From The Lens:
The shortest route from the city of Plaquemine, Louisiana to Dothan, Alabama, by car is over 400 miles, takes more than six hours, and requires crossing into both Mississippi and Florida. The route takes you through Baton Rouge, where you’ll be within a few miles of a juvenile jail. Farther along on the ride, you’ll pass the Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center. In fact, there are 13 juvenile detention centers in the state of Louisiana that are closer to Plaquemine than Dothan, and all of them are licensed by the state’s Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS. But if you are under the age of 18 in Plaquemine and get arrested, rather than be held in a nearby juvenile detention center, you may be sent to Dothan.
Records obtained by The Lens show that so far in 2022, the city of Plaquemine paid over $25,000 to Southeast Alabama Youth Services’ Diversion Center, a juvenile detention center in Dothan, to hold kids who were arrested in the city and awaiting trial. It is unclear if the payments were for a single kid or several, but they were held for a combined 118 days — $226 per day, per kid.
Plaquemine is not the only place in Louisiana that is sending kids who are arrested out of state. The Lens found that over a dozen cities and parishes are contracting either with the Dothan facility, or another in Natchez, Mississippi, and have together paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold kids from Louisiana — sometimes for just days, but often for weeks or months at a time. Continue Reading >>>
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