Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (2 page)

Do what's right.

JUST WRITE, Nell. WRITE.

INTRODUCTION

Caging men like animals . . . then expecting them to become better men is fallacious.

—Earl Warren

C
URTIS HAD MIXED FEELINGS
when he learned he was headed for the California Youth Authority: “terrified and petrified.” A sprawling system of violent and poorly managed state institutions, the Youth Authority was home to California's most serious juvenile offenders and, at the time, held wards as old as twenty-five. Curtis was ten years old.

I met Curtis on a brisk fall afternoon soon after his release. Sixteen by then, he was sitting on a bench in a leafy courtyard outside the restored Victorian that housed the Oakland-based Mentoring Center. He had attended the organization's workshops while he was locked up and formed a strong bond with several of the staff. Post-release, the center had become a second home to Curtis.

For the next several hours, Curtis spoke in an urgent, nearly unbroken stream, pausing only to catch the occasional breath. In pressed black slacks and a black-and-white-checked shirt, towing a briefcase stuffed with books and papers, the newly freed teenager seemed at once anxious and exuberant, wringing his hands until his narrative kicked into high gear, then releasing them to gesticulate or pound the bench for emphasis.

When Curtis was arrested for a robbery, he told me, he figured he would do some time in county juvenile hall. No one had ever heard of a child his age being sent to the Youth Authority.

“To me, California Youth Authority is a
prison
for younger people,” Curtis said, recalling his reaction when he got the news. “And I was going to prison. I was scared. I was ten years old and I was in the Youth Authority with twenty-five-year-old grown men. I was crazy. I was saying, ‘Man, oh my god, they gonna rape me. They gonna kill me. I'm gonna become somebody's woman.' 'Cause I heard so many things about prison, you know.”

Researchers have taken to mapping
“million-dollar blocks”—pockets of immiseration where we spend that sum or more each year to lock up large proportions of the residents. Less remarked upon is our proclivity for churning out million-dollar kids. On average,
we spend $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person in a state facility—
more than eight times the $10,652 we invest in her education. In many states, this gap is even wider. In California, for example,
the cost of a year in a
youth prison reached a high of $225,000, while
education spending dipped to less than $8,000. The young people who rack up the million-dollar tabs behind bars, and the many more we spend hundreds of thousands to incarcerate, generally get the message: that they are at once disposable and dangerous—worth little to cultivate but anything to contain.

Curtis became a million-dollar kid. By the time he left the Youth Authority, the annual cost per youth was approaching its high of $225,000—a figure inflated by the cost of litigation over physical abuse, inhumane conditions, and other violations of children's civil rights. Sentenced initially to two years behind bars, Curtis wound up staying more than six “because of my repetitive negative behavior,” he intoned, slipping into the jargon that defined him throughout his adolescence.

“Fighting and things,” he clarified. “I cut somebody when I was locked up. Somebody tried to rape me, and I shanked that person in the neck.”

Curtis described his experience as a ten-year-old in a high-security facility as akin to being “thrown to the dogs. If you're out there with the savages, then you're gonna have to become a savage in order to survive. 'Cause it's the survival of the fittest in there.”

“They treated me like I was an animal,” he said forcefully, using an expression I would hear many times from young prisoners, “When I really was just a little child that was misguided, that needed some help and some direction.”

California taxpayers spent at least a million dollars constructing this self-described “savage”: turning an angry, lonesome, traumatized ten-year-old into a ruthless fighter; driving him crazy with months in solitary confinement to punish him for those fights; and finally medicating him into a stupor to “treat” the new disorders with which he was diagnosed in solitary, where his main form of human interaction was the nurse who pushed the meds cart down the hall.

At last count,
66,332 American youth were confined in juvenile facilities, with the majority—about two-thirds—in long-term placements such as state-run training schools, places like the one to which Curtis was sent at ten.
Most of these are boys; about 13 percent are girls.

More broadly,
police arrest nearly 2 million juveniles each year, and demographers predict that
one in three American schoolchildren will be arrested by the age of twenty-three. All this is so despite the fact that juvenile crime is steadily declining.

The juvenile court was founded at the end of the nineteenth century with the mandate to rehabilitate, not punish, wayward youth. There is little evidence, however, that confining young people does anything to advance this mandate. Instead, for as long as we have locked children away in the name of rehabilitating them, the evidence has mounted that this approach is a failure on all fronts.
Sky-high recidivism rates (the percentage of those released who are re-arrested or incarcerated again)—higher than 80 percent in some states—indicate that whatever is taking place inside our juvenile correctional facilities, nobody is actually being “corrected.”

In fact, multiple studies have shown that
putting youth behind bars not only fails to enhance public safety; it does just the opposite, driving low-level delinquents deeper into criminality and
increasing
the likelihood that they will wind up behind bars again and again.
One recent longitudinal study of 35,000 young offenders found that those who were incarcerated as juveniles were twice as likely to go on to be locked up as adults as those who committed similar offenses and came from similar backgrounds but were given an alternative sanction or simply not arrested. A study from the Arkansas Division of Youth Services identified incarceration itself as
the single most significant factor in predicting whether a youth will offend again—more so than family difficulties or gang membership. As scholar and author Barry Feld has written,
“A century of experience with training
schools and youth prisons demonstrates that they constitute the one extensively evaluated and clearly ineffective method to treat delinquents.”

