>> we will be able to see change. >> gripping. inspiring. entertaining. talk to al jazeera. only on al jazeera america. >> several months ago, we received a package of dvds. it came from a group of lawyers in michigan, and it contained video testimonies by young inmates of the state's adult prisons. we're hiding their identities - but the stories we heard if true, were horrifying. >> tell me what he does. with his arm. >> now he's saying i want you to suck my d***. and i say no, i don't do that, man, i don't do that. he said you're going to now. >> the videos are testimony for a lawsuit. as teenagers, the young men were

incarcerated with older inmates who, they say, brutally assaulted them. >> he grabbed me on my neck and he told me he was going to f*** me. >> what we heard in the videos made us get on a plane to michigan. it was the starting point of our investigation into the treatment of youth in the adult criminal justice system. >> we are now on the record, this is the videotape deposition of john doe 1. >> and it began with an inmate we'll be referring to as: john doe 1. >> describe the weapon. >> it was about three inches long and it was a bunch of razors attached to a stick. >> he had me face down on the bed and he said if i screamed he was going to cut my throat. >> did you believe him? >> yes. >> i need you to describe in

step by step detail what happened. so he's pumping on you for seven minutes, he finishes did he -- >> can we take a break. >> sure. >> i need a break! >> the time is 1:52 pm. we are now off the record. >> in michigan, many of the prisons are located in remote, rural parts of the state. the one where john doe 1 is being held is 2 hours drive from detroit. >> the michigan department of corrections has a statewide policy that no cameras are allowed inside any of its prisons. but we've been told that the young man will be calling us shortly from a phone that's

right inside that facility where he's currently being held. >> john doe 1 was convicted of a series of offenses including home invasion and second degree criminal sexual conduct. he's been held here and at the facility across the road for more than three years. in that time, he says, he's been raped so often he's lost count of how many times it's happened. >> i was assaulted in the shower by another man that i didn't lock with. >> the first time - he's told the lawyers - he was 17 and it was his cellmate. >> did he regularly assault you? >> yeah, almost every day... >> and then-he says-his cellmate sold his key to other prisoners, who also assaulted him. >> guys would come in and out of my room without authorization and the staff made a comment to me when one of the guys walked out of my room and he laughed at me.

>> what was the comment? >> can i... can i say it on camera? >> you can say it. >> he said 'that's what happens to fags'. >> i'm so sorry. (starts to cry) >> he's alleging prison guards knew about the abuse but did nothing to stop it. >> hello can you hear me? >> he's currently locked down for 23 hours a day. he called during his one free hour on the yard.

>> you're currently being held in protective custody, is that right? why are you being held there? can you explain that? >> and do you feel safe there? >> what do the guards do when, when this is happening?

>> john doe 1's story is not the only one. >> thanks so much for talking to us. >> over the past two years, a team of lawyers here in ann arbor has been collecting testimony from other young inmates who say they were abused too. they filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 200 young inmates. deborah labelle is the lead lawyer on the case.

>> oh, hey deborah, hey it's sebastian from al jazeera. >> it's nice to meet you sebastian. >> it's nice to meet you too. thank you. >> i started getting letters from youth inside. and often they would say things like, really basic like, 'bad things are happening to me and i can't write it. can you come talk to me?' or, 'can you help me? please come talk to me.' one youth wrote about, he said he felt like a reindeer with meat on his head surrounded by lions. >> according to prison officials in michigan, they now send all minors their own housing unit-and keep them separated from older inmates. while the threat of rape may now be diminished, many of the youth say they've been harmed in other ways too.

the lawyers filed record requests for incidents involving minors - what came back was a rare glimpse of what life is like for teenagers behind bars. >> a lot of these dvds seem to have been shot by prison guards. there's dozens and dozens of them. in fact, there's so much material that lawyers still haven't even gone through all of it yet. >> so i'm giving you direct order now to back up to have these restraints put on you. >> hell, no! >> ... or we're going to use chemical agent right now. >> hell, no! >> prisoner is not complying with last order. >> copy. >> chemical agent administered at 15:55 hours... here give me your clothes. take off your clothes. hand me your clothes.

>> i want to wash it off. >> take off your clothes. >> part of the whole thing about the suit is that youth it's very improper to try to place youth in adult facilities and treat them according to adult standards. they are subject to being tasered and they are tasered. you can be put in solitary confinement, and they are, for extended periods of time. and i'm talking about being in a solitary cell for 23 hours a day 7 days a week. you're talking about food restrictions. so you're hungry, you're subject to tasering, solitary confinement, shackling, four point and five point restraints, all of the things that you can do to adults. >> stop. can i breathe? guys!!

i can't breathe!!! >> sit back. just relax. try to relax. >> catch more "faultlines" episodes on demand or at aljazeera.com/faultlines. >> government committees. >> they're spending money, they're not saving it. >> costing millions and getting nothing. >> it's a bogus sham. >> america tonight investigates. money for nothing. >> they've gotten away with it for years.

