Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (10 page)

“It's not about how I
feel
,” he answered patiently. “I
feel
like maybe I won't get arrested trying to get to work today.”

Remember adolescence? The keen eye for hypocrisy that has not yet acquired the veneer of self-righteousness; the seeking, probing, and
endless philosophizing; the persistent questioning of a status quo that—because they have yet to make the slow bargain with the world that constitutes social adulthood—teenagers see more clearly than their elders can afford to? It didn't take the findings of a blue ribbon commission to let Jared and other black and brown youths know how the world saw them. For that, they had the “purse clutchers” (their term for the adults who crossed the street when they approached or shrunk into elevator walls to avoid getting too close), who are ubiquitous whenever young people of color have the temerity to step outside their turf.

Race and class, more than anything else,
including
behavior, determine who gets locked up in this country. As many as 90 percent of
all
teenagers, according to research based on confidential interviews, acknowledge having committed illegal acts serious enough to warrant incarceration. Most are never arrested, much less incarcerated. They simply go on with their lives, growing up and, as they do, growing out of the impulsivity that leads so many teens to break the law.
Young people of color face a different reality. They comprise 38 percent of the youth population, but
72 percent
of incarcerated juveniles. Multiple studies reveal that this gap is a result not of differences in behavior but of differences in how we respond to that behavior—differences grounded in race.

Racism does not merely inform or infuse our juvenile justice system; it drives that system at every level, from legislation to policing to sentencing to conditions of confinement and enforcement of parole. Harsher treatment of poor youth of color at every point on the juvenile justice spectrum ensures that they will be grossly overrepresented in the so-called deep end: long-term locked facilities. “Your skin is your sin,” one young man I met recalled young wards saying inside one such facility.

In almost every state, youth of color are held in secure facilities at rates as high as four and a half times their percentage of the population.
Black youths are five times more likely than their white peers to be incarcerated, and Hispanic youths twice as likely.

Reams of research have left little doubt that so-called racial disparities result from disparate treatment rather than different rates of criminality. Across the board, the justice system treats youth of color far more harshly than it does whites, after controlling for offending history and myriad other factors. For instance:

       
•
   
African American youth are 4.5 times more likely (and Latino youth 2.3 times more likely) than white youth to be detained
for identical offenses
.

       
•
   
African American youth with no prior offenses are far more likely than white youth with similar histories to be incarcerated on the same charges. Specifically, they are
nine times as likely to be incarcerated for crimes against persons; four times as likely for property crimes; seven times as likely for public order offenses; and
forty-eight times
as likely for drug offenses.

       
•
   
About half of white teenagers arrested on a drug charge go home without being formally charged. Only a quarter of black teens catch a similar break.

       
•
   
Despite the fact that white youth are
more than a third more likely
to sell drugs than are African American youth, black youth are twice as likely to be arrested on charges of drug sales.
Nearly half (48 percent) of all juveniles incarcerated on drug charges are black, while blacks make up 17 percent of the juvenile population.

       
•
   
When charges are filed, white teenagers are more likely to be placed on probation, while black youth are more likely to be placed behind bars.
According to research from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, when white and black youths with similar histories were charged with the same offenses, black youths were six times more likely to be incarcerated in public institutions. Latino youths were three times more likely than white youths to be incarcerated under similar circumstances.

       
•
   
Unequal treatment determines how deeply a young person will penetrate into the system. African American children comprise 17 percent of the overall youth population, 30 percent of those arrested, and 62 percent of those prosecuted in the adult criminal system. Latino youth are 43 percent more likely than white youth to wind up in the adult system.

These gross inequalities persist despite decades of advocacy and reform efforts aimed at creating a more equitable system. The result has been not a resolution of the racism that drives the current system, nor even a mitigation of the crushing odds young people of color face before the law,
but instead the growth of what the W. Haywood Burns Institute calls a
“multi-million dollar cottage industry whose primary activity is to restate the problem of disparities, in essence, endlessly adoring the question of what to do about [disproportionate minority confinement], but never reaching an answer.”

The federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, for instance, was amended in 1988 to require the states to study the problem of racial disparity in juvenile justice and make “good faith” efforts to remedy it. The Department of Justice funded a major effort to reduce racial disparity, and private philanthropy has launched or supported efforts with similar aims. But as Barry Krisberg, director of research and policy at the University of California, Berkeley's Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, puts it, despite these efforts to “control this entrenched, discriminatory tendency, the problem has only gotten worse.”

For far too many young people of color, coming of age is marked by
metal detectors and onsite police officers in their schools, security guards following them in stores, the “gang squad” showing up to break up school yard scuffles, purse clutchers, car-door lockers, and many other signals that they are now old enough to be presumed guilty at a glance. In this sense, youth prisons are the end phase of what sociologist Victor Rios calls the
“youth control complex,” a densely woven net that encompasses everything from fortress-like schools and militarized streets to the child welfare system (a primary feeder of its juvenile justice cousin, and also marked by massive racial disparities) to popular and academic culture, which turned on young people of color viciously in the 1980s and 1990s and has yet to overcome its fear-driven demonization of the hoodie-clad hordes at the gates.

