Oops: New State-of-the-Art "Anti-Prison" Has Better Facilities, Easier Escape Routes

Today in layups: one day after the opening of the top-shelf New Beginnings Youth Center, which is supposed to be a kinder, gentler way to go to prison, a kid escaped.  The “campus” cost $46 million to build in Washington, D.C. and was praised by the mayor as “one of the best rehabilitative facilities in the country.”  

The state-of-the-art center, with its 30-acre campus and spacious lunchroom and library, was built to replace the nearby Oak Hill Youth Center, once called the Pound or Little Lorton because of its notorious history and its similarity to adult detention facilities.

Everyone is having a hearty laugh, because the new detention facility was all touchy-feely with blooming dandelions and marshmallow smores even before dinnertime, and they called it the “anti-prison” and some bad apple kid took one look around and went, “Cool, later guys.”   But there is another side to the story:  

About that time [the late '80s], an investigation found that Oak Hill staff had beaten inmates badly enough to dislocate a shoulder, knock out teeth and damage a kidney. 

So they built a new prison to feel more like a college and less like a career fair for the Latin Kings and Aryan Nation.  But…

A day before the facility opened, [youth director] Schiraldi and David Muhammad, chief of committed services, said they had brought in young men to try to scale the fences and made modifications based on what they observed. Schiraldi said he planned to place prickly shrubbery, possibly rose bushes, near the fence so inmates would not be tempted to flee.

In the statement, officials said an internal investigation is underway into what went wrong and how the escape happened.

I will tell you how the escape happened: the shrubbery was not prickly enough.  Plans are underway to replace it with a new kind of shrubbery so prickly it has been banned in nine states.  Also, razor wire.  Also, also, all the child inmates will be beaten severely, just so everyone will be on the same page from now on.

Source: The Washington Post.