National Public Radio has done a series on the nation’s largest juvenile justice detention facility in the small town of Walnut Grove, Miss.

The story was triggered, in part, by a civil rights lawsuit brought by the Montgomery, Ala.,-based Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit against the private operator of the facility, GEO Group, claims that inmates are held in inhuman conditions, that sex takes place between female guards and male inmates and that inmate-on- inmate violence is rampant.

In mid-2010 the Louisiana-based GEO Group was awarded a contract by the Georgia Department of Corrections to operate a 1,500 adult correctional detention in Milledgeville.