>> the idea of sending kids to adult prisons goes back to the 1990s "tough on crime" era - when almost every state in the nation passed laws making it easier to treat young offenders as adults. we wanted to meet the young men in the videos - but getting access to film them in prison was impossible.

but some of the plaintiffs are now out of prison - one said he was willing to talk, on the condition we hide his identity. john doe 11 was arrested at 17 for robbery in 2010. he was sentenced to 29 months as an adult. he'd been in prison about 2 months when, he claims, an older man followed him into the shower. >> he come in there after me, i started trying to fight with him but i was slippin' and slidin' everywhere and he got the best of me. >> you couldn't fight him off anymore. >> if i could i know i would have. i was just...defeated, simple as that. he got me. >> were you crying out while he was raping you as well? >> yeah.

i was screaming, you know? "help, get the f off me!" you know, like there's no way nobody heard anything. there's no way. i will never believe that. the officer's desk is like ten, fifteen feet on this side of the door, you know? you mean to tell me you can't hear another person screamin'? well so, i just laid there in the shower, crying for a pretty long time. i was beat, i was wore down, i was bleeding... >> you were bleeding from your face? >> no. from my... rectum, you know? >> bleeding? >> yeah, i was trying to...get myself...back together, somehow. like i had just fell to pieces you know? and somehow i had to stand up and walk to my bunk,

walk past everybody. >> was it hard to walk? >> oh yeah. >> you were in pain? >> yeah, i mean, from the rape itself, from the fight, from all of it, you know. >> it was difficult, he says but he eventually told his mother what happened. >> when he was in prison, of course i worried about his safety and his mental state. now that he's home, i have to worry about this eating him up inside. my son was already living with himself knowing that he was a criminal, knowing he made bad choices, knowing he had already broken his mother's heart. and now he has to live his life as a rape victim as well. he was 17 years old. and that's what they have chosen for my child. and then to think that i

couldn't protect him but to put my trust in the judicial system, to think that they could protect him. and to find out that he stood in that bathroom and screamed for minutes and minutes and minutes and nobody went to help him. that's horrible. >> john doe 11 was one of more than a thousand minors sent to adult prisons in michigan since 2003. the lawsuit is focused on just a fraction of those - it's a class action open only to inmates alleging harassment or abuse since 2010. >> we're trying to move this case forward and have the court address the issues before 2018 your honor. >> the complaint was first filed in 2013, but it's going to be some time before the case gets to trial.

and the state's lawyers are trying to get it thrown out altogether. >> let these plaintiffs support, prove their own claims because they are all different. >> they all have one thing in common, a very significant allegation or claim which is that they were all incarcerated as juveniles in adult facilities with adults and claim that they were injured by that practice. and this is the central issue of liability. >> is it? to me it isn't. to me the central issue of liability is were they injured? did these events in fact occur"? >> whether or not the events occurred will be for a jury to decide in this case. outside the courtroom, the department of corrections has said they're confident that assertions made in the lawsuit are false. but michigan's governor rick snyder-who is also named as a

defendant in the lawsuit-hasn't directly addressed the allegations so far. we caught up with him at a press conference he was holding in detroit. >> so the governor's just arrived and we've heard he's going to make a major statement just shortly about criminal justice and prison reform. >> one thing we need to recognize in the vast majority of the people that are incarcerated are coming back out. and should be coming back out. and the question is, is by helping them be successful coming back out it's a win for all of us. >> the governor's speech made no mention of concerns about conditions for minors in michigan's prisons. >> what's your response to allegations that young men under the age of 18 have been sexually abused and abused in serious criminal ways in prisons in michigan and feel that the state failed to protect them? >> yeah, actually that's in litigation. so i can't comment on active matters where the state is a

party to litigation. that wouldn't be legally appropriate. so what i would say is, with respect to looking at the overall subject matter, if you read the message, you'll see i have a section in there on the prison rape act and how to deal with it, in terms of us being proactive on that topic. >> do you think if it did happen the state would be liable though, i mean if'.. >> again, that's a matter of litigation. i'm not going to speculate on litigation. >> the "prison rape elimination act" the governor was referring to - known as prea - is a federal initiative to try to reduce the level of sexual assault in prison. it was passed in 2003-but it wasn't until almost ten years later that michigan's department of corrections began separating minors from adults. we'd heard there were several corrections officials at the event. since we'd been requesting an interview for weeks with no success, we tried approaching them directly. >> hi my name's sebastian walker, i'm with al jazeera. we wanted to know why it had

