IN Girls School Blasted by Judge

Most of the media outlets are carrying stories about St. Joseph Co. Circuit Court Judge Peter Nemeth blasting state officials about the Girls School facility in Indianapolis.  The facility, which houses and “treats” juvenile female offenders from throughout the state, is being criticized by the Judge for:

Girls are not receiving an adequate education, apparently are being allowed to have frequent sex with each other, are not being prepared to re-enter the community and are not receiving needed psychiatric care, Judge Peter Nemeth says his staff has discovered.

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Nemeth said his staff has learned through interviews with St. Joseph County girls at the facility that many are having frequent sex with each other there because staff levels are too low for adequate supervision. Some staff know it’s happening but still leave the girls’ doors unlocked at night, giving tacit approval to the sex, some girls have told Nemeth’s personnel.

The girls also complained that male staff members, men they identify by name, often make sexual advances toward them, speaking to and touching them inappropriately.

Speaking with The [South Bend] Tribune, Nemeth called homosexual sex “aberrant” and “not normal,” but said heterosexual sex also has no place in a juvenile rehabilitative setting, where the juvenile needs to instead focus on changing thinking and behavior.

The spread of sexually transmitted diseases also is a risk.
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In a pointed letter he sent this week to Gov. Mitch Daniels, Nemeth said the girls school, formally called the Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Facility, along with the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility for boys, must stop treating children as “adult prisoners” and focus more on rehabilitating them.

“There’s no requirement that anybody achieve anything,” Nemeth told The Tribune. “It’s like how they warehouse them in the adult system. You do your time and you’re gone.”