Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice is transferring incarcerated girls to the Ware Youth Center, with which the leader of the state office has a longstanding personal connection.
Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration had ended the state’s contract with Ware in Coushatta in late 2023 to house up to 24 incarcerated girls after the facility requested an additional $600,000 to cover the girls’ health care expenses.
At the time, the Edwards administration said the state couldn’t afford to give Ware the additional money. It was already paying the facility $2.9 million per fiscal year to hold and care for the girls.
Kenny Loftin, who Gov. Jeff Landry placed in charge of the Office of Juvenile Justice, has reinstated the state contract again and is moving incarcerated girls to Ware. Loftin helped start the facility and personally ran Ware for most of his career in juvenile justice, from 1993 to 2015.
The detention center is not a traditional state facility and instead controlled by local officials. Judges and law enforcement officials from six north Louisiana parishes sit on its management board.
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Ware is also controversial because it was the subject of a New York Times investigation published in 2022 that alleged girls housed at the detention center had been subjected to rampant abuse and neglect over several years.
The alleged abuse would have overlapped with times Loftin was in charge of Ware, but he was never accused of being involved in the alleged misconduct. During his confirmation hearing last year, Loftin also said the news story was full of lies and false statements.
Last week, Loftin told legislators that eight girls had already been moved to Ware. An additional 12 incarcerated girls are still living in an old jail in St. Martinville, which serves as an extension for the Acadiana Center for Youth, but will also be eventually sent to Ware as well.
“We’re in the process of transitioning them back to Ware because Ware is just a much better facility,” said Loftin at a meeting of the Louisiana Legislature’s Select Committee on Women and Children.
Loftin said the St. Martinville jail is at capacity and can’t hold all 20 girls currently in state custody. All the girls can’t be sent to Ware yet because the appropriate staff hasn’t been hired at the facility yet.
Ware had asked for a significant bump in health care funding in 2023 to make up for money it had erroneously received from the federal government, Curtis Nelson, then director of the Office of Juvenile Justice, said at the time.
The facility had been enrolling incarcerated girls in the Medicaid program, even though incarcerated people can’t typically qualify for the federally-backed health insurance.
“Because of the federal law, we are not able to do that,” Loftin said when a legislator asked him last week if incarcerated girls could be enrolled in Medicaid.
The Office of Juvenile Justice did not respond to phone calls or an email with questions sent last Thursday about whether it had added funding to Ware’s contract to cover more health care expenses for the incarcerated girls.
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