Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (28 page)

He was two weeks off parole and two months away from graduating from high school. His grades were good, and his counselor was pushing for him to go to college—something he was starting to think might be possible. “Even though I was living a double life,” he said, “I was trying. I thought I found a map for my success, for my happiness. I thought I was going to do a one-eighty and just live life.”

“In my mind, I had good intentions. I was like, ‘[College] might be the key. . . . Man, this is gonna be it, I'ma do it,'” he recalled. “But even though I had those good intentions, I was still doing what I was doing, which was gangbanging.”

That's where Roland was, standing at the crossroads, when the call came in. He was hanging at a friend's house when his friend's cell phone buzzed:
Something happened. We are going to retaliate. We're coming to pick you up.

Roland demurred.
Nah, I'm good . . . I'll walk home
.

No problem, his friend told him—the crew was on its way and they could drop him off at home . . . if that was what he really wanted.

It was late, and the neighborhood was rough—Roland wasn't too thrilled at the thought of the walk home. But he had a bad feeling about riding with the crew. He was shaking his friend's hand, saying his goodbyes, when his homeboys pulled up in a truck, ten strong.

Wussup
,
fool, you going with us?

Nah, I'm about to leave.

Come here, man, we gon' give you a ride, we gonna drop you off.

“And I was, like, you know what, let's do it . . .”

Roland's description of the rest of the evening has a passive, dreamlike quality. They rolled by a park and someone spotted a group of rival gang members. The driver hit the brakes and everyone ran out.

Even in the heat of the moment, Roland remained split: “I remember telling myself, man, something's not right. But I felt good. . . .
Well, this is who I am, we are retaliating for whatever reason, but justice is being done
. . .”

“I'm thinking, ‘Man I just got myself into some bullshit. But fuck it.' I ran . . .”

From beneath a barrage of punches and kicks, the kid they were attacking seemed to be looking straight at Roland. “I remember looking at his eyes,” Roland said. “There was blood everywhere . . .”

Roland swung his leg back to get in one good kick. “I just wanted to make sure I did something.” He missed, and his shoe flew off. He remembers thinking it was some kind of sign. Then there were sirens, and everyone was running back to the truck. As the truck screeched away, Roland heard one of his friends crowing, “I got that fool. I stabbed him.”

That was when Roland realized his white T-shirt was soaked through with blood. What the fuck was going on? What had they done?

At six thirty the next morning, the phone woke him up.

“You fools are stupid,” a girl he knew was hissing, raw fury in her voice. “You fools killed somebody yesterday. He was thirteen years old. He fucking died.”

Roland felt paralyzed. Over years of violence, he had never faced head-on the taking of a life. Drive-bys were one thing—shots might ring in the dark, but you'd be long gone before you had to face the consequences, and you could never be sure who had done what. Looking a boy in the eye as he bled out—that was something different, horrible and new.

For nearly an hour Roland just sat there, trying to muster the energy to flee. “I was, like, man, this shit is over. I'm going to jail for something I didn't do. . . . At the moment, I'm trying to justify ‘I didn't do it.' But I am just as guilty as everybody else. I was there. I could have prevented it from happening. I could have opened my mouth.”

It took a week for the police to catch up with Roland—a week in which he could barely eat or sleep.
Murder
. The word rang incessantly in his mind.
Murder
and
Why now?
and
Thirteen years old
and
Dead
. He had been
so close to a different kind of life, and now two lives were over—that of the boy they had killed and his own life along with it.

When the knock came on the door a week after the crime, Roland lay down on the floor and waited. He had a pack of spearmint gum, he remembers. Mechanically, he unwrapped one piece after another.

I'm going to jail for life
, he remembers thinking.
This might be the last gum I ever try
.

“I am going to detain you.”

Luis froze as the words left the judge's mouth. His unsuccessful robbery attempt had taken him no farther than a few steps into an unfamiliar backyard. Now he was headed for juvenile hall. It was February 14, 2005. Luis was fifteen years old.

“My heart shook,” he recalls of the moment he heard the judge's order. “I didn't know what to do.”

Luis was trembling so violently as he was led from the courtroom that the bailiff asked him if he was okay. The truth, Luis understood already, would win him at best a moment's pity—the last thing he needed as he struggled to steel himself for dangers yet unknown.

“Yeah,” he answered brusquely, trying to keep his voice from betraying him. It was the first lie he'd told since the misbegotten robbery attempt, but it would not be the last. Surviving behind bars, he learned very quickly, would require reinventing himself inside and out. The trauma he would experience while he was locked up—compounded by all he had weathered already—would launch him on a journey from “pothead skater kid” to card-carrying delinquent.

Slight to this day, Luis felt tiny as he entered the building where he would spend the following year. “Everyone was hella big. It was all shut off by brick. There was no sunlight in there, just bright-ass white lights.”

As soon as he entered the general population, the questions began to fly: Norteño? Sureño? What gang was he claiming?

Terrified of being victimized, Luis made a decision: “I have got to start gangbanging for real, because I'm in the hall now. If I'm not down with it, then my life is threatened. If I am not with the culture in there that is aggressive and paranoid and more, then I am going to be eaten.”

“It feels like a shark tank,” Luis said.

Luis had known violence since he was very young, but mainly as a victim. Behind bars, the balance would shift. “I tried to prove myself immediately,” he recalled. He claimed a small gang that was identified with his neighborhood, nodding at street names and pretending to recognize nicknames. He started to fight to establish credibility, taking on all comers with a manic persistence in order to make up for his size and lack of backup. He learned never to back down, flailing away until staff broke things up—interventions that constituted anything but rescue. “They would literally slam me on the ground, Mace me, and then
they
would fuck me up.”

