Jesse,

Thank you for calling attention to this.

For what it’s worth, a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center was instrumental in finally getting Columbia shuttered, and the report that you’re quoting from is hosted on the SPLC’s website, but the report itself wasn’t prepared by the SPLC. It was prepared by investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice, who were investigating as part of an earlier DOJ lawsuit over the treatment of child prisoners. Of course, I’d be the last person to say that being produced by federal prosecutors makes it more reliable, but in any case, that’s the provenance.

Jennifer,

Charges? Hell, none of them will even be fired. The state government’s current plan is to shut down Columbia and let all the former employees who turned it into such a hellhole torture camp transfer and metastasize throughout the rest of the Mississippi prison system.

J sub D:

I initially expected something similar from this article. Fortunately it was just physical and emotional abuse, not sexual.

Unfortunately the Department of Justice’s report isn’t the only story out of Columbia. Besides the sexual humiliation involved in guards forcing teenaged children to strip naked before they are locked in the “dark room,” and reports by girls at Columbia of a peeping-tom prison guard (both reported in the DOJ’s report), there’s also been at least one federal lawsuit filed over a male prison guard’s repeated rape of a 14 year old girl imprisoned at Columbia.