Solitary at 11, Dead at 16: One Kid’s Path to Adult Prison

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Content warning: self-harm, suicide

Roadhouse Family Diner in Paris, Texas, is on Main Street, which is also U.S. Highway 271. The ceilings are corrugated steel, the walls are wood-paneled, and the waffles are shaped like Texas.

This is where, in the back with the sinks and the boxes of soda syrups, Amnisty Freelen would take calls from her 11-year-old son in prison.

The state didn’t call it prison. They called it a “Juvenile Correctional Facility.” But just like prison, you can’t call anyone incarcerated there. They call you when they get a chance, and only if they have enough money to pay for it. There is no voicemail. You either pick up or you don’t.

At the Roadhouse, Amnisty mostly washed dishes. But that was too loud for speakerphone conversations with little Joshua Beasley Jr., so when he called her at work, she’d turn the faucet off. That’s how she describes it. As she cut tomatoes or onions, or refilled ketchup bottles, he’d ask how his brothers were doing. He’d tell her about the other boys at the facility 275 miles from his family. And he’d tell her how much he hated it there. She says over and over again, he told her: “It’s hard here, Mom.”

He told her how often corrections officers pepper-sprayed him. She says at one point, it seemed to be happening every week, usually when Joshua was trying to strangle himself in his cell.

Joshua was incarcerated because of a series of offenses committed at age 11. First, he got into a fight with his older brother and threatened him with a kitchen knife. Next, he was arrested for spray-painting a building. While on probation for the graffiti, he kicked an officer at the disciplinary school where the state sent him.

Joshua spent most of the next five years in solitary confinement by other names in Texas Juvenile Justice Department facilities, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of his parents. It accuses the state of deliberate indifference to Joshua’s needs, and argues that it caused his death by negligence. The suit points out that his transfer to adult prison at 16 was particularly harmful.

As the preteen’s self-harm and suicide attempts intensified, the state implemented more and more restrictions. During his years in confinement, he was allowed to hug his mother only once, according to the lawsuit. His counselors and case workers were constantly changing, and to treat his multiple diagnosed mental illnesses, he was prescribed a combination of drugs that can have the side effect of increasing suicidality – Zoloft and Abilify, among others. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice did not respond to our questions about Joshua, nor about general policies and statistics for minors in their custody.

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department declined to comment on the lawsuit, but a spokesperson denied that the department uses “solitary confinement” at all. They say youth are in groups during the day and alone at night, unless they’re “exhibiting extreme violence toward themselves.” Then they are placed in what the department calls protective custody, and what the lawsuit calls solitary confinement. The spokesperson said “protective custody” is very rare – used in less than 1% of suicide assessments over the last five years.

The lawsuit describes a litany of Joshua’s self-harm, which resulted in punishments – denied calls with his mother, denied parole, denied exit from his cell. In response to these punishments, he’d hurt himself more. For some periods, he was held in solitary confinement 23 hours per day. That’s what Amnisty says. She has screenshots of their video calls when Joshua would look out of the food slot in his cell door to talk to her, with an officer holding up a screen for him to see.

Even in near-total isolation, Joshua found ways to hurt himself. He found staples, and broke pieces of floor tile, and gouged his arms with these things repeatedly. He swallowed metal, and buried objects so deep in his skin and urethra that he required multiple hospital trips, as the lawsuit details. Often, he tied things around his neck to choke himself. Amnisty says on some video calls she could see bruising on his neck from the ligatures.

At age 16, the state transferred Joshua to an adult prison, the Wayne Scott Unit, where he was further isolated. The lawsuit says at times he was kept naked. He was allowed only sack meals. He was not allowed to call his mother. Officers covered his window so adults would not be able to see inside – a policy enforced by the warden. “He couldn’t even look out of that cell he died in,” Amnisty says.

After a month without calls, and weeks after losing access to the tablet that allowed him to message his mother, Joshua tied a sheet around his neck and killed himself.

The warden who called Amnisty didn’t use the word “dead,” she says. He used the word “unresponsive.” Later, Amnisty learned from prison records that two hours before officers found him dead, Joshua had been talking about his phone-restriction punishment. He was assigned to be checked on every 15 minutes. He was left unchecked for more than two hours.

When Amnisty saw Joshua in his casket, it was the first time she had seen him in three months. In photos of the service, his skin is gray, and his button-up shirt is red like his casket. When Amnisty approached, she had a sudden urge to unbutton it. That’s how she describes it. She did, and she saw his throat. There are photos of that, too: fingernail-sized red wounds, like maybe he was trying to pull the sheet off. “What I seen was Josh trying to live,” she says.

It has been a difficult spring for Amnisty. March 24 was the second anniversary of her son’s death in prison. She says it was finally time to clean out his old dresser drawers.

