Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (31 page)

Allowing the experience of incarceration to calcify into an identity—difficult to resist within a system and a society that encourage, if not enforce, this very identification—is, Will implies, the greatest impediment to recovering one's freedom. Shaking off that identity is central to the struggle to reenter the world as something other than an “ex-con.”

At bottom, said Will, “a lot of it has to do with language. We own stuff, as if it's our identity. Like when I say, ‘I am angry,' as if that is who I
am
, when really, I
feel
angry. It is temporary. Or when you are in jail: ‘I
am
a convict.' No, you're not. You made a mistake and you had to do some jail time. But you should not identify with those kinds of labels.”

“Once you identify, you internalize those things,” Will continued. “So people come out, like, ‘I am a convict.' that is so internalized, you can't break away from that. How can you expect to be a normal member of society when you have got that stigma? . . . A lot of people I talk to aren't even aware of it—that this subconscious idea is actually a motivating factor for why they are still having problems out here.”

“If I am, five years from now, still talking about something a CO [correctional officer] did years ago? He's not even thinking about me and here I am still mad because, I don't know, he yelled at me or looked at me the wrong way. I don't want to give them that power. I want to be out here talking about ‘Yeah, I was in prison but I went to college, I did this and that.' ”

For now, his continuing struggle to find his footing has led him to a conclusion that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful in its clarity and logic: “It doesn't make sense to take a kid
out
of the community to show him how to live
in
the community.”

Throughout history and across cultures, the transition from child to adult has been marked by rites of passage: bar mitzvah, confirmation, walkabout, vision quest, graduation, prom, fraternity pledge, and more. Anthropologists describe these rites of passage in terms of phases: separation, transition, and, finally, reincorporation.
“Reincorporation is characterized by elaborate rituals and ceremonies, like debutante balls and college graduation, and by outward symbols of new ties: thus in rites of incorporation there is widespread use of the ‘sacred bond,' the ‘sacred cord,' the knot, and of analogous forms such as the belt, the ring, the bracelet and the crown.”

Those who are locked up during this pivotal transition experience
separation, but there are for them no “rites of incorporation.” Instead of the bond and the knot, the ring or the crown—symbols of inclusion, connection, and status—they wear only the brand of the ex-offender. Over and over, as this identity leads to repeated exclusion and rejection, they learn that for them there may be no “reincorporation.”

Two in ten, bro. Two in ten.

Will and Luis—two young men who had managed to stay free in a state with a juvenile recidivism rate that topped 80 percent—gave each another an ironic fist bump along with this sardonic congratulation.
Two in ten, bro
.
Gotta represent
.

Only two of every ten youths who get locked up, they are saying, are expected or even
allowed
to stay free. Those who do become the poster children, role models, heroes—the boy who comes back from the war with, to borrow from Salinger, “all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.” Carrying the weight of living for those they left behind in prison while proving to the world that they are more than “ex-offenders,” some show signs of a premature weariness that resembles survivor's guilt.

Will and Luis were doing well enough that they could afford a joke, however bitter, about the bleak odds those in their position face. For others, there is only fear. Fear, in fact, seemed nearly universal among those I met who had recently been released. Those who are still on parole or probation feel it intensely—the fear that they could be sent back to prison for a “technical violation” of the terms of their parole, losing their precarious freedom for an act, such as associating with the wrong people, that would not be considered a crime were they not marked as ex-offenders. Even for those who have finished their probation, this anxiety can be as hard to shake as the stigma of having been locked up. It is worst of all for those who have accrued “strikes” in a state such as California, which allows juvenile strikes to justify decades-long sentences even for minor crimes down the line.

Tony, for example, left prison with two strikes. He had been out for several months when I met him, but the fear had not faded. He woke each morning “terrified I could be sentenced to life in prison for anything. Just being at the wrong place at the wrong time, not even committing a crime, because there are cases of people being sentenced to twenty-five to life for doing not much of anything.”

The fear alone is burden enough. But on a deeper level, Tony understands his status as a “second-striker” as a stain he can never erase. That he and those in the same boat can be locked up, perhaps for life, for actions that would draw only minor sanctions for others sends a strong message that they are fundamentally and irredeemably other, part of a criminal caste to whom different rules apply.

No matter how well Tony is doing, his freedom feels contingent. He deals with this by being constantly watchful, restricting his activities in order to avoid any hint of danger.

“There are places I have never gone,” he explained. “Like a club. There is no point for me to go clubbing. Say there is a bunch of rowdy people. Maybe some of them . . . just want to pick up hot girls. And if I just so happen to be casually talking to one [girl] and this idiot is trying to—you know, he's drunk and all—I'm going to [get into it with] this dude because I want to look good for this girl.
No
. I'm not going to put myself in that situation. And I never will.”

Tony appeared certain of his own willpower: he would not let his guard down, nor make himself vulnerable. But he also understood how much lay beyond his control. “My concern is the stigma that is attached to an ex-felon, an ex-con,” he explained. If people—especially authorities—learn he has two strikes, he fears, that is all they will care to know. “They are not going to think, ‘You were only a kid.' . . . So if I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, something happens, who is our first suspect? Me, right? ‘Let me see your ID. . . . Okay. You're coming in.' ”

Researchers have studied the thorny issue of juvenile reentry from virtually every angle, trying to figure out why our nation's youth prisons have such a dismal track record when it comes to turning out returnees who are able to regain their footing and find their way to a stable life.