Beyond this central failure, our nation's juvenile facilities do not even meet their bottom-line responsibility to keep their charges safe.
Physical and sexual abuse are rampant, as are solitary confinement and other practices that erode young people's mental and physical health. Even those who manage to avoid the most explicit abuses live in isolation, in conditions that are often dangerous and unhealthy and serve further to traumatize young people who often already carry a heavy burden of pain.

We are hurting kids, and hurting ourselves in the process, exposing far too many young people to inhumane conditions with the sole measurable result of
increasing
the odds that they will be drawn ever more deeply into delinquency. A system ostensibly designed to protect and improve children has turned on them instead, scarring one generation after another, and—after decades of institutional impunity—leaving today's youth vulnerable to practices we would decry were they perpetrated anywhere but behind prison walls.

Juvenile incarceration is also one of the most glaring examples of racial injustice our nation has to offer. Studies based on confidential interviews have found that the vast majority of Americans go through a period of delinquency at some point during adolescence.
Fully 80 to 90 percent of American teenagers have committed an illegal act that could qualify them for time behind bars, and
one-third of all teens have committed a serious crime. Most, however, never see the inside of a cell, or even a police car. Of this group—the kids who get a pass—the overwhelming majority simply grow out of it.
By the time they reach adulthood they are crime-free.

Black and brown youth, especially those from impoverished communities, face far different prospects than do their white counterparts on this front. Those living in poor neighborhoods are subject to what sociologist Victor Rios calls a “culture of control”—treated with suspicion and harsh discipline at school, on the street, and even in the community. They also face discrimination at every stop on the juvenile and criminal justice circuits. They are more likely than white youth who commit identical acts to be arrested; to be charged and detained rather than released to their families; to be sentenced to locked institutions; to be kept behind bars longer; and to be sent back more often (all after controlling for the seriousness of
their acts and other relevant factors). These cascading inequities dramatically curtail the prospects of young people who are already at a disadvantage when it comes to the educational and employment opportunities that serve as the bridge to secure and successful adulthood.

The young people who sit today inside locked facilities are, overwhelmingly, our nation's most vulnerable youth. Disproportionately black and brown and drawn from impoverished neighborhoods, they are more likely to have been victims of violence than they are to have perpetrated it. Incarceration not only exacerbates the vulnerabilities with which they arrive but exposes them to all manner of new challenges: post-traumatic stress syndrome; curtailed education; gang affiliation and a gladiator mentality enforced by prison culture; the unraveling effects of social isolation; and a lifetime of stigma and further isolation.

Counter to the popular notion of the juvenile detainee as vicious “super-predator,” young people are far more likely to be locked up for minor offenses than for violent crimes. In 2010, only one of every four confined youths was locked up based on a violent Crime Index offense (a category that encompasses aggravated assault and robbery along with homicide and sexual assault). At the other end of the spectrum, nearly 40 percent were behind bars due to low-level, low-threat offenses: technical violations of probation, drug possession, minor property offenses, public order offenses, or status offenses (activities that would not be crimes for adults, such as possession of alcohol or truancy). The bottom line is that
most confined youth pose little risk to public safety—they're not kids we are afraid of but those we are mad at, to borrow a much-quoted locution.

Whatever the charge, the overwhelming evidence is that whatever mental health, trauma, or behavior problems children may enter with are rarely alleviated and more often exacerbated by the experience of finding themselves caged. Being locked up, many young people I spoke to conveyed in one way or another, undermined not only any faith in their own potential—their sense of connection to and stake in the larger society—but their very sense of self.

The small proportion of young prisoners behind bars for acts that pose a genuine threat to public safety are no exception. While a small number of serious juvenile offenders do need to be confined to protect the public (a
much, much smaller number than are currently locked up), juvenile prisons as they are currently managed are not the place even for the so-called dangerous few. By worsening the problems that often contributed to their crimes in the first place, and
increasing
the odds that they will commit more crime in the future, these institutions actually undermine public safety in the longer term.

The wholesale sacrifice of a young person's future that incarceration often reflects is all the more tragic because it is so very unnecessary. Models exist—carefully designed and extensively studied—that improve the prospects of virtually all juvenile offenders, including the most serious. These models—which provide a tight web of support, supervision, and relationship without forcibly removing a young person from home and community—show far better outcomes than do juvenile prisons.

Over the decade I spent as editor of a youth newspaper, I developed friendships with young people that spanned many years and, too often, multiple incarcerations. I attended dozens of court hearings, sometimes speaking before the judge on a young writer's behalf, other times just shaking hands with a weary public defender or brisk district attorney, but either way doing my Ann Taylored best to give my writers the boost in credibility that a white face beside them appeared to confer. It wasn't a fair strategy, nor was it universally effective: despite my weekday vigils in the courtroom, I spent many weekends in visiting rooms.

Watching an ambitious, lively girl or boy—filled with the rebelliousness, Vulnerability, spark, and aspiration that mark the adolescent years—unravel behind bars was always wrenching, no matter how many times I had seen it before. But over the years, I also bore witness to something very different. Over and over, I watched young people who appeared to be well along the path to delinquency turn their lives around when they had support in doing so.

The kids I've seen make it have followed various trajectories, but they all have a consistent relationship with at least one trusted adult. Young people struggling with the pull of the street, as well as the trauma that often accompanies it, need someone walking with them as they do the difficult work of changing how they think, act, and react; how they view themselves and others and their own place in the world.

After spending much of the past two decades listening to the young
people we dub juvenile offenders—having read the literature, interviewed the experts, and visited juvenile prisons across the country—I have seen a single theme emerge with remarkable consistency:
rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship
.