. Her eyes were dilated,
her skin pale, her lips purple. She urinated on herself and began
frothing at the mouth. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Even when a
farmer's manure truck rumbled down the road beside her, Gina didn't
budge. The staff still thought she was faking; several girls recall
them laughing and telling jokes as Gina lay on the ground. The
camp's director came out to assess the situation, but he told the
staff to "wait out" Gina, so no one called for an ambulance.
"I was crying," says Christi Battis, a former inmate. "All the
girls were crying. ... How could she be faking it when she was pale
blue and wasn't even brushing the flies off her?"
Finally, at 10:47, three hours after Gina collapsed, two
physicians happened by and ordered that an ambulance be called. Six
minutes later, paramedics were giving Gina oxygen, but on the way to
the hospital, her heart stopped. In the emergency room they sent
chilled IV fluids through Gina's rigid body and packed her in ice,
but a rectal thermometer peaked at 108 -- the highest it would go.
Internally, she had literally begun to cook. With her organs
shutting down, repeated attempts to restart her heart were futile.
At 12:39 p.m., Gina was declared dead. "It was," said emergency room
physician Jerome Howe, "the worst case of heatstroke I've ever
seen."
Gina Score's death shocked the sensibilities of South Dakotans,
who trusted state-run boot camps to protect and educate troubled
children as well as straighten them out. But for those familiar with
the juvenile justice system nationwide, the scandal was simply the
latest outrage in a decade-long tale of abuse at boot camps. There
are currently an estimated 4,000 kids in approximately 50
military-style camps nationwide. At least half a dozen children have
died in detention, and numerous state and federal investigations
have concluded that hundreds of others have been subjected to
physical and emotional abuse.
Juvenile boot camps got their start in the mid-1980s, when
officials in Louisiana and Georgia experimented with putting teenage
boys in military-style settings. At first the camps housed young
burglars, drug abusers, and auto thieves, but before long they were
filled with a surprising number of truants and petty shoplifters,
like Gina Score. The burr-headed ex-military men who usually ran the
camps may have rubbed liberals the wrong way, but at first glance
they hardly seemed like sadists. Like many voters who supported boot
camps, they genuinely believed that for kids immune to other forms
of correction, nothing short of a radical departure from their lives
would get their attention. "Nobody can tell me from some ivory tower
that you take a kid, kick him in the rear end, and it doesn't do any
good," declared then-Governor Zell Miller of Georgia, an ex-Marine
and early proponent of boot camps. Politicians eager to appear tough
on crime could soon point to images on the local TV news of
previously smart-mouthed teenagers marching crisply, doing push-ups,
and shouting, "Sir, yes, sir!"
Yet in state after state, public officials have ignored
persuasive evidence that most boot camps don't work. A growing body
of research, from private studies to federal investigations, has
shown the camps rarely reduce recidivism or save the fortunes their
promoters promise, and often permit horrific abuses of kids by
underpaid and undertrained staff.
A study by the Koch Crime Institute in Kansas found that "the
fear of being incarcerated at a boot camp has not deterred crime,"
noting that nearly three out of every four children who pass through
the camps are back in detention within a year. The National Mental
Health Association concluded that "employing tactics of intimidation
and humiliation is counterproductive for most youth" and has led to
"disturbing incidents" of abuse. In Georgia, U.S. Justice Department
investigators found kids being forced to crawl on their hands and
knees to lunch, clean floors with their T-shirts, and run in summer
heat while carrying tires. "The paramilitary boot camp model is not
only ineffective, but harmful," the investigation concluded.
Abuses have been both far-reaching and extreme. At the Arizona
Boys Ranch, a military-style boot camp that enjoyed wide political
support, the staff made an incontinent 16-year-old boy, Nicholaus
Contreraz, sleep in soiled underwear, eat meals on the toilet, and
carry a yellow trash basket filled with his own vomit. On March 2,
1998, Contreraz collapsed repeatedly during strenuous physical
training, prompting one staff member to say he deserved an Academy
Award for faking. He died that evening from a massive, undiagnosed
infection. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Boys Ranch
had sparked nearly 100 complaints of child abuse in the previous
five years, including reports that staff members hit one boy in the
head with a shovel and burned another with hot water so severely he
needed skin grafts.
In Maryland, where Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend championed
military-style boot camps for kids, a yearlong investigation by the
Baltimore Sun revealed how guards at the Savage Leadership
Challenge routinely kicked, punched, and brutalized teenage
criminals. When new inmates arrived at the camp, guards dressed in
military fatigues would yank the shackled teenagers off the prison
van and drive their faces into the dirt with a forearm to their
backs if they so much as wiped a tear.
