Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (4 page)

Once you understand this essential individuality—part and parcel of young people's universal humanity—the notion that delinquent children are somehow expendable, essential as it is to the practice of locking them away, becomes not only ludicrous but genuinely horrifying. We cannot afford to extinguish the light in one more child's spirit.

Just write the truth
, Jared urged. I don't take his trust lightly. Any truth I have to tell belongs not to me but to him, to the other veterans of our juvenile justice system whom I've come to count among my friends over the years, and to the many more who offered their time and their trust by agreeing to be interviewed.

Here, then, is the truth as I have come to understand it, after listening to hundreds of young people and their families, speaking with dozens of scholars and practitioners, and reading thousands of pages of documentation of vicious abuse, chronic neglect, and unremitting failure behind the walls of our nation's juvenile prisons:

       
•
   
Correcting our children does not require containing them.

       
•
   
Rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship, making our addiction to isolation a surefire route to failure.

       
•
   
Reform is inadequate to the moral challenge posed by the violence-plagued dungeons in which we keep our children.

       
•
   
setting our children free will make us safer, not less so.

We owe young people nothing less than a complete transformation in how we respond when they step outside the law: an end to isolation and a national infrastructure of community-based supports.

This is the truth I hope to honor Jared's trust in telling. It is the truth I have heard and witnessed all across the nation. The time has come to move beyond the long battle to reform our juvenile prisons and declare them beyond redemption. Raze the buildings, free the children, and begin anew.

PART I

Teenage Wasteland

1

INSIDE JUVENILE PRISON

Even if I got away with a few years only, on account of my age, it was forever. It wasn't even possible that Monday should come, when at least I'd get a walk up the stairs. The clock was not made that would pass the time between now and Monday. It was like what we were told about the last day, “Time is, time was, time is no more.” And Jesus Christ, even now, I was only locked up ten minutes.

—Brendan Behan,
Borstal Boy

On the day of our arrival to Oakley, we observed a 13-year-old boy sitting in a restraint chair near the Ironwood control room. Reportedly, he was placed in the restraint chair to prevent self-mutilation. No staff approached him, and he was not allowed to attend school or receive programming, counseling, or medication. This boy had been severely sexually and physically abused by family members . . . prior to being sent to Ironwood. Just before our arrival, he had been locked naked in his empty cell. His cell smelled of urine, and we observed torn pieces of toilet paper on the concrete floor that he had been using as a pillow.

—Findings letter, Department of Justice Investigation of Oakley and Columbia Training Schools in Raymond and Columbia, Mississippi, June 19, 2003

T
HE PLACES WHERE YOUNG
people are confined in the United States operate under any number of euphemistic titles, each as soothing as it is
implausible: guidance center, boys school, youth ranch, camp. New arrivals test the door and know exactly where they are.

Most get the message long before they arrive. A teenager headed for a state juvenile prison likely rides in a van for hundreds of miles, shackled in leg irons, a belly chain, and handcuffs. He passes the outskirts of his hometown or city and enters an unfamiliar rural landscape. He may ride for hours before he arrives, passing through gates topped with razor wire into a compound inhabited by two hundred or three hundred others, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-four (juvenile facilities hold young people for offenses committed as minors but are often permitted to keep them past their eighteenth birthday). His jaw muscles may tighten as he composes his face in an effort to hide the fear that constricts his gut as his senses fill with what appears to be a prison.

Despite the fact that the very notion of a separate system for juveniles is predicated on the need to keep youth
out
of adult prisons, most state juvenile institutions look and feel very much like the adult correctional institutions they were intended to supplant. Sited in job-hungry rural counties far from most wards' homes, holding as many as two hundred or three hundred uniform-clad bodies, fitted with cell blocks or closely packed dormitories, and surrounded on all sides by angry coils of razor wire, many seem custom-made to inspire the kind of fear the new arrival has been warned by veterans to conceal at any cost.

These institutions are run by the states, and there is certainly great variation among them, from size and site to policies and procedures. But an overriding focus on custody and control and a persistent climate of dehumanization make it possible to offer a broad outline of what a new arrival might generally expect.

After he is escorted into the building (unless these things have already been taken care of at a separate intake facility), he will be photographed, fingerprinted, and, in some states, required to submit a DNA sample. He will be
assigned an identification number, which anyone who hopes to reach him by mail will need to use. Before he can enter the general population, he will have to hand over any personal belongings—shoes, belt, watch, jewelry—though most arrive at state facilities from local juvenile halls and so have already been stripped of these effects.
Anything that remains will be either stored, mailed home at his expense, or destroyed.

Next, he will be required to strip naked, surrender what is left of his clothing, and
submit to a search. He may be ordered to turn this way and that, run his hands through his hair, lift his genitals, or spread his butt cheeks in order to give officers the most thorough view. He may also be asked to
squat and cough to expel whatever might be hidden in a bodily orifice.

He will then be required to shower and may have delousing chemicals sprayed on his head, underarms, and pubic area, whether or not he shows symptoms of lice. Next, he will be given a uniform—sweatpants and a T-shirt or baggy khakis, sometimes in bright colors, socks, and underwear, all of which have been worn by others before him. Here and there,
young wards still wear prison stripes.