They were full of children’s clothes, kids’ size 11 and 13, mostly Nike. And there were papers he wrote raps on. Lots of lyrics, many of them crossed out. One is called “Slime Life.”

Two weeks after the dresser cleaning, Amnisty drove 300 miles south of her home in Paris to the Capitol. When Joshua was alive in prison, she testified before lawmakers about the conditions many times. Now, she’s pleading with lawmakers not to pass a bill that would move more Texas teenagers into adult prisons. It would allow these transfers for kids as young as 15.

Amnisty says most of the time, when she thinks about losing Joshua, she’s either numb or angry. But when she learned about Senate Bill 1727, she thought she was going to throw up.

The Texas Senate has already passed the bill, and it was advanced by a committee in the Texas House.

The bill’s author, state Sen. Charles Perry, says the state needs to reduce the number of assaults by juveniles against officers in corrections facilities. When he introduced the bill in April, he pointed out that the state counted hundreds of these assaults in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

To do this, the bill mostly finds ways to prevent kids from being released. It would eliminate a community supervision option for certain incarcerated teenagers 17 and above, and it would block judges from shortening children’s sentences except in narrow circumstances. For many kids, it would prevent their release if they are “alleged” to have committed a felony while in the juvenile justice system. But the worst part for Amnisty is a provision that would lower the age at which minors can enter adult prison.

“In a nutshell, we’re asking to drop the age from 16 to 15 to send them,” Perry testified April 1. “It’s kids that act like adults and offend in a very violent and aggressive way that would get this treatment.”

Amnisty says she believes in God. She says she thinks about Mary a lot – a mother watching her son die, covered in lacerations. She says she thinks Joshua was a sacrifice. “For other children to live, and to change, and to get the rehabilitation they desperately need.”

When she testified against the legislation April 7, she told lawmakers that attempting to protect guards is a good thing. But, she argued, rehabilitation is the best option to do that.

One of the guards responsible for Joshua, Tiffany Andrews, says Joshua protected her. Once when she was pregnant, some kids got into a fight, and Joshua went over and de-escalated so she didn’t have to. She said he prevented fights for her all the time. She calls him a good kid, and “proof” that the department is broken. “He didn’t trust the system, and he had every right not to trust it,” she says.

Amnisty didn’t mention Andrews in her testimony April 7. But she said once, when Joshua was pepper-sprayed while restrained, he spit on a guard. For that, he got an assault charge – the kind that would send a 15-year-old to adult prison under SB 1727.

The first night Joshua spent in jail, Amnisty was relieved. He’d been running away a lot, and she’d been praying. There was a closet in Amnisty’s house dedicated to prayer, with church service bulletins pinned up all over the walls.

When Amnisty laid in bed that night, she was with Aarin, her soon-to-be-husband, this man who brought her three boys to church, “the first man who never did drugs with me.” He held her in his arms, and she felt safe. That’s what she says she remembers most – feeling safe. Joshua wasn’t on the street somewhere. She knew exactly where he was. People were there to take care of him. She thought he was safe, too. “And I was wrong.”

Amnisty grew up in small towns across Texas, places with 2,000 or fewer residents and main streets that look like cowboy movie sets. She says she always trusted police. When her brother had violent episodes as a kid, her mom called the police. They were, after all, the only people Amnisty’s mother could call. There were no crisis counselors. On those nights when Amnisty was young, police would come, and they could calm things down.

Amnisty blames herself and Joshua’s father for the boy’s mental illnesses. She was addicted to meth in his early years and incarcerated far from home for several months as a result. During her incarceration, Joshua’s dad had an affair. He chose the new woman, and the family tore apart, and Amnisty and the three little boys lived for a while in a shelter.

When Joshua started acting out, he wasn’t self-harming. He hated authority, ran away, and fought with his brothers, Amnisty says. When the state sent him to a disciplinary school and he continued to show symptoms of depression and other mental health disorders, a probation officer told Amnisty the best mental health care available to him would be in Texas’ juvenile facilities.

“And I really believed them,” Amnisty says. “That he would get the help that he really needed to rehabilitate and do better. That wasn’t the case.”

This week, Amnisty is going through Joshua’s things. One by one, she lays out his letters, essays, and counseling worksheets on her blue and white striped comforter and takes pictures of them.

One is in faint pencil, Joshua’s round, tidy script. “My name is Joshua Beasley and I’m 14. And I started using weed when I was 11, but one of the main reasons why I started using weed was because my granny on my dad’s side of the family passed away from cancer and I was really close to her.”

There was not much in Joshua’s final cell. He was only allowed a few things he couldn’t hurt himself with: some of these papers, a pair of rubber slippers, a Bible.

The Bible is black and beat up with the back cover torn off. The last page has a single handwritten note. Joshua’s mother says it looks like his handwriting, but she can’t be sure.

“1 Corth 13-11” diagonal across the top of the page: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.