Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (36 page)

“When I take kids away from their families, I need to do a whole lot better,” she said, “because I've taken this very drastic step. So the state has a tremendous responsibility to do better.”

How much better, realistically?

“We have to want for each child what we want for our own sons and daughters,” Carrión replied. “There has to be a single standard. These children
matter
.”

Carrión's idealism is balanced by a strong sense of realism. She is doing her best to sell off the facilities she has shut down, or hand them over to the counties, so that the state will not be able to reopen them down the line should the political or fiscal tide shift once more.

“Change must be transformative, systemic, and sustainable,” she insisted, “so that you have a hard time undoing this after I leave.”

The battle to close the institutions is anything but over. In many ways,
it has only begun. Despite the steep decline in recent years, America still leads the industrialized world in the rate at which we lock up our young. As things stand, the recent drop in juvenile incarceration looks more like a stock market correction than a revolution: the current number of youth in confinement is almost identical to that in the mid-1980s, right before that era's pendulum swing swept thousands more youth behind bars. Even accounting for the recent drop in population, state institutions today hold far more young people for nonviolent offenses such as truancy, low-level property offenses, and technical probation violations than they do those who pose a threat to public safety. Finally, changes inspired in great part by financial concerns are extremely vulnerable to shifts in the economic tide.

At the same time, a remarkable opportunity lies before us. If we succeed in building on the changes of the past decade, we will have made great progress. But if we find the courage to go even further—to acknowledge the moral and political bankruptcy of large-scale juvenile prisons and then act on that knowledge—we might finally transcend the long effort to reform a failed system and galvanize a movement to shut it down instead.

11

A BETTER MOUSETRAP

The Therapeutic Prison

At first I was very bitter, but I learned how to “program,” a term used by correctional staff that means you have the ability to adjust to the loss of freedom well. . . . Now that I think about it, I don't believe learning how to cooperate with the policies and procedures that are imposed in a locked facility is a positive quality that children should acquire. Nevertheless, that was what I was expected to do
.

—Marilyn Denise Jones, MEd,
From Crack to College and Vice Versa

“W
OULD YOU CALL THIS
a prison?”

Riley, seventeen, had been inside Minnesota's Red Wing Correctional Facility for ten months when he asked me this question. He had reached Level Four on the facility's behavior scale—the second-highest level—and would soon be heading out. After a series of short-term furloughs to test his newfound stability, he would be free for good in a matter of months.

Riley and Kent, nineteen, had been given the task of showing me around the place. When Riley surprised me with this question we were standing in a hallway, idled for a moment by the piercing blare of a siren indicating that someone was being taken to the security unit, where troublemakers were kept in twenty-three-hour isolation. The sound, Riley explained, signaled “stop movement”—no one could leave where they were until the all clear had sounded.

The temporary lull sent my tour guides into a reflective state. For the past few hours, they had been showing me around Red Wing, a place Riley called the safest he had known. Their pride in their temporary home was unmistakable. Now Riley wanted to know what I made of what they had shown me.

In recent years, many of the states engaged in reform efforts—the same ones, by and large, that are cutting back on their use of juvenile prisons—have also been working to change the culture of those that remain: to use therapeutic concepts and modalities to refashion their youth prisons, including retraining staff to consider themselves adjuncts to their young wards' healing rather than agents of power and control.

Red Wing warden Otis Zanders proudly showed me a map of the country with clusters of brightly colored pins, representing the many jurisdictions that had sent delegations to visit Red Wing in the hope of replicating its model.

Missouri—which has run small, therapeutic facilities for thirty years—is likely the most-visited system in the nation, with a separate institute dedicated to supporting replication efforts. But few states are prepared to turn wholesale to the Missouri Model, which entails eliminating large, prison-like facilities and replacing them with smaller, group home–like settings. For those seeking some sort of a compromise—a therapeutic model at an existing site, for instance—Red Wing offers a promising example.

Whatever the model or scale of the facility, the effort to create a therapeutic prison reflects a new twist in the decades-long back-and-forth between punishment and rehabilitation. This long-standing dialectic is now giving way to a third rationale for incarcerating young people. That rationale is “treatment.”

Ideologically, this looks like progress. Punishment (or its milder cousin, “accountability”) assumes that a young person is bad and must be made to suffer in order to pay for his crimes. Rehabilitation assumes, more generously, that he is merely broken, and prison is the workshop where he will be repaired.

A treatment-based model, sometimes referred to as a “therapeutic milieu,” starts from a variant on this latter premise: the young people who enter these facilities are traumatized—hurt and in need of healing, with or
without their consent. This appeared to be the guiding philosophy at Red Wing. It had a good reputation—I had heard praise from local advocates as well as those from the law enforcement side—and I hoped at Red Wing to see what a successful therapeutic prison looked like.

Riley's question hovered in my mind throughout my visit, first to Red Wing and later to other institutions that were trying to import a therapeutic milieu into a correctional setting.

The success of this approach appeared to vary widely, depending in great part on the level of commitment of administrators and staff. But beyond these variations lay a deeper conundrum: can a locked facility truly be a therapeutic environment or are the intrinsic contradictions too profound? If your freedom is taken in the name of treatment rather than punishment, are you, as Riley had wondered, not
really
in prison? Or is there no method or modality powerful enough to counter the loss of liberty that is the defining characteristic of that institution?

