Well, I’ve never been to juvie, but one of my best friends is a Juvenile Corrections Officer here at the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), so I’ll answer what I know about things here.
The place is freaking crazy. If there’s a riot at big-people jail, it’s on the news - they have riots at the DJJ every couple of weeks. The officers don’t carry any weapons whatsoever, and you have to move up to JCO II before you even get handcuffs. The training is pretty minimal and I think it’s a dangerous place to work.
The kids at the “campus” J works at live in “dorms” which are divided somewhat by offense and age of offender (AFAIK it’s boys only at this facility). So you have a dorm of big sex offenders and a dorm of little sex offenders, in other words. There are no bars or anything - kids are supposed to be in their rooms (which have no doors or any actual way to lock them down) but are often out of place (for which they get cited, theoretically). They do go to school every day, but they can’t take books home or anything because of their tendancy to be used as weapons, so I don’t see that there’s really a whole lot of learnin’ going on.
There’s an active contraband trade, which is partly the guards’ fault - J says a guard can get $250 for a carton of cigarettes, which is enough profit to motivate a lot of people. Cigarettes and cash are the main contraband but they also find porn, drugs, and oddly enough Chap Stick. Kids are searched when they get back from school (which is on the “campus”), after visitation (Sundays), etc, but a lot of the guards are pretty slack about it. Actually, a lot of the guards seem awfully slack in general - if they did what they’re supposed to, maybe there wouldn’t be so many damned riots!
Kids are not allowed to touch each other, even in play. Is it a violent place where kids get the crap kicked out of them by bigger kids? Sure, sometimes, but the guards do seem pretty on top of actual violence. I mean, there are a lot of tough, mean kids in there, and I wouldn’t want to be the little scrawny one, no, but the guards do seem to generally keep them safe. I think there are three or four guards for each dorm, which can have anywhere from ten kids to (I think) twenty five, so the guard-to-juvenile ratio can vary a lot. The guards move around a lot, so it’s not the same people all the time for the same kids. It’s true, however, that once they put a kid from one gang into a dorm full of kids from another gang, and they beat him into a coma. (Two of them went to SCDC (adult prison), not that that helped the comatose child a damned bit. He did recover.) That sort of level of brutality seems to be rare, though.
It’s a sad situation all around, if you ask me - J’s been working there a year, and he says he’s maybe seen two or three kids in that time who he thinks will serve their sentances, get out, and get on with productive lives in society. A whole lot of kids go from going in and out of DJJ to going in and out of SCDC. He wants to get on with the police department, and I’d honestly feel better about him being a cop getting shot at than I do about him as a JCO at the DJJ. He storms into his second job, where I usually bring him dinner, almost every day seething about something awful that happened there that day, mostly because of mismanagement or incompetance on the part of his cow-orkers, honestly, although he gets his share of nasty bruises from the kids, too. In real prison, assaulting a guard means you might never see the outside again! There, it dosen’t seem to mean much of anything!
I’d like to reiterate that all of that only applies to this particular facility in this particular jurisdiction.