Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (5 page)

Measuring about nine by eleven feet, a cell (or “room,” to use another common euphemism) in a juvenile prison seems more like a stall than anything else. Most have minimal bedding—a thin mattress on a bunk bolted to the wall, a steel toilet and sink. The fortunate may have a desk, also bolted to the wall, or a locker or shelf to store a few belongings. In some facilities, large dormitories filled with bunk beds replace individual cells; in others youths have roommates, sometimes bunked four to a cell. There will also be a yard, sometimes a field, and a gym. Classrooms. A cafeteria. An infirmary. A chapel. And miles of empty sky—the practice of siting juvenile prisons in remote rural outposts leaves even those with windows little to see. If the facility is on lockdown—as can happen because of a fight, gang concerns, or something as mundane as a shortage of teachers—the dayroom may be empty, while young people spend twenty-two, twenty-three, or sometimes, despite regulations, twenty-four hours locked in their cells.

Just as all hospitals or high schools seem to have the same smell, so do juvenile prisons—the astringent odor of industrial-strength soap mixed with the sour sweat of fear. Sound echoes hollowly off concrete floors and cinder-block walls. Every aspect of the institution, cold to the touch and harsh on the ear, seems designed to convey that those who abide there are all alone and very far from home.

Rules vary from one institution to the next, but most places require that wards march three or four across from unit to classroom to meals and back
again. Some also require young people to hold their hands behind their backs when they move together from one place to another, or to do some version of the “chicken walk” (hands folded across the chest and tucked into the armpits). Justified as a means of preempting fights, this odd posture of self-containment also functions to sap any residual dignity.

Most juvenile facilities have some version of “the hole”: stripped-down solitary confinement cells, sometimes whole wings of them, used to house the victimized, the victimizer, the vulnerable, the suicidal, or the simply defiant, with little distinction made among them. Youth deemed in need of protection (from themselves or others) or discipline spend up to twenty-three hours a day in these barren cells, with the mattress removed during the day in the name of safety, and meals and education (sometimes worksheets and a crayon) slipped through a slot in the door. When these young people leave their cells for any reason, they must first slip their hands through a slot to be cuffed.

Even in the “general population,” the young prisoner generally has little to call his own. There are strict limitations on “personal effects”; even photographs of family are rationed, if not banned. Rooms must be kept military-style neat, although guards may also ransack them in the name of a general search. The young ward will eat, sleep, and shower with strangers, under the eye of yet more strangers and often surveillance cameras, and wake to the sound of a clamoring bell.

“When you walk into the living quarters of a lot of our places, it's very intimidating,” a clinician who works with multiple New York youth facilities acknowledged. “When you drove up to the facility, it was a huge campus surrounded by a fence with razor wire,” he continued, speaking of a particular institution that had recently been closed. “You had to drive [through] a fence. They closed the gate behind you and then the next gate opened up and you drive through it. Just the physical layout is . . . very intimidating.” For those new to institutional life, he explained, the effect was often overwhelming.

He was not talking about the kids who are held in these places, sometimes for years. He was explaining why turnover is so high among newly hired guards.

•
   
•
   
•

As California's Preston Youth Correctional Facility loomed in the distance, Luis's palms began to sweat and his heart rate accelerated. Instinctively, he balled up his fists, ready to fight before he even stepped off the bus.

“I did not know what to expect,” Luis recalled of his arrival at age sixteen. His first stop on the state juvenile circuit was known colloquially as “The Castle” because of its site just beneath the now empty Preston School of Industry, a massive, Romanesque Revival stone edifice in California's Gold Country that housed young offenders until 1960.

Evoking a medieval torture mill more than any kind of industry, the Castle is rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of former wards and an unlucky housekeeper. Ghosts, however, were not Luis's top concern. A slight and handsome teenager with the eyes of a deer, Luis had picked up a gang affiliation in an effort to protect himself inside the local juvenile hall. Until now, though, he had just been testing out the identity. Here, he feared, he might be pushed further. “I thought if it was gonna be hella crazy, then I would have turned crazy and kept fighting and defending the gang that I represent,” Luis explained.

Each unit at Preston was named for a different tree, as if the complex were a suburban subdivision. First, Luis went to Cedars, the reception unit. Looking around, he saw no familiar faces—no potential allies but any number of possible foes. As he passed by the Sequoia Unit, empty metal cages loomed before him, used (until subsequent litigation challenged the practice) to hold young men during their legally mandated hour of
“large-muscle exercise.”

“I was lost,” Luis recalled of his arrival at Preston. “Swear to God, I was lost.”

Luis was lying on his bunk in boxers and sandals, trying to orient himself by staring at the rows of triple-tier bunks and the locked command center, when he heard a catcall that represented a direct challenge to his local gang. Luis returned the insult, and then it was on. He charged his provocateur at full speed and was ready to fight a second belligerent when guards arrived and hauled him away.

Others shouted taunts as guards escorted him past the showers and down the hallway to Ironwood, Preston's secure unit. It was his first night, and already Luis was on lockdown.

“Where the fuck am I?” Luis wondered. “I am hella skinny, my shirt is off, I am in my boxers still . . . and I am just pondering. Am I going to be this self-proclaimed gangster that goes all out for this stupid set that I am not a part of? That is really just hurting me, not loving me—hurting me in every way possible?”

What was the alternative? The conflicts and alliances that defined life in a juvenile prison held little interest for Luis, who had entered the system an abused kid toying with a criminal identity. But could he survive without the protection of a gang? Challenged within hours of his arrival, he had already landed in solitary confinement.

