In the video report below, The Nation's Laura Flanders speaks to Gabrielle Prisco, Director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York and journalist Daniel Redman about the disproportionate amount of violence and abuse that LGBT youth face in the nation's correctional systems. According to Redman, not only are LGBT teens incarcerated in disproportionate numbers, but they are 12 times more likely to be sexually assaulted while in prison. Even worse, prison staff are often complicit: "You have a situation where staff either look the other way or target the youth themselves for brutal treatment." Prisco also speaks about the disprortionate amount of time that queer youth spend in isolation "for their own protection," while in detention facilities.
In Redman's article for The Nation, "I Was Scared to Sleep," he writes that:
The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it's appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. "Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there's a reason you can't go home," says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. "A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression."
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