On a warm night last fall, a group of incarcerated teenagers seized an opportunity during a going-to-bed routine to make a bold break from a juvenile facility.
It was around 9 p.m., Oct. 14. A staffer at the Baton Rouge Juvenile Detention Center was leading four youthful offenders one by one into cells in the center's C-unit when two of them — Jordan Pough and Tre’Deon Hilliard — suddenly accosted her. One of the two dragged staffer Angela Royal into the cell where she was trying to place him for the night. The other pushed Royal into the cell from behind.
Two teenagers who’d been waiting in the hallway to be placed into their cells — Xavier Cade and Jerrell Morrison — quickly ganged up on Royal, officials said later. The four teens wrested away the jailer’s keys, using them to lock her inside the unlit cell, where she would sit in the dark without her radio to call for help.
With her keys at their disposal, the four boys unlocked the cell of a fifth teenager, Malik Williams. Since all remaining staff were putting kids to bed in the center’s A and D units, the five boys were free in C-unit, unsupervised.
Three of the five boys slipped through an exit into a control room and then on through another door before taking off from the facility in Royal’s car, using personal keys that she’d attached to her work keyring. The two other boys got locked inside the building by a door that slammed shut behind the first three.
But the lagging pair eventually made it out, too — after fending off two staff members with punches, kicks and, according to a Baton Rouge police spokesman, “shanks,” a term that can describe any makeshift knife. Police said the staffers sustained non-life threatening injuries in the clash.
Despite the myriad security lapses exposed by the escape, an internal review later found that no facility rules were broken, that all staff involved in the incident had received proper training and that the staff-to-youth ratio had been up to standards. No employees were disciplined.
The problem, officials ultimately determined, had more to do with lax security — not a violation of rules, but the lack thereof.
An entrance to Juvenile Justice Center at 8333 Veterans Memorial Blvd in Baton Rouge, LA. Five people held at this center for "some very serious offenses" escaped after attacking two guards who had been watching them. One of the youths remained at large Friday Oct 15, 2021
'It’s shameful'
The step-by-step account of the youths’ flight from the center came in a report recently obtained through a records request to the Louisiana Department of Child and Family Services, which reviews incidents at the detention center as part of the facility’s licensing requirements. The document offers new details about the jailbreak that reignited calls for a new facility to hold youth awaiting hearings or trials in the city-parish’s juvenile justice system.
Redacted from the report provided by DCFS, the names of the youths who escaped the facility had previously been made public in court filings.
The brazen escape illustrated two trends that have alarmed people involved in local juvenile justice. For one, a higher number of 17-and-18-year-old youths, some of whom are accused of more serious crimes, have been held at the juvenile center since Louisiana’s Raise the Age Act went into effect in 2019. The other factor: an aging facility that officials say isn’t built to properly house them.
Raise the Age posed broad challenges to the center "in the sense that you have youth who would otherwise not have been in that facility," said Mark Armstrong, a spokesperson for East Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome.
Other states have long since passed and adjusted to raise the age laws, said Jessica Fierman, a Senior Managing Director at the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that advocates for harm reduction in the country's youth justice and welfare systems.
"The concern that this can’t be done because now we have these older kids in the system...it’s been done for years," she said.
Other states have similarly struggled with growing pains in such programs.
An example of those older alleged juvenile offenders is Cade. Now 17, he’s accused of second-degree murder in the 2019 killing of a 74-year-old woman. He was 15 at the time. In a hearing last month to decide whether Cade should be housed in an adult jail, the Juvenile Detention Center’s manager, Shane Zanders Sr., said wards stay an average of 15 days at his facility.
Cade had been there since May, Zanders told a judge. He had been free on bond in Haymon's killing when he was arrested again for allegedly possessing counterfeit money and a gun and sent back to the juvenile facility
"It's not a jail or a prison," Zanders Sr. said in the hearing. "Detention is short-term. We're not a long-term facility."
The juvenile center, on Veterans Memorial Boulevard near Metro Airport, turns 70 this year. It has long been considered outdated, a remnant of a time when surveillance cameras and computer technology didn’t yet exist.
Concerns over safety at the center bubbled up again this month, when a Baton Rouge Police SWAT unit was placed on standby for a couple hours after two boys disobeyed staff and ripped out chunks of the walls.
East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III said last week that the episode showed yet again a need for the facility to be torn down and rebuilt. According to Juvenile Court Judge Adam Haney, that’s been the case for more than two decades, since a 2000 report found the center in dire need of an overhaul.
The back fence of the Juvenile Justice Center at 8333 Veterans Memorial Blvd in Baton Rouge, LA. Five people held at this center for "some very serious offenses" escaped after attacking two guards who had been watching them. One of the youths remained at large Friday Oct 15, 2021
“If you compare what our detention center looks like to what new facilities look like, it’s shameful what ours look like,” Haney said.
Apart from quality-of-life shortfalls like a dearth of classroom space, the facility’s outdated design can pose security risks — risks that become more obvious, and more of a liability, during an escape like the one detailed in the report, according to Moore.
Some hallway angles obstruct security footage. While modern facilities tend to be fortified by brick walls, the juvenile center is partly encircled by a fence. Meanwhile, it’s hard to separate kids who should be apart due to disputes over turf, age, or gender, Haney explained.
While the structural problems persist, the facility did alter some procedures after the October jailbreak.
Staff started staggering bedtimes for different units to free up availability for backup in case of emergency. And despite the incident review saying the center met youth-staff ratio standards during the escape, the facility pledged to exceed that threshold by hiring more workers. Locks were changed at various exits to the facility.
All of those steps have been upheld since October, Armstrong said in an email Friday.
Haney said staff who work at the detention center are not prison guards or law enforcement deputies.
“They're people who are working for $13 an hour,” he said, “and they’re doing this because they care about the kids.”
The front fence of the Juvenile Justice Center at 8333 Veterans Memorial Blvd in Baton Rouge, LA. Five people held at this center for "some very serious offenses" escaped after attacking two guards who had been watching them. One of the youths remained at large Friday Oct 15, 2021
Inevitable rebuild?
Some who work in the juvenile justice system say questions of how to rebuild aging youth detention centers like the one in Baton Rouge won't ultimately do much to change the system that brings kids there in the first place.
Reform projects have popped up around the country that operate on the belief that "holding young people in prison-like facilities is a failed model," Fierman said.
"Other places that are doing really transformative reforms are getting kids out of these facilities entirely," she said. One such example is New York City's Close to Home initiative, which detained some juvenile offenders in dwellings near their homes, rather than far-off detention centers, based on research that showed better outcomes in those scenarios.
In Baton Rouge, all five of the teen escapees were eventually recaptured. Once they were put behind bars again, at least some faced new and more serious charges, court records show.
Pough, who turned 18 a month before his escape, faces new charges in the adult judicial system, including battery of a correctional facility employee and aggravated escape. Williams faces charges of aggravated escape and theft of a motor vehicle.
Haney, meanwhile, believes a rebuild of the facility is inevitable.
If voters don't approve a measure to build a new youth jail, the federal government could sue to compel the city-parish to do it, he explained — something that could be costlier for the city and taxpayers.