One of the Arizona children’s detention facilities that was last year forced to shut down after the state found the company running them was failing to comply with employee background checks will soon be back to jailing kids. “An investigation launched last year by the state's health department after several reports of abuse found Southwest Key didn't have fingerprint records for some employees,” The New York Times reports. “It temporarily stopped taking in more children, closed two facilities and had to meet other criteria to stay open.”
Southwest Key claimed that it has resolved the issues, and an application for the Phoenix facility was approved last weekend, with capacity to detain as many as 420 kids. “An application to reopen the second shuttered facility where authorities investigated physical abuse but decided not to pursue charges is pending.” Authorities may have decided to not pursue charges, but there was no question kids were abused, because it was caught on camera.
In one video, an adult is shown pushing and shoving a boy so hard that he hits the wall behind him. “Another video,” NBC News reported, “appears to show another person dragging a child through a room and then trying to pull the child across the floor as the child lay down and tried to use its legs to block a doorway. At the same time, another person dragged a different child with its arms extended across the same room.”
Yet “authorities investigated but decided not to pursue charges, saying there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of proving’ the workers committed a crime,” the Times continued. Numerous Southwest Key employees have also been arrested and charged with child molestation, including one former employee who faced 11 charges after molesting at least eight boys over a one-year period.
Now Southwest Key is returning to maximum jailing capacity. This group may have had noble origins—former CEO Juan Sanchez established Southwest Key “to help children stay out of prison”—but the “non-profit” has since rotted, now holding lucrative federal contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to jail kids. Sanchez himself was forced to resign this past March, mired in accusations of self-dealing and reports that top executives were receiving million-dollar paychecks.