The differential treatment young people of color face from an early age contributes to a particularly insidious cycle. The general public sees only the statistics and the faces on the evening news. The differential treatment that
drives
the statistics, however, is rarely reported. Without this context, the racism that leads black youth to be so grossly overrepresented in the juvenile justice system serves to fuel the racism they face on the street—the assumption that all of them have their eye on the white lady's purse.

The criminalization of adolescence has made way for an unofficial,
largely unacknowledged, but brutally effective apartheid that has so dehumanized large numbers of poor black and brown children—painted and treated them as so profoundly “other”—that we no longer need take notice of their inextinguishable humanity, much less the vulnerability of their tender years. The more time I spent behind the walls of our juvenile prisons, the more I came to understand the essential role these institutions play both in perpetuating this apartheid and ensuring its invisibility; in concealing behind coils of barbed wire and veils of “confidentiality” both the most wounded among America's children and the further injuries we inflict on them in the name of the law.

Curtis was ten years old when he was first sent to youth prison, but he was no neophyte to the struggle for survival. When he was five, his father kidnapped him and his brother off the lawn of their mother's house. Curtis remembers being kept in a crack house, where addicts came and went throughout the day and night. Sometimes his father left the boys alone in the place for days, without food or money. After eight months, Curtis's mother obtained a court order and the boys were returned to her.

“All that made me very angry, very bitter inside,” Curtis recalled, “but at the time, I didn't know how to deal with those emotions. All around me, people would express their emotions through violence, so that was the only way I knew.”

At school, when Curtis felt belittled by a teacher, he would make threats or throw chairs. At home, a new boyfriend was abusing his mother, just as his father had. In his neighborhood, he was surrounded by gangs, drugs, and violence. More than once, he said, his own father threatened to kill him.

“I had a lot of anger and pain and rage inside, and I did not know how to channel that energy,” he continued. “Gangs, violence, drug addicts, drug dealers—my whole life was surrounded by chaos.”

At seven, Curtis was arrested for the first time, for stabbing a teacher with a pencil. He spent the afternoon in juvenile hall and then went back to what he knew. By eight, he was out on the street with his cousins and their friends. “Their mother was on drugs or their father was in and out of prison, so they could relate to me. They told me, if you wanna be down with us you gotta do certain things, like steal radios out of cars, steal stuff
from stores. Do these things if you want to be accepted. So I did those things, and it landed me in juvenile hall. From there I was always in juvenile hall and group homes.”

“Eventually, I became totally desensitized. Coldhearted. I really didn't care what nobody was feeling. I just wanted what I wanted. And I progressed in violence.”

As Curtis progressed in delinquency, the state progressed in sanctioning him, but no one showed an interest in the reasons for his actions. “Nobody really gave me the attention I needed,” said Curtis, echoing many other young people with whom I spoke. “Nobody sat down with me and really tried to understand what I was going through and what I was feeling, and tried to help me get through my struggles and my problems.”

“Attention,” he reflected, “was my number one goal.”

Eventually Curtis arrived at the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino—a place the California inspector general later found “conducive to suicide attempts and potentially dangerous to staff,” one where wards were Maced as often as four times a day. Over time, Curtis's anger melded with his fear and loneliness to form a toxic rage that became explosive.

“Whether it was shanking someone or beating them over the head with a chair,” Curtis said, “I was making a point. The point was ‘Don't mess with me.' But at the same time, it was a way of releasing my anger, of channeling that energy.”

How does a ten-year-old wind up in a state juvenile institution? Curtis was black, male, poor, and alone, his mother overworked and his father (eventually) incarcerated. Most of all, Curtis was hurting, and violence was the language he had learned to express it. Officially, Curtis was sent to juvenile prison on a robbery charge. The bottom line, however, is that he had, like Eliza, bounced through so many “placements”—foster homes, group homes, and then juvenile halls—that the judge couldn't come up with anything else to do with him. As often happens, the intervention the court selected for Curtis had more to do with what was available than with what was most appropriate.

Childhood trauma such as Curtis experienced is so widespread among the children we incarcerate as to be nearly ubiquitous. The report of the Attorney General's National Task Force on
Children Exposed to Violence
describes the very trajectory Curtis followed from hurt child to child prisoner, and the damage accrued along the way.

Children exposed to violence, who desperately need help, often end up alienated. Instead of responding in ways that repair the damage done to them by trauma and violence, the frequent response of communities, caregivers, and peers is to reject and ostracize these children, pushing them further into negative behaviors. Often the children become isolated from and lost to their families, schools, and neighborhoods and end up in multiple unsuccessful out-of-home placements and, ultimately, in correctional institutions.

Many youth in the justice system appear angry, defiant, or indifferent, but actually they are fearful, depressed, and lonely. They hurt emotionally and feel powerless, abandoned, and subject to double standards by adults in their lives and in “the system.” These children are often viewed by the system as beyond hope and uncontrollable, labeled as “oppositional,” “willfully irresponsible,” or “unreachable.” What appears to be intentional defiance and aggression, however, is often a defense against the despair and hopelessness that violence has caused in these children's lives. When the justice system responds with punishment, these children may be pushed further into the juvenile and criminal justice systems and permanently lost to their families and society.

Jared's eyes blazed as he described the year when he lost his last connection and learned what it was to survive on his own.