When one of our out-of-state QUSL students asked if there was a facility in Connecticut like CJTS for girls, our guides said no. Teen girls live in various facilities across the state, they said.

 

Some live in Stepping Stone in Farmington. Some are in York Correctional for Women in Niantic, even though they aren’t 18. But that is standard practice.

 

Connecticut’s adult prisons feature more children under age 18 than any other state in the nation, according to a well-reported indictment by Colin Poitras printed in the Courant, Thursday, March 22.

 

The Nutmeg state’s 383 youth in real jails outranks New York’s 223, Florida’s 185, North Carolina’s 169 and Texas’ 167. This isn’t company we want to keep, especially not when these states have populations 10 times ours, and are known as death penalty havens like Florida and Texas.

 

Yeesh. So other teenaged female inmates live in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, despite the fact that the girls have never been diagnosed with any mental illness, our guides said. Add the lack of a cohesive DCF strategy to handle teen girls to the list of problems.

 

And despite the fact that CJTS isn’t designed to deal with boys on psychotropic medicines, about 50 percent of them currently there take prescription medications, our guides told us. Another 50 percent of the boys locked inside CJTS are fathers. I don’t remember the percentage of kids in special education on campus, but it was high.

 

Our guides weren’t sure of the overlap on all three. But doesn’t it kind of doom the children of those children? They happened to be born to a family where one parent is in jail, and the other one was stuck in a place – the city- whose imagery invokes such misery that people could mistake prison as a safer, better place.

 

Those children, the babies now, they are probably the ones who will be filling CJTS in 14 years from now. What are we doing to insure that doesn’t occur? That is the policy question we must answer.

 

When those children can see their fathers, it’s only for two hours at a time, either at on weekday nights or a few more hours than that on the weekends. The way the hours are staggered, with two before noon and three in the afternoon, inmates can’t eat lunch with their families.

 

A friend of mine was too old for CJTS when he started his four-year bid for shooting up a convenience store trying to get money to cop some PCP. Dude lived in various prisons across Connecticut, including little Cheshire, big Cheshire and Carl Robinson (when Michael Ross was executed), and was released in early January.

 

Yeah, at times, he said, it was easier inside. There was a routine. But during his time, he said he learned to ask one question two ways: How come DOC produces only monsters? When will DOC start to turn out geniuses?

 

I hope that young man sitting outside his cell devouring the words of Geronimo Ji Jaga will be one of the geniuses. In fact, I hope all of the 98 inmates currently housed there someday earn their way into Mensa, in spite of their current living conditions.

 

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