The harsh punishment in boot camps has often outweighed the
crime. Many states have placed not only gang members or others
guilty of violent crimes in their facilities, but also those known
as "status offenders" -- runaways, truants, and curfew violators. In
the social service jargon of South Dakota, such kids are called
CHINS, children in need of supervision. "Incarcerating CHINS goes
against every moral, ethical expectation about what is right for
children," says Dr. Susan Randall of the South Dakota Coalition for
Children.
News reports and lawsuits have prompted several waves of reform.
Camps have been closed or their methods drastically altered in
Louisiana, Georgia, Arizona, Maryland, North Dakota, Colorado,
Oregon, and Utah. Dozens of guards and corrections officials have
been fired or prosecuted. All but a handful of states have stopped
locking up status offenders. And some camps now place greater
emphasis on drug and alcohol treatment, intensive counseling, basic
education, and training in life skills.
But many facilities continue to rely on the kind of abusive,
veins-bulging, in-your-face humiliation that their political
sponsors apparently believe is still the norm at real boot camps run
by the U.S. Armed Forces. The military realized some years ago,
however, that explosive anger and unfair, degrading punishment
develop neither esprit de corps nor mature soldiers. Yet child
advocates who suggest that shouting and bullying might not work well
on abused and troubled kids have been all but drowned out by the
boot camp industry's tough-love mantra: We must break kids down to
build them back up.
"I've heard that one before," says Paul DeMuro, a corrections
expert in New Jersey who has been appointed by courts to evaluate
juvenile institutions in more than 20 states. "It might work if
they're middle-class kids free of deep psychological problems. But
with kids who have been abused and neglected, educationally
deprived, subjected to summary punishment -- it's a disaster waiting
to happen."
As a teenager, Bill Janklow would have been a likely candidate
for a boot camp. Growing up in a small South Dakota town in the
1950s, he once fired shots at the town water tower, he says, "just
to hear the bong." He often skipped school, and made enough of a
nuisance of himself that a judge advised him to enter the Marines at
age 16. Janklow credits the Corps with straightening out his life --
but his troubles weren't over. As a legal-aid lawyer on a South
Dakota Indian reservation, he was charged with assaulting a
15-year-old girl with the intent to rape. Janklow denied the
accusation, and the prosecution was eventually dropped, but a tribal
court barred him from practicing law on the reservation. (Years
later, when author Peter Matthiessen detailed Janklow's time on the
reservation in his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Janklow
sued, keeping the book out of print for years.) The assault
allegation didn't hurt Janklow's political career, however. In 1978,
after serving as state attorney general, he was elected governor.
Janklow inherited a state with a reputation for progressive
juvenile facilities; for years, other states sent juvenile justice
officials to study South Dakota's vocational, wilderness, and
job-skills programs for kids. But during his third term, Janklow
became determined to set up boot camps that harkened back to his
days in the military. He demonized juvenile criminals, calling some
of them "scum" and speaking of kids and their families in dismissive
tones.
"Most of them come from a lousy home," the governor told
Mother Jones. "No discipline, no respect for others or
themselves, huge problems in school, can't read or write." In 1996,
the state opened its first boot camp, a facility for boys in the
western town of Custer. The Plankinton facility for girls followed
in 1998.
Janklow was undeterred by the dismal track record of boot camps
in other states. "Everybody in America debates whether or not they
work," he declared. "We in South Dakota have always been able to
make things work."
But from the beginning, serious mistakes plagued the facilities.
Janklow hired a former Marine drill instructor and lumber salesman
to run the boot camps, and a loyal Republican county prosecutor to
head the state Department of Corrections. Neither man had any
experience running prisons or working with juvenile prisoners. In
turn, the two hired staff with little or no background in social
work, paid them little more than $7 an hour, and called them
"counselors." Contrary to virtually all recommendations by
child-advocacy groups, South Dakota placed CHINS and other status
offenders in the camps, including many children who were emotionally
disturbed or sexually abused.
At Plankinton and the boot camp for boys in Custer, drill
instructors used a manual that spelled out their goal for the
first-day induction: "overwhelming the students with stress and
anxiety." A videotape of the induction process shows five cowed
teenage girls standing at attention in the Plankinton gym, just as
Gina Score did, as staff members scream within inches of their
faces. "I saw one induction, and that was enough," says Don Jones, a
former group counselor at Plankinton. "I thought it was barbaric."
