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Juvenile offenders in Wisconsin claim in court that they are treated "like dogs, in cages" by guards who liberally use pepper spray without cause and are quick to resort to solitary confinement.
In a federal class-action
lawsuit filed Monday in Madison, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center claim that
at least 15 to 20 percent of residents at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls are locked in solitary confinement at any given time."The State of Wisconsin operates the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and the Copper Lake School for Girls, which incarcerate approximately 150-200 youth who are as young as 14 years old, in remote northern Wisconsin," the complaint states.
"The State routinely subjects these youth to unlawful solitary confinement, mechanical restraints and pepper spraying."The alleged infractions that warrant punishment forbidden by the United Nations as torture include "being loud and disruptive," in the case of a girl with ADHD, and failing to remove shoes in another case, according to the ACLU and the JLC.
Wisconsin's juvenile prisons have been under scrutiny since a federal raid in December 2015, when Department of Justice agents descended on the facilities to investigate reports of child abuse and cover-up by staff, according to local news reports.
Comment: Michelle Obama's lunch program has been a dismal failure as millions of children refused to eat school lunches altogether, creating massive amounts of food waste that forced some schools to feed the leftovers to pigs and other animals at local farms, while others have implemented composting programs to deal with the issue. Many school districts have already scrapped the program altogether.