What happened to children in detention? Caring for children in a Juvenile Justice System after a disaster.

I HAVE SEEN a lot of this country’s natural disasters, having lived through hurricanes in Long Island, New York, snowstorms in Albany, New York, and tornadoes in Birmingham, Alabama. However, nothing could prepare me for the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I am the medical director for a long-term juvenile correctional facility, the damage from Hurricane Katrina was more collateral, as opposed to the direct hit that New Orleans, Louisiana, suffered. Nonetheless, we received the brunt of the hurricane’s aftermath. My facility, the Jetson Center for Youth (JCY), is located approximately 80 miles northwest of New Orleans. Louisiana has 2 other long-term facilities, Bridge City Center for Youth on New Orleans’s west bank of the Mississippi River, and Swanson Center for Youth in Shreveport (more than 280 miles from landfall). In the past 2 years, youth from the Bridge City facility had been evacuated to JCY twice in anticipation of hurricanes. Fortunately, both evacuations were false alarms but, as it turns out, useful trial runs.