Triblive is reporting…A group of nearly 70 people alleged Wednesday they were sexually abused as children while housed in detention centers in Pennsylvania, adding to earlier lawsuits targeting what the accusers’ lawyers say is the state’s broken juvenile justice system.
The latest group of plaintiffs filed suit in state or federal court against 10 different juvenile facilities across Pennsylvania, three of them state-operated. Some of the plaintiffs said they were repeatedly raped by staff members and threatened with harm if they reported it. Others said their reports of sexual abuse were ignored. None of the facilities protected the children in their care, lawyers said.
The facilities’ operators “put profit ahead of the safety of children,” attorney Jerome Block told The Associated Press. “Many of these juvenile facilities where the sexual abuse occurred remain open, and we have seen no evidence that the inadequate procedures and policies that enabled the sexual abuse have been fixed.”
Twenty-two of the accusers were housed at Merakey USA’s Northwestern Academy outside Shamokin, which closed in 2016. One man says he was raped by two male staff members at Northwestern in 2004, when he was 13 years old, and he was told he wouldn’t be able to go home if he reported it.
Merakey, a large provider of developmental, behavioral health and education services with more than 8,000 employees in a dozen states, “allowed Northwestern Academy’s culture of sexual abuse and brutality to continue unabated until the facility’s closure in 2016,” lawyers wrote.
The Shamokin area facility is closed and some of the property is home to the new Northumberland County Prison.
