State plans to reopen Jetson juvenile jail

=Louisiana officials plan to reopen a youth prison in April that was shuttered over a decade ago when it was declared inappropriate for young people. 
The state Office of Juvenile Justice plans to move 36 incarcerated youth to the old Jetson Center for Youth in Baker after some minor upgrades to buildings on the site. The interim facility is expected to help with overcrowding in the state’s youth prison system, agency undersecretary Jason Starnes said. 
“We desperately need some relief with our bed capacity issues,” Starnes told state lawmakers at a budget hearing last week.
The long-term plan for the Jetson site is to replace the existing facility with a brand new youth prison complex that will house up to 72 children and teenagers. It is expected to cost close to $70 million and would open during the 2027-28 state budget year.
In the meantime, the state will renovate existing buildings at Jetson to accommodate a dormitory, cafeteria, laundry facility and classrooms for the 36 youth who will arrive in the spring.
The money to make those buildings inhabitable will come from the budget for the new Jetson construction, said Matt Baker, director of the state Office of Planning and Facility Control, at the budget hearing. He did not say how much will be spent on the rehabilitation. 
“We’re going to do some cleaning up,” Baker said. “But essentially, we are doing as efficient of a renovation as possible so we can retain as much budget as we can for the new facility.”
Once the new building is opened, the state plans to tear down all the existing facilities on Jetson’s campus, Baker said.
When Jetson was closed in 2014, Gov. Bobby Jindal’s staff described it as old and obsolete. Some Jetson buildings first opened in 1948 and were not conducive to the therapeutic setting the juvenile justice system was trying to embrace at the time.
State officials also justified Jetson’s closure by saying it was difficult to secure because its campus is large and buildings are spread out over several acres. 
More recently, Louisiana used Jetson as its temporary women’s prison for nine years. The state hastily moved its incarcerated women to Jetson in 2016 after the women’s prison in St. Gabriel flooded and became unlivable. They were moved out of Jetson earlier this year when a new women’s prison opened at another St. Gabriel site. Advocates for incarcerated women complained about the condition of Jetson while the women were housed there, but juvenile justice officials say they intend to use a different building. 
Still, Starnes admitted most of the facilities at Jetson are in bad physical shape. 
“A lot of the facilities are very aged. [The buildings] are in very poor condition,” he said last week.
Legislators are also concerned about the impact to the surrounding communities. When Jetson was open, breakouts happened frequently and surrounding neighbors experienced waves of crime from the facility. At the time, the facility housed hundreds of incarcerated youth. State Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, said she is concerned about new residential developments under construction near the Jetson site. 
 “We have to be good neighbors to the people we are going to be next to,” Barrow said.