The Georgia prison system is failing to protect the state's youngest inmates from violent attacks and sexual assaults, a motion filed Thursday in federal court alleges.

The Southern Center for Human Rights contends that young inmates at Lee Arrendale State Prison in northeast Georgia routinely fall prey to older prisoners. The Atlanta-based center is asking a judge to find the Georgia Department of Corrections in contempt of a 1991 court order governing conditions at the prison, in Alto in Habersham County.

"Rapes, stabbings, chokings and beatings with locks, broomsticks, trash cans and other objects continually occur at Arrendale, leaving some of the state's youngest inmates with severe physical and psychological trauma," the motion states. Inmate advocates and parents fear that the young men will leave prison worse than they entered, it says.

Arrendale, once a reform school for boys, now houses Georgia's youngest convicted felons among its 1,200-inmate population. The legal filing states that there are 231 inmates at Arrendale under age 21. Eleven of them are inmates under age 17 who were convicted as adults. Though those inmates are segregated from adults, they eventually join the general population after turning 18.

"The age difference, combined with lax supervision by guards and broken locks on cell doors, has resulted in rapes, other violent assaults (and, in one case, death), of vulnerable, teenaged inmates," the motion states. "Young inmates, in particular, live in constant fear of being sexually assaulted."

Thursday's legal action comes after investigators for the human rights center and lawyers spent months interviewing inmates at Arrendale and documenting at least 41 "serious" incidents of violence or sexual assaults since 2001. In February, Wayne Boatwright Jr., 18, was strangled in his cell. His family sued the Corrections Department, and lawyers are negotiating a settlement.

Arrendale had the Georgia prison system's second-highest rate of violent disciplinary infractions in 2003, according to a Corrections Department study. Only the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville — notorious for holding the state's most dangerous inmates — had a higher rate.

Detailed plan sought

The center, along with lawyers for Atlanta law firm King & Spalding, is asking a judge to hold the prison system in contempt of a 1991 consent order in a class-action lawsuit over conditions at Arrendale. Thursday's motion alleges that the prison is plagued by inadequate staffing and poor security. The center wants to force the prison system to submit a detailed plan to curb violence at the prison, and the appointment of a monitor to make sure the plan is carried out. It also recommends that fines and penalties be levied against the prison system if it fails to act.

A Corrections Department spokeswoman said the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

In an interview in August, Arrendale warden Tony Turpin said that violent incidents at the prison have declined in recent years. He has also noted that, while many of the inmates are young, they have been convicted of serious violent crimes, including murder, rape and armed robbery. Turpin said some of the violence is unavoidable: brutal prison justice for inmates who steal, act tough or otherwise violate an unwritten convict code.

Young inmates who spoke with an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter during a tour of the prison in August seemed to back up the warden's argument, saying that trouble generally finds only those who are looking for it.

"I was kind of on guard, waiting for somebody to try me," Josh Kernea, 18, of Ringgold, serving a seven-year sentence for false imprisonment, said then. "I ain't been tried. I mind my own business. I don't go around acting stupid."

But a former Arrendale inmate said such statements are just tough talk by young men who are fighting for survival.

"If you're young and you go in there, you're going to get tried up [tested] from the get-go," said Shane Prather of Conyers, who was released last year after serving four years for statutory rape. "They basically want you to fight. If you fall weak, they're going to try to rape you."