D CF decided to try art therapy instead. So the state has converted the cells, featuring stainless steel toilet/sink combos, into really, really expensive art closets.

 

There are 250 video cameras across campus, some of which captured the beatings in Youth Rights' Media movie, and the cameras in this Boys Club have been rendered somewhat ineffective by the change of heart. The expensive console sits empty.

 

Our tour guides explained that boys who were locked down in this maximum security facility started flushing their sheets down the toilets and blocking the sinks and flooding the rooms. I wondered why that didn’t happen in the old Long Lane, which had the same kind of toilet-sink combos in the rooms, or the facility in Ohio that CJTS was modeled after?

 

During John Rowland’s ten month stay in a federal penitentiary, he lived in cells much larger than the ones he conspired to build, according to our guides. They also said that his prison had a golf course, too. As taxpayers carry a prime debt load on CJTS, the buildings are outdated after only being in use for five years.

 

In the main visiting room, taxpayers financed a non-contact visiting room, where phones sit on either side of a large pane of glass. The room is not used for visits, our guides said, because if the kids are so off-the-wall that they need such security for a visit, they can’t come down at all.

 

But the very fact that the room exists is the problem. How does the presence of that room affect people who work there? It isn’t church.

 

Even Governor M. Jodi Rell has suggested knocking CJTS down and replacing it by 2008. But nothing that larges moves that rapidly in this state. So we will continue to incarcerate a minority population on a campus that from a quick glance, could be homey, almost like a New England prep school, with a view of tree-lined rolling hills to the east and spectacular pink sunsets to the west.

 

One of our QUSL students suggested that the inmates could get used to it, and it was probably better for them than surviving on the mean streets. They get three squares a day inside. Would that young man have the opportunity to read Geronimo Ji Jaga on the outside?

 

She even said CJTS seemed too comfortable, that the boys shouldn’t have the opportunity to feast on a Friday night on greasy lo mein and fortune cookies. They've done something wrong, punish them.

 

I realized later that night, home safe, that if it is better for them inside, yet inside is so horrible a place, where solitary confinement cells greet prisoner-youth at the dormitory doors, how bad must it be outside and why must we subject young people to the hell of the outside part, where on your way home from high school in Hartford, you can get jumped by two teen girls and have them try to cut one of your fingers off with a pair of dull scissors?

 

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