taken so long for the state to act on federal findings. >> i'm not going to comment on that at this time. >> but nobody wanted to talk. here's michigan's top corrections official telling me to go and speak to his staff. >> so if we do get somebody from mdoc.. >> it'll be me. >> it'll be on your side, okay. >> eventually, this spokesperson did agree to an interview. we wanted to find out how many assault complaints the department received when youth were still being housed with adults. >> would it not be obvious that younger inmates would be targeted more frequently for this type of attack given that their more vulnerable status? >> well again it predates me so i can't comment on something that was taken place or not taken place before i was but if i can find those numbers for you then i can provide that to you. >> the spokesperson told us

they've turned over more than a half million pages of documents and more than 500 videos-but so far none of it, he says, proves any of the allegations. >> so do you think if these investigations actually discovered that the allegations of abuse were true then the mdoc would accept responsibility for that? >> well that would be something to, i mean that's, um, that's something that we'd have to look at and it's not something that i can comment on right now. >> if somebody in your custody a minor was raped by an adult inmate of one of the prisons here in michigan, you can't say for sure that you would even be responsible for that? >> a court of law would determine that and then whatever happened would come after that. but that's all i can say at this point, because those are just, that's a hypothetical and they're also just allegations that have been made at this point.

>> catch more "faultlines" episodes on demand or at aljazeera.com/faultlines. >> al jazeera america primetime. get the real news you've been lo

>> the policy of placing minors in adult prisons was made here -

at michigan's state capitol. these days, though, not everyone in this chamber agrees with it. >> how many people have to get raped? how many people have to get beaten up? how many people have to be abused in prison before somebody says, whoa we got a problem here. >> state representative harvey santana says that lawmakers have largely ignored the issue-but that it's starting to gain attention. >> have you heard some of these stories? >> i've read 'em. i've heard 'em. you know, i've met people that have said they've been abused. >> you think it's plausible that some of those stories could be true.. >> i'm convinced of it. >> and other people in this chamber you think are also of the same mind but just don't want to say that openly? >> i agree yeah, absolutely. i think that people understand what has happened, what goes on but listen, 'i'm not going to be concerned about it because it's way over there.

it's something that i don't have everyday access to and it's something that people in my district, it isn't going to resonate with them.' you know and that's the attitude that they take unfortunately. >> santana thinks separating minors from adults is not enough-he and several colleagues plan to propose legislation to keep youth out of adult facilities altogether. >> if your job is to make sure that people are treated decently and humanely inside our correctional system. and i use the word correctional. your job is to correct the behavior so that one day they get released back into society. and if we're not doing that, then we have failed. >> the legislature has yet to change many of the harsh sentencing laws that were enacted decades ago. and that's had an impact on the lives of teens and their families across the state, people like nevalynn grays. >> me and my brother.

older. >> that's you? >> that's me. >> and that's dj. >> yep, that's him. the last time i saw him was in the county jail. he was 14, 14, 15 in the county jail. >> it looks like you guys were close. >> yeah, we were super close. >> nevalynn was still in school when her little brother, dennis jr, was arrested for carjacking. she still has the letters he wrote her from jail. >> tell mom i miss her and i love her. i think about y'all every night. write me back as soon as you all get this letter. when you do, i'm going to try to get ahold of an envelope and write back as soon as i can. so.. >> does that make you sad? >> yeah, it make me sad a lot. it make me sad a lot. >> dennis jr was transferred from county jail to an adult prison when he was 16 - less

than three months later, he hanged himself in his cell. nevlaynn says she'd noticed a change in the tone of his letters. >> it wasn't him. it wasn't something like, even when i opened the letter and you know you see eyes and tears falling from it, it's like, what is he going through, like. don't do that, you know. it was like that last cry for help, that's all i got. you know what i'm saying? >> she says she doesn't know exactly why her brother took his own life. but she says one thing is clear-he never should have been sent to an adult facility. >> you can't sit here and tell me you'd be okay with your child, your son, mingling with an adult your age. these are babies in prison you know.

>> the policies that have sent thousands of youth to adult prisons in michigan are now being questioned - but so far the laws remain in place. meanwhile, former and current prisoners continue to come forward with allegations. some of them echo the testimony of those first john does. >> i don't like people touching me. can't sleep well at night. afraid. it really have me thinking about hurting myself and different things. >> you're ashamed? have you told your family? >> no. >> why not? >> i can't.

>> have you had flashbacks about these incidents?. >> yes, just like being on the ground with my face in the pavem-in the tiles. i feel like i can't wash it off. and i can't, i think people can just look at me and tell. >> catch more "faultlines" episodes on demand or at aljazeera.com/faultlines. >> investigating a dark side of the law >> they don't have the money to puchace their freedom... >> for some...crime does pay... >> the bail bond industry has been good to me.... i'll make a chunk of change off the crime... >> fault lines al jazeera america's hard hitting... >> today they will be arrested... >> ground breaking... they're firing canisters of gas at us... emmy award winning investigative series... chaising bail only on al jazeera america

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