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Funding for New Youth Detention Center in Georgia Moving Through Legislature

Georgia state Senate budget writers signed off Tuesday on $3.35 million in immediate funding to open and staff a youth prison in south Fulton County. The new 80-bed Atlanta Youth Development Campus, the first in North Georgia, could open as soon as April, helping to ease pressures at the state's six other prisons for juveniles. Several of those facilities saw violent disturbances in 2011, culminating in November in the beating death of a 19-year-old in his cell at the Augusta YDC. Plans call for housing youths from metro Atlanta in the new YDC, DJJ spokesman Jim Shuler said. The department is not currently considering Juvenile Justice Commissioner Gale Buckner's suggestion, reported last month, to transfer the instigators of disturbances at the other facilities to the Atlanta YDC, he said.