Jail Sell

At 5 feet tall and weighing in at less than 90 pounds, young William P. most likely could not have lasted long defending himself against a cellmate the size of a grown man. A troubled boy diagnosed with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, William P. was no doubt a handful -- by 1996, he was involuntarily committed to a South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice correctional facility -- but probably no more or less difficult to handle than other teens with similar emotional and disciplinary problems.

In July 1996, William P. was transferred, with 400 other boys, from South Carolina's overcrowded Broad River Road juvenile institution to the Columbia Training Center, a newly renovated psychiatric hospital-turned-"secure training school" in Columbia, S.C.

The new detention center was a little different than the institutions to which boys such as William P. were accustomed. Unlike the other facilities used to detain juvenile offenders in South Carolina, which were operated by the state's Department of Juvenile Justice, the Columbia Training Center was a private, for-profit institution designed, built and financed by the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the fastest-growing multinational, private operators of so-called "prisons for profit." And unlike the facilities that boys such as William P. had been in before, the Center was plagued by problems that CCA would later call "operational challenges."

Within a few months of its opening, the Center came under intense scrutiny from the public. A CCA-employed social worker claimed to have documented abuse and mismanagement at the facility, and later claimed he was fired for airing his complaints to outside sources; the center's staff were accused of using unorthodox and unacceptable disciplinary methods with unruly residents; and by August 1996, CCA was confronted with a shortage of staff members to supervise the 350 to 400 boys who populated the facility at any given time.

William P. quickly found out that Columbia Training Center could be a frightening and dangerous place. According to a federal lawsuit filed on his behalf in 1998 by Columbia, S.C., attorney Gaston Fairey, there was a "lack of control in the CTC facility,"which resulted in the use of abusive techniques to deal with disciplinary problems. The lawsuit claims that CCA permitted the center's staff to routinely terrorize and abuse the boys in their care with "inappropriate use of chemical munitions; excessive force; the inappropriate use of isolation rooms by intentionally placing an excessive number of juveniles into the rooms. ... [and] the use of older, larger juveniles as 'enforcers' or 'strawmen' to abuse younger or smaller juveniles as a means of discipline or control."

The lawsuit claims that in the less than six months that William P. was a resident at the Center, staffers subjected him to "inappropriate use of mace" and repeatedly threatened to lock him up with big, aggressive and violent juvenile offenders who would assault him. The lawsuit also alleges that he was "hog-tied" (a practice in which a juvenile's wrists and ankles are shackled together behind the back) as a disciplinary procedure; and that he was confined to a lock-up cell with a 6-foot-4, 225-pound inmate who, according to the suit, was "known by staff to abuse young, small juveniles such as William P. The other juvenile was placed in the cell by CCA staff with the knowledge and expectation that the other juvenile would assault William P."

By the end of the year, William P. allegedly had been physically brutalized by the larger boy and hog-tied as many as 30 times.

In January 1997, he was committed to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, covered with bruises and threatening to injure himself. He was hospitalized in an acute care psychiatric unit at a state-run mental-health facility until December 1997 -- almost one full year -- after only six months of detention at the CCA-run center.