As Luis came to understand that those in charge were, like his father, more likely to hurt than protect him, his new persona hardened into something like identity. A familiar transition was under way:
I don't give a fuck about me
combined with
You don't give a fuck about me
to create that most destructive and pervasive of worldviews:
I don't give a fuck. Period. About you, about me, or about anyone else. I just don't give a fuck.

“Originally,” Luis said, “I was a pot-smoking abused kid with some trauma issues. But when I went to jail, I had to defend myself. I felt that if the system was so fucked-up that they couldn't help me, then for damn sure the other fucked-up youth weren't going to help me. But you know what? they are not going to pick on me anymore. I am not going to get taken advantage of anymore. . . . I am going to fuck you all—whoever comes against me.”

This attitude offered some protection but also exposed Luis to new dangers. He caught charges for fighting on the inside and landed next at a state-run boot camp. “The only course of action that they had for me was negative reinforcement:
We are going to give you more punishment.
what the fuck—it was not hitting the core. They gave me a stricter boot-camp program. I still didn't give a fuck.”

Young people sometimes describe being abused in juvenile facilities with a kind of victimized bravado. The drill sergeants at boot camp were “like ex-Marines,” Luis recalled. “They slammed me and tripped me and Maced me while I was down. I would try to fight someone, or someone would fight me, and I wouldn't stop fighting. The staff would literally have to slam me on the ground, and then they would fucking fuck me up.”

“I am fully gangster now,” Luis recalled of the shaven-headed, reconstructed self who emerged on probation the next time around. “I am
on it, I am with it, I am willing to do anything. Don't care about the consequences.”

Incarceration, in other words, had done its work on Luis. The kid who had trembled his way into juvenile hall, who had been naive enough to return to a crime scene out of eagerness to play a favorite video game, was buried now beneath a veneer of bravado.

Far from being rehabilitated, Luis emerged a newly minted nihilist, the
I don't give a fuck
attitude imprinted on his soul like the freshly inked tattoos on each of his arms (one honoring his mother, the other claiming his 'hood). It was a passage one young person after another described to me, often using the same wording—
I stopped giving a fuck—
to describe the moment when they let go of hope and surrendered to prison.

“I kind of felt helpless,” David remembered of his first days in juvenile hall, coming down off drugs and alcohol and waking up to the seriousness of the charges he faced. But soon, like Luis, he experienced an “excuse the language, but for lack of a better phrase,
I don't give a fuck
moment. I don't give a fuck. I don't care. . . . It was a dark time, because when that disconnect happens in my head, I really don't care about consequences. I don't care about anything.”

For Luis, David, and many others, that
I don't give a fuck
moment is a crucial rite of passage, dividing the dreams of childhood from the reality of prison. “I became a man at fifteen, when I went into the system,” Luis believes. “My cutoff [from childhood] was 2005, when I got locked up.”

By “man,” Luis appeared to mean a manufactured gangster, constructed as efficiently as if that had been the juvenile justice system's explicit intent, rather than the phenomenon it is meant to prevent. Building a gangster from the bits and pieces of an angry, wounded kid is, it turns out, no challenge at all. Take a hurt kid, look away from his wounds and allow them to fester, then drop him into a building where further trauma is just about inevitable. The next thing you know, he's covered in ink and claiming his block.

Danielle Sered, founding director of the Brooklyn-based restorative justice program Common Justice, sees this cycle frequently. In fact, it is one of the things that motivated her to launch her organization.

Sered grew up in Chicago in the 1980s, surrounded by the ravages of the crack epidemic:
“It was so clear to me what incarceration did to
people and to communities. People would go away and come back, and most often, something in them had been damaged. But it wasn't the will to commit crimes. It was the thing that connects us to each other. There are some people with a strength of heart and spirit that could come through even [incarceration] fully intact, but most people couldn't. For most people, that thing in us that connects us to each other, that makes us care about each other, is the thing that is under the greatest attack in a prison. So unless someone is really self-aware, or really naturally inclined to protect that part of themselves, it's hard to make it through without that being damaged.”

“People came home, and they were hurt. . . . They expressed that hurt in all sorts of ways, and hurt more people, and went back [to prison]. We saw what it did to their families to have them gone. We saw what they suffered in that experience. And we saw what they did when they came back.”

At first, Sered assumed that incarceration “must be bringing the victims some peace. We must at least be doing this because [those who were imprisoned] really hurt somebody, and that's what that person [who was hurt] wanted.”

“But as I started listening to victims of crime, and paying attention to my own experiences, the experiences of my loved ones, of the people around me, it became very clear that our needs for safety and justice and peace were
not
being met by someone being incarcerated. So then the whole thing just seemed very silly. . . . It's expensive, it's bad for all parties, and it doesn't work.”

Luis was living out the cycle Sered described. Learning to fight protected him from being targeted by his peers but jettisoned him ever deeper into the justice system. Aside from infractions committed inside facilities ostensibly devoted to his rehabilitation, his sole charge was that initial attempted burglary. Those few steps into a neighbor's backyard would draw him, like a river to the ocean, into the heart of the California Youth Authority, a state system ostensibly designed to contain the most serious offenders.

During the latter years of his incarceration, Luis became a student of the system in which he was enmeshed. “If you look at the history,” he said, “juvenile justice was created to be rehabilitation. Parens patriae—it meant that the state was going to rehabilitate you, out of the hands of
your parents because they couldn't control you. That's where our juvenile justice system comes from.”