He tried to fall asleep on the bare concrete slab that served as his bed—he had no blanket and had cast away the shit-stained mattress—but these questions kept him awake deep into the night.

The next day was little better. Released from isolation, he was placed in a cage (an actual metal cage, ostensibly for exercise) with two rival gang members, who told him to plan to “get down” in the showers.

“Shower time, and you are gonna box me when I'm naked?” Luis cast his eyes to the sky: What next? He'd soon find out.

“When kids go to prison in California, it's not pretty,” Luis summarized. “I witnessed how COs [correctional officers] would put you in your place, and if you
weren't
in your place, they would beat the shit out of you and put you in your place.”

Technically, the young people held in juvenile institutions like Preston are not prisoners. They have stepped outside the lines of the law, but they have not been convicted of any crime. Instead, under the rubric of the juvenile justice system, they have been adjudicated delinquent and mandated to a stay in a state institution in the name of their best interest as well as public safety.

But walk down a cellblock or visit a dorm inside one of these places anywhere in the nation and ask the kids to describe their situation: they will make it clear that they are locked down. The distinction we make between a juvenile facility, by whatever euphemism, and a prison means little to the kid who enters through a sally port and sleeps in a barren cell, watched over by uniformed guards wielding pepper spray, and surrounded on all sides by coils of razor wire.

A national survey by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention paints a picture of state juvenile prisons as an environment of nearly unremitting victimization, where young people
“experience violence, theft and assault at an alarming rate.” The majority of youth in state custody—56 percent—told investigators they had been victimized, most of them repeatedly, at the hands of staff as well as their peers. Sixty-one percent of those who had been victimized reported that they were injured in the process.
Nearly half of those surveyed had their property stolen, 10 percent were directly robbed, and 29 percent had been threatened or beaten. Most who were robbed behind bars had been robbed repeatedly, and about a third were injured badly enough to require medical treatment.

All of this conspires to underscore a central message: that the young ward surrenders the right not only to freedom but also to safety and bodily integrity the moment he crosses the threshold. Young people who have been sent to juvenile institutions to learn “accountability” discover that there is a powerful double standard when they are the victims and their keepers are the perpetrators. According to a large-scale federal survey, fully 41 percent of incarcerated youth who told investigators they'd “had property taken by force or threat” reported that
a guard was the perpetrator, as did 24 percent of victims of assault. A comprehensive federal investigation into sexual abuse in juvenile facilities found that the vast majority was perpetrated by guards.
One in ten youths nationwide had suffered sexual assault at the hands of a staff member, while a far lower number—one in fifty—were sexually victimized by peers. Staff are rarely called to account for these offenses—which are often more serious than those that propelled their victims into custody—and criminal prosecution is particularly rare.

The ward-on-ward violence, at least, may appear self-explanatory:
These are violent kids; what else do you expect?
In fact, the dynamic is more complex. Certainly, some youths are already acting out violently by the time they are locked up, but more are not. Only one-fourth of youth held in state juvenile facilities, ostensibly reserved for more serious offenders, are locked up for
Violent Crime Index offenses. But whatever their charge, or demeanor on the outside, new arrivals often feel pressed to make a stark choice: victim or victimizer. Neutrality is rarely an option.

Even as young prisoners are given the message that they must be confined because they pose a threat to society, many live in constant, if well-hidden, fear themselves. More than one-third of youth (38 percent) told federal researchers they feared being attacked while locked up, 25 percent by another resident and 22 percent by staff.

On top of the violence cited above, more than one-fourth of youth in custody reported that staff used “some method of physical restraint on them—whether handcuffs, wristlets, a security belt, chains, or a restraint chair.” Another 7 percent had been pepper sprayed, while 30 percent live on units where pepper spray is used. Taken in the name of “safety and security,” these and similar measures more often serve to heighten young people's fear and constant vigilance.

Guards often use hands-on physical restraint, not only to break up fights or avert other violence but in response to minor infractions such as horseplay, talking in line, or simply talking back. The most dangerous method is known as “prone restraint.” Guards, sometimes two or three, force a youth to the ground and then lie or sit on him until they are convinced he has been thoroughly subdued.
A number of young people have died during or shortly after being restrained in this manner, leading a few states to ban the practice.

Also striking is
the pervasive use of solitary confinement, given widespread agreement that the practice is damaging and potentially dangerous, especially for youth. Nevertheless, more than a third of youth in custody
reported being placed in isolation, more than half for longer than twenty-four hours (a clear violation of international standards).

In a particularly bitter irony, the stricter the means of custody and control at a particular institution, the
higher
the odds that youths will be victimized there, by guards as well as peers.
The more often young people are handcuffed, strip-searched, chained, or bound in restraint chairs, in other words, the higher the odds they will also be assaulted, robbed, or raped.

Much of what is done in the name of institutional security only adds to young people's sense of degradation. For Enrique, the frequent room searches were a particular affront. “That's your sanctuary,” he said of the few feet of cell space allotted each inmate—“that's our place of peace.
Some guys' floor is so clean, the toilet is spotless, the walls are clean, the bed is made, all your clothes you have are folded neatly, your letters, paper, and pencil, everything is perfect.”

During a search, he said, order gives way to chaos. “All your mail is thrown on the ground. Body washes and shampoos are open and [spilled] on the mail. Blankets are on the floor. The blankets you sleep on, and it's on the floor! Your clothes, your boxers, it's on the floor. Why throw it on the floor? Why can't you just put it on the mat?”

For many young people, connection with family—their link to the outside world and the life they knew before—is especially precious. Even in this sacred realm, according to Enrique and others, staff seemed to go out of their way to convey disrespect.