Survivors recount rampant abuse at Los Angeles' juvenile jails:'Helpless, hopeless, lost and lonely'

Maisha was 16 years old when the officer inside Los Angeles juvenile hall began to take interest in her. At first, she said, he was friendly, and she would run errands for him, including delivering paperwork to his office; then, when no one else was around, he started grabbing her.

She tried to avoid being alone with him, but the groping and sexual assault escalated, she said, adding that he once assaulted her when she went to pick up her inhaler.

Maisha, who was incarcerated in 1997, knew the assaults were happening to other girls, but she never considered reporting it, she recently told the Guardian: “If you tell on staff, then the other staff are going to treat you wrong and say you’re lying. I wouldn’t have told on nobody. It was ‘snitches get stitches.’ When you grow up like that, that’s all you know until you learn something different.”

Now 42, Maisha is speaking up for the first time about the abuse she says she endured while imprisoned in America’s largest juvenile system – and she is far from alone. Nearly 300 people have come forward in a lawsuit against LA county, detailing claims of sexual abuse by officers in juvenile jails, spanning from 1972 through 2018. The case paints a disturbing picture of systemic misconduct and violence against multiple generations of children in the most vulnerable circumstances, some as young as 10 and 11 years old.

Staff sexually violated children in their cells, bathrooms, hallways, medical areas, solitary confinement and throughout more than a dozen boys’ and girls’ detention halls, the suit says. Some victims were handcuffed when they were assaulted, and officers frequently intimidated victims into silence and submission, saying they’d be punished in isolation, get longer jail time or be permanently separated from their families if they spoke up, according to a 359-page complaint filed in December.

While some of the overwhelming volume of testimony is from decades past, scandals over the last two years suggest that the mistreatment and neglect of children behind bars in LA is not a historical problem. On the contrary, the crisis has recently worsened, even after years of scrutiny and oversight.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/23/california-los-angeles-juvenile-center-abuse-survivors

Somehow I don't think this is unique to California