Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (51 page)

America is at a crossroads when it comes to our treatment of young people who have stepped outside the law. Just as the states tripped over one another in the super-predator era to “crack down” on kids—writing tough new laws, building huge facilities and then packing them well past capacity, rushing to send juveniles to adult prisons—many are now moving in the opposite direction. The drop in the number of juveniles behind bars is as important as it is astonishing.

Visit a state like New York, which is creating innovative new programs as quickly as it can close its much-vilified training schools; or Missouri, which has abandoned the notion of the large-scale youth prison completely; or California, where the number of youths in state institutions is less than a tenth of what it was a decade ago, and it's hard not to feel optimistic. Walk around a place like Red Wing in Minnesota, or Red Hook in
New York, and see wardens address kids by name, with genuine affection, hear young people earnestly repeat the hopeful mantras of Positive Youth Development, and it is tempting to believe that the problems that have plagued the youth prison since its inception are on the way to being fixed, that the kids, at last, are going to be all right.

The problem with this sort of institutional reform is that it leaves the institution itself, and its underlying premise, unchallenged. And when it comes to the juvenile prison, the grounds for such a challenge are too strong to ignore. Young people in trouble—both the many locked up for minor offenses and the few behind bars for having caused real harm—are not only propelled deeper into trouble by isolation; they are crying out, often
via
delinquent acts, for exactly the opposite: attention, relationship, connection, community. Love.

Prisons, by definition, take away two things—autonomy and connection—that are central to adolescent development. Teenagers need the opportunity to make choices, to make mistakes and learn from them—a process that banishing them to a rigid penal environment curtails rather than fosters. Children need love when they are “bad” just as they do when they are “good” (perhaps even more so; try the “my child” test on this one), and prison, no matter how thoroughly we may reform it, is fundamentally a loveless place.

Until America breaks free of the edifice complex that has made isolating youth in locked institutions far from family and community our default response to juvenile delinquency, we will neither do our children justice nor offer our citizens safety. Connection, not quarantine, must be the aim of a juvenile justice system that aims to do anything besides churn out embittered survivors—candidates, too often, for the adult prison system.

A juvenile prison is a dismal place, its atmosphere a toxic combination of rage, frustration, boredom, and fear. But something else permeates locked facilities as well: a powerful desire to communicate, to be heard. The young people I met were eager to talk—about life behind bars but also much more. They shared wrenching stories of trauma and struggle, described their aspirations and detailed their plans for pursuing them, offered keen analysis on questions of crime and punishment, and outlined detailed visions of a transformed and transformative response to youthful wrongdoing.

Above all, what young people all over the country seemed most determined to communicate was a sense of urgency. The many thousands of young people locked away today cannot afford to wait for incremental reform. They have only one chance to grow up, and those behind bars speak of feeling it slip through their fingers as one lost day fades into the next. As the decades-long debate over juvenile justice drags on, these are the young people whose lives hang in the balance. They are living in a state of emergency, and they want someone—everyone—to take notice.

A young man on lockdown writes an open letter. He has been behind bars for more than seven years at this point, the last two spent in a lock-down unit known as “The Back.” Showers, clean sheets, education, worship—all are frequently denied to those in “The Back,” he writes. Family visits are reserved to be taken away as punishment from young men who have little else left to lose.

But grievance was not the motive for his missive. He wanted to be known.

I write this to represent the faceless, voiceless, the unknown struggl[ing] within [the] youth prison system. For we do exist. We are young, vibrant, diligent, strong minded, and remain hopeful. Not because of any outside force, but from within. Hope that sustains us, persevering and believing in what is right, just, and lawful, while humbly taking responsibility for all factors that have led us to such a predicament. . . .

We call upon the Department of Corrections and this facility to provide true, meaningful, effective solutions that can offer real treatment, training, and rehabilitation—none of which we receive.

And to you the public who we derive our hope from: take heed to this call, take action of which we do not have the opportunity, and stand in solidarity by supporting our cause.

For the voiceless, the unknown struggle—I am WE. This is our declaration for justice.

“Ain't I a woman?” the antislavery activist Sojourner Truth asked a nation that, in taking her freedom, cast into question her very humanity.

Am I normal?
Darren asked during the months he spent in solitary, his silent question echoing off the bare walls of his cell.
Does a normal kid live like this, away from his mother?

