Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (3 page)

Every study I've seen on the subject bears this out, as does the life trajectory of every young person whose genuine transformation I've been fortunate enough to witness. Meanwhile, virtually every aspect of our juvenile prison system—designed to disrupt and deny relationships, not foster or forge them—runs counter to this fundamental aspect of human nature.

If you've witnessed true rehabilitation, the fact that our default response when young people veer into trouble is incarceration—the deprivation of relationship—seems more than counterintuitive. Viewed through the eyes of the children consigned to exile when they most need connection, incarceration seems flat-out monstrous. We take young people who have violated a communal norm and we
isolate
them in barren facilities where relationships with staff are minimal and hostile. (“If you wanted attention,” a juvenile hall staffer told my friend Eliza—then a sixteen-year-old survivor of more than thirty different foster and group homes, whose vast and helpless loneliness was as unmistakable as an open wound—“you shouldn't have gotten yourself locked up.”) Our response when already vulnerable, needy, and impulse-prone youth do
not
adapt well to being isolated from family, friends, and community and commit some sort of infraction on the inside—fighting with one another, breaking a rule, or simply breaking down—is to isolate them further, in solitary confinement, an environment that often succeeds in breaking them entirely.

There is no reform adequate to remedy a conceptual flaw this fundamental. We simply cannot fix a system with
recidivism rates that send as many as four out of five juvenile parolees back behind bars within three years of release. The time has come to acknowledge our failures and demonstrate the courage to try something new—the same courage we demand of young people whose terms of probation require them to avoid all that
they
know and begin new lives from scratch.

The challenge is not simply to build a better mousetrap, but to reexamine every aspect of how we address delinquency, from taking on the racial, educational, social, and economic inequities that feed it to ensuring that
relationship-focused, community-inspired responses are not just boutique “alternatives” but become the status quo—available to everyone.

The moment is at hand.

Jared was right on point with his literal wake-up call. We are at a crucial juncture when it comes to juvenile justice in this country—a time when the peril we face if we fail to change course is matched only by the surprising possibility that we may succeed.

All across the country, states are shutting down juvenile prisons, often beginning with the most abusive.
The rate of juvenile confinement has dropped a remarkable 41 percent since its peak in 1995, with the decline accelerating in recent years. A few states have been hit by a perfect storm—crushing budget pressures; determined campaigns led by young people, their families, and other advocates; damning exposés in the media; defeats in the courtroom; and Department of Justice findings of widespread violations of constitutional rights—and responded by closing not some but
most
of their juvenile prisons.

This shift has not led to a rise in youth crime. In fact, juvenile crime rates
dropped
over the same period.
Politicians who back these changes are finding far more support than they expected among a public increasingly soured on wasting tax dollars on failed interventions.

These cuts are rightly heralded as cause for celebration. But any social change that is inspired in large part by a dip in tax revenues is intrinsically fragile. Buildings that now stand empty may well fill up once again, should an improved economy replenish drained state coffers and a fresh onslaught of fearmongering shift the political winds. The wave of closures of juvenile prisons that now appears so promising may be looked back on as just another blip in America's history of pendulum swings on questions of criminal justice—a back-and-forth that has always, to date, returned to incarceration as a first-line intervention. Without a frank acknowledgment of the fundamental failure of our isolation-driven model to improve public safety; an honest reckoning with the devastation incarceration wreaks on young people, their families, and their neighborhoods; and a shared belief that
all
children are
our
children and deserve a chance to flourish, the promise of the current moment could well be betrayed.

As things stand,
the United States still incarcerates more of its young
people than does any other industrialized nation—seven times the rate of Great Britain and eighteen times that of France—
spending a total of $5
billion
a year to keep kids such as Curtis in juvenile institutions.
Even our closest competitor, South Africa, incarcerates its children at one-fifth the rate of the voracious United States.

We continue to countenance racial disparities so extreme as to threaten the legitimacy of our democracy, locking up black teenagers at five times the rate we do whites.
We still fill our youth prisons primarily with young people who pose little or no threat to public safety.
And we persist in sending them to places where they are likely to be victimized and certain to be isolated, and from which they consistently emerge further disadvantaged—a formula custom-made to send them back to prison again and again.

When something is as wrong as what we are doing to young people behind the walls of our juvenile prisons, it calls for a remedy more immediate and more profound than incremental and partial reform. We don't have the luxury of patting ourselves on the back for simply cutting down on abuse, no more than a parent in family court can get away with telling the judge he is beating his children less often, or breaking fewer bones. When it comes to an institution as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison, there is no middle road.

That's not to say we should throw up our hands when it comes to intervening in a young person's delinquent trajectory. Not only do
interventions that rely on support and connection rather than isolation and confinement exist; they have been studied closely and found to have great promise for young people and the public. Across the country, scattered jurisdictions have adopted these models with tremendous success, but to date they have been utilized mainly as “alternatives” or small-scale pilot programs, available to only a sliver of those who might benefit. Incarceration, despite these reforms, remains our default response to everything from homicide to shoplifting.

“When will justice come?” Tolstoy is said to have asked and then answered: “When those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are.”

My travels through the deep end of our nation's juvenile justice system—the large, state-run, locked facilities—have left me beyond
Indignant. Along the way I've met many others, including system survivors, their families, and their allies, who are not only outraged but extraordinarily committed to change, many dedicating their lives to answering Tolstoy's question.

