Agency leader: Jetson safer

• By SANDY DAVIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 4, 2009 - Page: 1A

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The head of the agency operating the state’s three secure care facilities for juvenile delinquents said she is pleased with the results of the 2009 legislative session — particularly since it approved keeping open the Louis Jetson Center for Youth.

The center near Baker was on the road to closure after the  Legislature voted in its 2008 session to close it.

The nearly 70-year-old, 800-acre facility has been plagued during much of its history with allegations of brutality against the teenagers serving time there.

But the state Office of Juvenile Justice asked the Legislature during this year’s session to keep the facility open, although as a new, smaller, regional facility which would be operated using a therapeutic approach — all of which fall under approved juvenile justice reform methods.

Mary Livers, deputy secretary of the Office of Juvenile Justice since October, called the legislative decision to keep it open, “another giant step for reform.”

The state has been working toward reforming the way it handles troubled youths since 2003, when the Legislature approved Act 1225, known as the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003.

“As we’ve progressed with the facility taking a new direction and focus, the people who work out there have embraced the changes,” Livers said late last week.

Livers has said  she wanted to make clear that the new Jetson is nothing like the old Jetson — which had a prisonlike atmosphere.

“It’s a different place than it was six months ago,” she said recently. “It’s therapeutic. Kids are getting treatment. It’s much safer.”

The agency had gone so far as to propose renaming Jetson the Capital Area Center for Youth in what she said was a symbolic gesture to show that it was a new facility.

But the Legislature turned down the idea and instead decided that the facility should retain the name Jetson — after Louis  Jetson, a well-known Baton Rouge advocate for teenagers — especially now that the name should bring positive connotations.

But not everyone agrees that Jetson is on its way to reform.

“All of the vestiges of the past — razor wire, lockdown units, staff that are verbally and physically abusive — need to be addressed in order to make anything more than a superficial change to that facility,” said Dana Kaplan, the executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.