But it wasn't until Gina Score died that the public started to
pay attention to abuses at the boot camps. State Rep. Pat Haley, a
former Democratic chairman of the state Corrections Commission and
once a prison guard himself in Minnesota, began receiving anonymous
calls about boys being molested at the Custer facility. "I was
always very careful about these allegations," says Haley. "It's an
easy issue to politicize. But when I started checking into things, I
couldn't believe what was going on."
What Haley learned, now confirmed by children, staff, and
videotapes, is that kids in the boot camps who were considered
discipline problems were shackled by their wrists and ankles to beds
or concrete floors -- a restraint called "four-pointing" --
sometimes for 24 hours a day. Male guards often took part in cutting
off the clothes of girls who were four-pointed, ostensibly to
prevent suicide. Male guards also patrolled the showers, a
particularly traumatizing practice for the 75 percent of Plankinton
girls who reported to counselors that they had been sexually abused
as children. Some kids were pepper-sprayed naked in their cells and
denied medication. Children considered violent were kept in total
isolation, more than 23 hours a day in small cells, for as long as
two weeks.
Kids responded by rioting, slashing themselves with shanks and
broken lightbulbs, and trying repeatedly to commit suicide. "Because
of the incredibly punitive culture, kids and staff were at war with
each other," says Marc Schindler, an attorney with the Youth Law
Center in Washington, D.C. "They pushed and pushed the kids until
all they wanted to do was resist."
South Dakota has instituted some better-late-than-never reforms
in the wake of the scandal: Janklow closed the Plankinton boot camp
in June, citing "management problems," and the state has placed
stricter guidelines on punishment throughout the system. But the
Custer boot camp remains open, and the governor praises it as a
"model facility."
Earlier this year, the Youth Law Center filed a class-action suit
against the state on behalf of several children. "We've filed
lawsuits against juvenile facilities in 19 states over the last 20
years, but some of the practices and policies in South Dakota are
the worst we've ever seen," says Schindler. "We've never seen girls
four-pointed spread-eagle on their backs and their clothes cut off.
And the isolation cells -- that's as bad as anything we've ever
seen. It's unconscionable."
The snarling crackle of a Harley's warm exhaust pipes fills the
parking lot of the First Congregational Church in downtown Sioux
Falls, South Dakota, on a warm July evening. A mammoth man with a
reddish-blond beard, sunglasses, and "Bad to the Bone" T-shirt steps
off the bike.
"Where's Margaret?" he asks.
Rick Anfinson, the biker, is here with Vicki, a petite soccer
mom; Ralph, an auto-body repairman; Bill, an 81-year-old consumer
activist; and Edith, a grandmother. They are all waiting for
Margaret Gramkow, an energetic, ruddy-cheeked mother who last year
started the Parents Who Care Coalition, a group of 130 parents whose
children have spent time in the state's juvenile facilities. As the
meeting begins, their stories pour out.
Rick's son Henry, a 16-year-old who was incarcerated at the
Custer boot camp, says guards shackled him to a board upside down in
nothing but his underwear for refusing to do push-ups. Vicki's
16-year-old son used to sneak out his window of their home at night.
"Once he was gone 10, 11 days," she recalls. "He had taken our car
out of state. We called the police, but the minute you tell them
your child is missing, your child is designated as a CHINS." The boy
was sent to the boot camp for four months and placed in state
custody until he turns 21. "My husband and I did what we thought was
right," Vicki says. "I regret the day I called anyone at the state.
I tell everyone now, 'Don't ever call.'"
Ralph's son, Jeff Kitchen, is a strong, stocky 18-year-old who
used to wrestle on school teams and play Little League baseball.
Ralph says Jeff has been on medication since he was seven for
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that he committed
several petty crimes, including vandalizing some school band
equipment. After spending a month at a psychiatric treatment center,
Jeff was sent to the boot camp in Custer.
"I just about shit in my pants," Jeff recalls of his induction
day. "There's no way to describe how I felt." Jeff was given the
standard burr haircut and issued khaki pants and shirt, socks,
T-shirt, boots, and sneakers. He admits that when guards got rough
with him he clawed, punched, and kicked them. "Once, the drill
instructor took away my journal that we were supposed to write our
thoughts in and read it to the platoon," Jeff says. "He made fun of
me. I told him to go to hell."