Bart Lubow—director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Justice Strategy Group—argues for a simple exercise he calls the “my child” test. The standard he suggests is simplicity itself:
Would this be acceptable if it were my child whose freedom were at stake?
This intimate yardstick offers the radical shift in perspective that is required to move beyond momentary horror to outrage, shame, and, eventually, action.

Try it for a moment. Picture a child—your own, if you are a parent, or any child you love. Now imagine that child has committed a crime—the worst you can imagine. Murder, mayhem, armed robbery, arson? Perhaps she drives drunk and causes a serious accident. Maybe he gets angry—in defense of a friend or over a girl—and the fistfight that ensues is charged as an assault. Using drugs? Selling them? Bringing them to school? It doesn't much matter, for the sake of this exercise: many roads converge at the prison gate.

Now picture your child, this child whom you love, being called to account for the thing he has done. Do you see him kneeling, cuffed, in a pool of his own urine, denied all but one meal a day and a few hours of sleep? Does the picture include your child being raped or beaten—perhaps both—by the very staff entrusted with her rehabilitation? Can you hold this image as day after day passes? Can you hold it for months? Can you live with it for years?

How would your child respond to these conditions? Might she break down and cry out that death would be better? Picture her, in that case, tossed into solitary; this is where those who speak of suicide are often sent. See her alone in a windowless cell, with a bare cement bunk and a cold metal toilet, huddling naked beneath a single rough blanket.

Might he get into a fight soon after arrival, trying to prove that he is not an easy mark? Imagine him, then, in this same bare cell, not huddling but screaming, unanswered cries of raw and helpless pain (he's been sprayed in the eyes with Mace and then dispatched to solitary without medical care or so much as a shower).

Would this be acceptable if it were
my
child?
If the answer is no (and
it's a question most of us can answer in an instant), then the edifice must crumble. We must not permit ourselves to settle on
any
child's behalf for piecemeal reform, nor find excuses to turn our faces away until another scandal returns us to attention. Bloodthirsty mass media have encouraged us to think of those in the juvenile justice system as fundamentally other, an alien species that to this day carries the taint of the “super-predator” label even as the research that spawned that politically potent term has been discredited. But we can cast these thousands of young people into dungeons of destruction only when we do not know them.

Getting to know them has left me both hopeful and indignant. It is remarkable how radically the lens shifts when one actually spends time with the young people we all too quickly write off in the political arena and throw away via our criminal dispositions.

“Doesn't it get old after a while?” an acquaintance asked of my work. “I mean these stories—they are heartbreaking, but don't they all start sounding the same?”

Yes and no, I would have answered, had the question not sent me into a defensive silence.

Yes, there is a tragic trajectory from hurt kid to delinquent to detainee to prisoner—and yes, the rough contours of that journey often seem alike. But not the kids! Shear their hair, put them in uniforms, brand them with numbers, and toss out their names; treat them as if they
are
, in fact, “all the same”—try as we might to obscure or extinguish a child's individuality by making him a prisoner, young people will find some way to resist. The will to keep growing is fierce.

Crystal is a ballerina; she dances in her cell. “It makes me feel like I can let all my frustration out,” she told me. “Whatever I'm feeling, I put it in my dance.”

For an hour every day, Crystal and her unit are let onto the yard for exercise. Why not dance then, where there's space to stretch her arms out without hitting the wall? I thought she'd plead shyness, but Crystal's not like that. She stood in the hallway where we had been talking and spun off in a series of crisp pirouettes, her grace the more stunning because it was stolen.

“They don't let us do that,” she said, meaning dance outdoors in the sunlight. “They'll be like, ‘What are you doing, Jenkins? What are you
doing?' And I'm like, ‘Oh, my bad.' ” So she does what she can during her one hour of outdoor “large-muscle exercise”—push-ups, jumping jacks, sit-ups, crunches—and then dances alone in her cell.

Before she could say more, our interview was cut short; my guide was approaching to move me along. By the time he arrived, Crystal had slipped back to the bench and composed her graceful limbs into the apathetic slouch that is the young prisoner's fallback pose.

“I dance in my room, though,” she repeated in a whisper as I was led away.

Young prisoners like Crystal have been stripped of nearly everything, but even in the most materially and emotionally impoverished environments they manage to aspire. This hidden vein of promise—the hope and ambition young people maintain under the most barren circumstances—glints briefly even in the otherwise bleak federal Survey of Youth in Residential Placement. Despite the fact that their educational opportunities have been sharply curtailed, more than two-thirds of youth in custody aspire to higher education. About half want to go to college and another fifth hope to go further, to graduate school, medical school, or law school. Despite obvious barriers, most youth in custody believe that they will reach the goals they set for themselves. The same is true when it comes to employment. Most youth in custody—88 percent—say they expect to have a steady job in the future.

The question is not whether young prisoners have hopes for the future—in that, like so much else, they are no different from any young person—but whether they will be permitted to pursue them.

Rakim is a mathematician, working out elaborate equations in his head. Darren is a therapist, his empathetic ear taking the place of formal training—the one with whom others share secrets they wouldn't dream of disclosing to a professional on the payroll. Luis is a comic, bringing levity to his unit, and Eliza a paperback scholar, reading history, philosophy, romance, or Westerns—whatever she can get her hands on that day.

The young people who fill our nation's prisons are at once each unique and at the same time—even in the very fact of their individuality—
just like
other young people, captive or free. That a particular teenager is locked up, or has been, changes nothing on that front, no matter how thorough
the institutional practices designed to make truth of the lie that they are, to paraphrase my skeptical acquaintance, “all the same.”