Edwin M. Shur raises some of these questions in his book
Radical Non-intervention: Rethinking the Delinquency Problem
. It is important, Shur writes,

to recognize that when, in an authoritative setting, we attempt to do something for a child “because of what he is and needs,” we are also doing something to him. . . . Whatever one's motivations, however elevated one's objectives, if the measures taken result in the compulsory loss of the child's liberty, the involuntary separation of a child from his family, or even the supervision of a child's activities by a probation worker, the impact on the affected individuals is essentially a punitive one. Good intentions and a flexible vocabulary do not alter this reality. . . . We shall escape much confusion here if we are willing to give candid recognition to the fact that the business of the juvenile court inevitably consists, to a considerable degree, in dispensing punishment.

Would I call Red Wing a prison? It certainly didn't look like one. The Romanesque brick-and-stone structure with its arched entryways and pristine lawns bore little resemblance to the stripped-down compounds I had seen elsewhere. As Kent, who had been there for twenty-two months,
pointed out, it could easily be mistaken for the campus of one of the elite universities after which its living units are named (Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Yale). The tour buses that pass through the picturesque region along the Mississippi River often stop by the facility, which visitors admire as a historic site.

Even the drive to Red Wing is idyllic. Fifty miles of classic green-gold farmland, dotted with barns and grain silos, separate the facility from the state's urban center of Minneapolis–St. Paul. As one draws closer, passenger cars give way to pickups and tractor-trailers. Red Wing itself rises up from the fields like the Emerald City of Oz: towers and turrets emerging out of nowhere, hinting at a place that is a world unto itself.

When they fenced the institution in the late nineties, superintendent Otis Zanders told me, it created consternation in the community. A square-shouldered, round-faced black man in a crisp suit and tie and wire-rimmed glasses, Zanders had run the place since 1996.
Now he was preparing to retire. Before the fence went up, Zanders said, “walkaways” would show up in town from time to time and break into houses, but that didn't stop the locals from opposing the fence on aesthetic grounds. “Red Wing is a tourist town,” he explained. The building was “part of their identity.”

The beauty at Red Wing is more than skin-deep. Youth have access to healing amenities including a sweat lodge and a ropes course. Community volunteers arrive in such numbers that they sometimes appeared to out-number the kids (eighty came through in the month that I visited, almost exactly the number of youth in custody at the time). The boys repay the kindness by escorting the older volunteers to swing dances and stopping by nearby senior facilities to play bingo with the residents.

With a capacity of 131 serious and chronic male juvenile offenders, Red Wing offers everything on the contemporary treatment menu: cognitive/behavior restructuring and skill development training, restorative justice and a therapeutic community. The walls are postered with motivational images and inspirational mottos, many of which the young men spontaneously repeated as they tried to describe the ethos of the place. I had never seen a facility quite so steeped in slogans, nor met a group of young people who seemed so thoroughly to have internalized the writing on the wall.

Each resident goes through a risk/needs assessment upon entry, out of which an individual treatment plan is devised. Monthly and quarterly reports track progress toward completion, and those on the way out depart with a personalized relapse-prevention plan. There is mental health treatment available, a specialized unit for sex offenders (“Yale”), and another for those with substance-abuse issues. The residents volunteer in and out of the facility, participate in religious services, have access to high school and work-readiness programs, and participate in community service. All in all, Zanders told me, they are “programming” sixteen hours a day. “There is a schedule like in college,” Kent elaborated. “You are active all day, and learning.”

Red Wing has a blue-blood pedigree to match its highbrow facade. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, it can trace its roots directly to the House of Refuge movement. Originally named the Minnesota State Training School for Boys and Girls (the girls were transferred out in 1976), Red Wing operated under that title until 1979, when the state changed its name to reflect the shifting mentality of the times.

To this day, however, according to Zanders,
“the name ‘State Training School' still lingers in the vocabulary of senior staff and local citizens,” as does the institution's longtime mandate: “to change the attitudes, values, and behavior of youth committed to the institution so they might be returned to the community to live with dignity, and feelings of self worth.”

At the same time, as Riley pointed out, “There are cameras and security everywhere. . . . Patrol everywhere, so you don't go over the fence.”

For the moment, Riley himself appeared in no hurry to reach the other side of the fence. “When the cops put me in handcuffs I was relieved,” he confessed. “It is hard out there. I was involved in gang activity and on the run from the police. It was stressful, with enemies and the police.”

Kent's experience of arrest was more traumatic. “They beat you up,” Kent explained matter-of-factly. “I was bit by a dog even though I was on my knees with my hands up. They let the dog come up and bite me.”

This experience highlights one of the challenges faced by Red Wing and the similar cities on a hill that I visited in other states. No matter how much effort had gone into creating a kinder, gentler prison, these boutique
institutions remained embedded in a larger system that rarely shared their values.

Young people who wind up in a state facility such as Red Wing generally pass through local juvenile detention centers first—institutions that are often dominated by a traditional, punitive culture. Before that, there are encounters with the police, whose main focus may not be on instilling “dignity” or “self-worth.” After being set upon by police dogs en route to Red Wing, Kent, for example, acknowledged, “I have a hard time respecting authority and the law.”

“Especially if they say they are ‘just doing their job,' ” chimed in Riley. “Sometimes they are the antagonist.”

This led to discussion of Red Wing's secure unit, where those who had been “bad” were kept on lockdown, according to my guides, sometimes for weeks or even months at a stretch. This was both boys' greatest fear when they learned they were headed for Red Wing.