The teenagers became tight allies. "No one went anywhere alone,
because the guards would beat you," Jeff says. "They'd pepper-spray
you for cussing."
After Jeff was moved to a facility for boys at Plankinton, he
says, he experienced some of the same abuses that took place at the
boot camp. He was four-pointed for entire days and was locked away
in solitary confinement on at least five occasions for more than a
week at a time. "The cell was about 5 by 10 feet with a concrete
bed, no mattress," he adds. "The only thing you got was a small
blanket and your underwear, and you only came out for two cold
showers. No books. No exercise. No school." Jeff says he was so
despondent, he once attempted suicide by taping a bread wrapper over
his face. After nearly two years he was transferred to the state
hospital, where he finally received the psychiatric care he needed.
He was placed on medication, his father says, and quickly became "a
model patient."
I wondered how a kid who needed psychiatric counseling and
medication survived being locked away for all but minutes of the
day. "Did you at least have a window in your cell?" I asked Jeff.
"Yeah," he said. "But it was against the rules to look outside."
Staff members who have disagreed with the culture of punishment
in Governor Janklow's boot camps say they soon found themselves
ostracized by supervisors. Don Jones, who worked at the juvenile
facilities at Plankinton for 17 years, says a dozen teachers and
counselors were fired earlier this year and that most, like Jones
himself, have found it impossible to get another job in the state
system. "We're blackballed," he says.
As the crisis in South Dakota's juvenile detention system
unfolded, Janklow took the offensive. He denied reporters, state
legislators, and federal investigators entrance to the boot camps.
He retaliated against an outspoken mother of an incarcerated kid by
releasing unfavorable information from the child's juvenile record
to a TV reporter. To underscore why he called imprisoned kids
"scum," Janklow used an official state government Web site to post
daily incident reports that prison staff filed against violent and
disruptive kids. But the detailed descriptions of assaults against
guards, suicide and escape attempts, fighting, and vandalism had the
unintended effect of confirming what Janklow's critics had been
saying all along -- that his failed policy of punishment over
rehabilitation was making kids more violent. "The culture of
violence in South Dakota's juvenile facilities was not created by
the kids," says Rep. Haley, "but by Bill Janklow."
Ted Klaudt, a Republican legislator, managed to get into the
Plankinton boot camp and talk to girls about the abuses firsthand by
showing up unannounced. Janklow responded a few days later at 10
p.m. by calling the staff member who allowed Klaudt in and
threatening to personally fire him if he did it again. Then about 15
minutes later the governor rang up the girls' cottage at Plankinton
and ordered staff to awaken two children who had spoken with Klaudt
so he could question them. He talked to them without their lawyers
or parents present, even though he knew they would likely be
witnesses in civil and criminal cases.
"He would ask a girl if she was four-pointed," says Klaudt, who
listened in on the phone conversations through a three-way
connection. "He must have had their files in front of him because he
would say something like, 'Did you throw that soap at the guard?
Don't you think you should be punished?' Can you imagine being a
15-year-old girl and this voice says on the phone, 'This is Bill
Janklow'? I think he sort of intimidated them. I thought it was very
unethical."
Janklow defends his late-night questioning, saying, "I'm
hands-on. I want to know what the facts are." When I suggested that
some might interpret his calls as witness tampering, he responded
angrily. "I would do it again this minute," the governor told me.
"How would they be intimidated? I was on their side."
The governor's call to imprisoned girls is one of many issues
being examined by the U.S. Justice Department, which has opened both
civil and criminal investigations into the treatment of youths in
South Dakota's juvenile detention system. "They're looking all the
way up the ladder," says a source familiar with the federal
investigation. "All the way to the top." Two female guards who were
present during Gina Score's forced run have been charged with four
counts of felony child abuse involving Gina and other girls. The
guards have pleaded not guilty.
It would be comforting to think that the exposure of systemic,
state-sanctioned abuse in South Dakota boot camps might prevent the
harsh mistreatment of children at other facilities across the
country. Yet for the past decade, despite the repeated failure of
boot camps, state officials like Bill Janklow and their political
supporters have clung to the misguided idea that foundering kids can
be reclaimed with little more than relentless discipline. And as
state after state has made the same errors in treating troubled
kids, the most basic of lessons has been lost. "The common
denominator in all these situations is the objectification of kids,"
says DeMuro, the New Jersey corrections expert. "It gets almost
spiritual, but the ability to punish humanely has at its core the
notion that this person is me, and I am them."
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