BATON ROUGE - The Jetson Center for Youth has long been troubled, with juveniles escaping and poor conditions reported.

The center officially closed its doors in 2014, but the remnants of its past existence continue to linger, including 52 recent lawsuits filed against the center, including allegations of sexual abuse by correctional officers.

Several of the lawsuits claim youth between the ages of 11 and 17 were touched inappropriately, some raped by officers, and then threatened if they told supervisors.

"I'm not surprised at all, you know we've been advocating for a long time, 25 years to be exact, for this institution to adopt a more restorative approach to how they deal with our young people," Leadership Development Manager with Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, Antonio Travis said.

Travis says it's not the first time he's learned about legal action filed by individuals housed in the Jetson Center.

"Our organization is membership-led. Our members are directly impacted people, who have young people in these institutions, so we hear the stories all the time about what's happening inside those facilities," Travis said.

The center closed its doors in 2014. Just last year, state Juvenile Justice officials announced plans to reopen the facility.

"There is a movement now to put a limited number of male youth again in the Jetson facility, so people are a little nervous about it," State Representative Barbara Carpenter said.

Representative Carpenter's district includes the closed center site. Representative Carpenter says back when the facility was open, some of the youth would escape.

"And were all through the neighborhood. I live in that neighborhood, quite close to that area, so I know what it's like," Carpenter said.

That and the allegations found on these numerous suits remain reasons, advocates say, that the Jetson Center should remain closed.

"Building Jetson up with the same punitive culture that exists in these other facilities, we're going to get the same results, we're going to get the same stories, right, we're going to keep getting these things over and over again," Travis said.

We reached out to the Office of Juvenile Justice for an update on the reopening of the Jetson Center and to comment on
the lawsuits, but have not heard back yet.

Gina Womack, Co-founder and Executive Director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, issued the following statement following the news about the lawsuits:

Every time we hear about allegations of abuse in facilities, it is deeply troubling and heartbreaking. We know what these systems do because our families have lived it. When children are abused, traumatized, or neglected in custody, the damage doesn't stay behind prison walls. It follows them home, into the families, relationships, schools, and communities. The scandal goes beyond the abuse itself– it speaks to a whole system that repeatedly harms children and then acts shocked when the next crisis emerges.

That is exactly why reopening Jetson is the wrong answer. Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) was founded by parents whose children survived Louisiana's brutal youth prison system, and our movement helped win the closure of notorious youth prisons because we knew these institutions were causing harm, not healing. For more than two decades, families, youth, and advocates have warned that prisons do not make children safer; they expose them to more trauma while draining resources from the supports that actually help young people thrive. The lesson from these lawsuits is not that we need a different prison, a newer prison, or a reopened prison. How many times are we going to let history repeat itself at the expense of children's lives? Families fought hard to shut down Jetson because we saw firsthand the abuse, trauma, and damage these institutions caused. Reopening it risks repeating that history with a new generation of young people.

The reality is that this is a fundamentally harmful system for children. The solution is to invest in families, mental health care, education, and community-based supports. Louisiana's children deserve better than another prison, and our communities deserve investments that create safety, healing, and opportunity instead of more trauma.