He may go through an “orientation” in which guards who are not called guards (youth workers, counselors, youth development aides, team leaders; here also imaginative euphemisms proliferate) will spell out the official rules and sometimes the unofficial as well, letting him know he has reason to fear both his neighbors and his keepers. More than one young person paraphrased this part of their orientation as the
Don't be a bitch
talk—a “bitch” being a youngster who shows fear or other weakness, opening himself up to abuse and exploitation. One young man recalled sitting handcuffed with three or four other newly arrived wards while a guard broke it down for them: “You won't die,” the guard promised. “You'll get beat up, get unconscious, probably go to the hospital, get your tooth broke, your nose broken, probably get a black eye, but you won't die. So don't sweat it.”

Only after these initial rites have concluded will the new arrival be led to a bunk in an open dormitory, or to a narrow cell, which may or may not house a roommate.

If the new arrival is a first-timer, he is likely terrified and struggling not to show it. His stay, he will have been warned on the outside or in county juvenile hall, will be nasty, brutish, and long. Watch out for gangs, he will have been cautioned; everyone's going to want to know what you're claiming. Stick with your own race—especially when it comes to the drug trade inside. Never show fear or walk away from a challenge.
Don't be a bitch
.

Fear is omnipresent inside a youth prison, hanging over the place like a persistent fog. Its companion is boredom, dense and unrelenting, sapping
the spirit as one day bleeds into the next and then the next. The days are a carefully synchronized march between cell, showers, cafeteria, schoolroom, dayroom, yard, and cell, punctuated by the sound of doors swinging open and gates clanging shut. None of this activity seems to counter the omnipresent lethargy that hovers over the place. Lights-out comes finally, a moment to oneself, but many describe this as the worst time of the day, as thoughts of what might have been and fear of what's to come crowd out sleep's relief.

Walk into the dayroom of a state juvenile prison (the common space intended for rest and recreation) and one is hit with a wave of collective ennui so powerful it can be soporific. Lanky teenagers slouch in an open-legged stance in plastic chairs that are, for some reason, always too small to contain their growing frames. Some turn the chairs around and sit backwards, their heads hunging forward in a posture of surrender, beneath motivational posters peeling from the walls. There may be a game of cards on a bolted-down table, the drone of a television tuned to an approved channel, or laconic conversation, but mostly there is a sense that time has slowed down.

Even when marching or walking in formation—as they are generally required to do—young prisoners often appear to drag their feet, as if in an effort to fill the empty time. The baggy sweats or droopy khaki uniforms and hospital-style slippers collude to enforce this slow shuffle and heighten the sense of being somehow underwater. The boisterous energy one finds virtually anywhere else that teens congregate is replaced behind bars by a sort of hibernation, as if children kept in cages somehow slowed their metabolism in an instinctive response to the winter of their exile.

In fact, that may be exactly what they are doing, intentionally or not. young people describe the food inside juvenile facilities in terms of quantity, not quality. Growing boys describe themselves as “hungry all the time”—so much so that they do, perhaps, become lethargic.

Will spent six years in juvenile prisons across California. “I don't know if you can call it a meal,” he said of the thrice-daily offerings, consumed quickly in forced silence. “They feed you enough not to starve, but never enough to satisfy you.” The hardest part to get through was the empty-bellied stretch between dinner at five and breakfast at seven.
“Young people are growing, and fourteen hours without a meal is not sufficient,” said Will, an athletic six-foot-something who spent his growing years on a prison diet. “You're hungry all the time.”

That, he added, was a best-case scenario. During the stretch he spent in a maximum-security lockdown, there was no communal mealtime at all. The delivery of food became, instead, another means of ritual humiliation. Wards were required to lie on their bunks, facing the wall, hands behind their backs, while a guard brought a tray in and set it on the toilet. The boys could lift their heads only once they heard the cell door close. This ritual was repeated when the tray was removed. Those in solitary confinement were granted even less: bag meals consisting of bread, two slices of bologna, Kool-Aid, and a container of room-temperature milk. The more experienced learned to ration the food to make it through the day.

Even out in the general population, the food young people described sounded barely edible, but very few complained about the menu—they spoke of food as fuel, not flavor or comfort. The one specific dish that Will could call to mind was SOS (Shit on a Shingle), a “chunky gravy on biscuits” that my father ate (and called by the same name) as a soldier during the privations of World War II. Will looked forward to it, he said, because it was filling.

Showers, like meals, are a mixed blessing. “I've never seen a group of guys so into their hygiene,” Will recalled. “When guys go to jail, they really keep their bodies clean.”

Nevertheless, he added, “For me, showering was one of the worst parts of jail.” The company of peers and the scrutiny of guards are hard to get used to, as is the three minutes allotted each bather. At one facility where Will spent time, things were made worse by a regimen of “broken” plumbing that mysteriously produced only cold water in the winter months and scalding hot in summer.

School, although legally mandated, does little to break the monotony. Luis was sixteen when he was shipped off to a state facility for violating his probation on an earlier, bungled burglary attempt. On the outside, teachers had urged him to stay in school and fulfill his potential. On the inside it was different. “Very little emphasis on education,” said Luis, who spent what would have been his high school years in prison. “Books are
outdated; teachers are pissed off.” Groups of one sort or another—Anger Management is a staple, as are Life Skills and Relapse Prevention—are sometimes helpful but more often perfunctory. Count to ten, rage-filled youth are instructed in Anger Management, while those in Life Skills report being told to watch their step on the outside, or else. (There are always exceptions—brilliant teachers or dedicated group leaders—but most youths I spoke with had not encountered them.)

Mental health care may be mandated by law, but that does not translate, for instance, to therapy. One of the sadder rituals I have witnessed is the nightly arrival of the “meds cart” on a wing: a nurse rolls in and half the kids line up without a word, downing handfuls of psychotropics with a single gulp of water from a flimsy paper cup.