Darren, whose analytic bent allowed him to squeeze an education out of his incarceration, offered a new and challenging theory as to why so many young ex-prisoners—his co-defendants, for example—wind up back in prison. Several years out, Darren did his best to keep up with the five others who had been sentenced along with him, but it was no easy task. All but one were incarcerated, scattered in adult institutions across
the state, part of the 70 to 80 percent of underage prisoners who emerge “uncorrected” from their stays in juvenile correctional facilities.

Given the experiences that shaped their thinking during the crucial adolescent years, Darren proposed, some may be making a conscious decision not to participate in a society they feel has given them no reason to trust its fundamental tenets: that if they play by the rules, they will be treated fairly; that hard work now will pay off later; that the basic components of the American dream—work that pays, relationships that last, and those famous American freedoms—might be within their reach. If nothing in their experience has taught them this lesson, and no one in authority ever held out such a hope,
is
playing ball a rational choice?

In his own life, Darren has offered a vociferous
yes
. Working as a liasion between homeless people and businesses while attending college, he is determined not to let the decade he spent behind bars deter or define him. But the fact that so few of the friends of his youth have taken the same route is, to him, entirely comprehensible.

“I have friends who don't want to work, they don't want to pay taxes, because of the traumatizing experiences they had within the infrastructure of the system,” he explained. “They are conscious as to why they choose the position in society that they do, after coming through an experience like that.”

“Not only that,” he continued, “but some have the perspective that people who were paying taxes that paid for [their incarceration] were responsible, so if they do harm to those people, they don't really care, because they feel like [the taxpayers] failed
them
in the first place. That's a position that some of these young so-called prisoners, re-enterers, violators, hold.”

There is a dreadful simplicity to the phenomenon of juvenile recidivism as Darren presents it. Consider, he challenges, what is asked of children raised by prison guards, who come into adulthood chained, cuffed, beaten, and treated as less than human. Darren remembers vividly the way the guards who spent two weeks watching over kneeling, handcuffed youths joked and laughed in the face of their suffering, as if these young people mattered so little that they were not just invisible but entirely dispensable. Just as the child raised in the glow of a parent's loving gaze learns empathy, a child raised under the hostile stare of the prison guard—or, worse,
his clear indifference—draws from that experience a sense of what one human being owes another. What strength must it take for this latter child
not
to learn to emulate his keepers; not to lose the capacity for empathy; not, once freed, simply to take what he needs but has never been given, or even permitted to earn.

Behind bars, Jared learned to inhabit a radical present. “From when they take the lock off the gate and say it's time to come out to when it's time to go back in the cell, you're not worried about tomorrow,” he recalled. “Just worry about today. That becomes big: just one day at a time.”

At the same time, prison demanded constant vigilance, a split self always watching the angles. “Anything could happen at any time. You're watching everybody and everybody's watching you. You're
watching
everybody watch you watch them.”

It has been years since Jared walked out the gates. Still, he said, “I gotta watch everything.” Like Tony, he left with two strikes under California's three strikes law, and the slightest altercation could send him back for life. Jared described the hypervigilance this knowledge required of him, sharing the anxious cadence of his internal monologue:
Who's the guy on the corner over there? Why is his left arm stiff? Why is he wearing that jacket when it's eighty degrees outside? Say he's posted at the stop sign. Or the light turns green, and he's still standing there. Maybe I don't want to walk over there. Who are these three dudes coming down the street? Where are they from? Look at how they dress.

It struck me again how readily the habits of thinking essential to adapting to life behind bars could become maladaptive post-release. Incarceration not only fails to rehabilitate young minds; it more often warps them, damaging young people's spirits in ways that are difficult to repair. “One day at a time” may get you through a sentence, but it's not going to get you into college, much less through it. The capacity to live and think only in the moment is not a quality valued by employers, and habitual mistrust makes it hard to forge new bonds both professionally and personally. On top of the multiple external barriers Jared and others faced—the stigma of a record, the barriers to employment—those who fared best in prison often had it hardest on the outside, having adapted all too well to an
artificial reality whose values and mores were in direct conflict with those of the larger world.

No one was more aware of this than Jared himself. He described sitting in a restaurant with his girlfriend, waiting to pick up a takeout order. Suddenly Jared realized he was sitting with his back toward the door. Absorbed in conversation and very much in love, he'd let fall his cloak of watchfulness and granted himself a fleeting taste of freedom. But the moment he realized that he had let his guard down, however briefly, he froze back up again. On the surface, he remained relaxed and engaged, continuing to talk with his girlfriend, but his mind was no longer with her. Instead he was distracted by a tense inner dialogue between his past and present selves.

You're sitting with your back to the door.

Don't trip. Nobody's going to come through that door trying to do anything to you. Don't worry about it. There's nobody here to harm you.

“I'm looking at all this stuff. I try not to let that leak out, to be obvious. But that's in my head.”

Jared's girlfriend may not notice these small lapses in attention, but she knows him well enough to be attuned to behaviors he picked up behind bars. “One of the biggest things she says is that I always look at somebody with a prison mentality—like they're trying to punk me, as in bully me, or get over on me, or belittle me in some way. Because I've got to have my respect. . . . If there's no respect or if the respect ain't reciprocal, I don't want to deal with you. I will survive another day without you in my life.”

Jared laughed drily before returning his attention to the lasting effects of his incarceration. “I don't have many friends. I got one, one friend. I have no other friends, and I can't say that's by choice. It just is. But I'm not walking around, ‘Hey, you want to be my friend?' I'm not doing that.”