You are not your crime
, Will answers from the future, beaming in cap and gown as he graduates from college.
I am not my crime. A crime is something you did. It is not who you are
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From the beginning, assembling this manuscript has been something akin to a barn raising. The heaviest lifting was done by those whose lives are reflected in these pages, who not only lived the experiences described herein but were willing to
re
live them so that others might understand. As a reporter, I am constantly amazed by people's willingness to open their doors—to entrust their precious histories and hard-won wisdom—to someone who often arrives as a stranger. My greatest hope is to do justice to this trust.

This book is also deeply steeped in friendship and the trust reflected there. Over the past two decades, I have had the good fortune to do work that has brought into my life young people who became both dear friends and great teachers. Far too many of these young people were locked up at some point. The result has been relationships that—while they enriched my own life immeasurably—have familiarized me with the bitter taste of indifference and injustice and the particular mix of loss and helpless fury that accompanies grieving the young.

Bart Lubow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation not only supported this book; he supported its author by sharing his vast network of contacts and deep well of knowledge, offering crucial ideas and insights, and helping me get (and keep) a grip on the process as well as the subject. His wisdom, rigor, and tremendous compassion infused every aspect of this endeavor, and his life's work serves as a constant reminder that change requires patience and fortitude, but is never beyond reach.

Will Roy contributed to this work as researcher, reporter, sounding board, conscience, and friend. Will challenged, and deepened, my
thinking at every turn, and his keen intellect helped me steer clear of false assumptions and received wisdom. Will is a gifted reporter, endlessly curious and profoundly empathetic, whom people trusted with their deepest truths. The stories he brought back were riveting, but it was the insights he drew out of his long conversations (technically “interviews”)—the wisdom he and other survivors shared with one another—that most consistently stopped me in my tracks. It is hard to find the words to express my gratitude to Will—for his ambitious reporting, his reflective nature, his insight, his guidance, his humor, his dedication, and the relentless call to think more deeply he brought to the work (and demanded of its author). More than anything, I am grateful for his faith.

Deborah Sills Iarussi and her marvelous uncles Arthur and Peter Sills at the Sills Family Foundation understood intuitively the importance of involving those who had experienced juvenile incarceration in the development of this book. That understanding, along with their generosity, allowed me to hire Will, without whom this book might not exist. Amy Price and my allies at the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership were generous in granting me a leave in order to write this book and relentless in continuing our shared effort while I was gone.

John Knight consistently went above and beyond in his role as researcher, bringing me information I asked for but also much more. His keen eye is peerless. Because Bart Lubow had the foresight to suggest that I hire a researcher and enabled me to do so—and because in John I found someone at once meticulous, knowledgeable, good-natured, and committed—I managed to finish the book without losing my mind.

Caroline Goosen contributed her time and reporting skills to this book and shared key information from her studies, as did Nabihah Azim. Grace Bauer offered insight, shared her remarkable network, and consistently inspired me with her own ferocious work at Justice for Families. I was bolstered also by her unwavering faith.

At The New Press, Jed Bickman went far beyond the call of duty, both in the early stages of assembling the manuscript and again at the end, when he worked tirelessly to speed its publication. Sarah Fan supervised the production process with exceptional precision and grace under pressure. Diane Wachtell is an editor like no other—when it comes to what stays on the page and what goes, her eye is unerring. My agent, Kathleen
Anderson, shook free the manuscript with a key piece of advice: to loosen my grip on the third person and let in my own life. My sister, Elizabeth Bernstein, lent her eye to the document at a crucial moment and helped it become a manuscript. I relied on many sources for background and statistics, but I owe particular thanks to Richard Mendel, whose report
No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration
offered a meticulous and incontrovertible research-based case against the policy and practice of locking up the young.

My husband, Tim Buckwalter, did everything around the house for a period of years, while working full bore himself, so I would have time to write. He and our children, Ruby and Nicholas, spent many a dinner hour talking about juvenile justice with genuine concern and curiosity (and, if ever that flagged, great patience). Their insights are threaded throughout the book as their hearts are through my own—an everyday reminder of how grave an act it is to isolate a child.

NOTES

Introduction

    
5
  
“Caging men like animals”
: Quoted in Robert Perkinson,
Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), p. 2.

    
6
  
“million-dollar blocks”
: Eric Cadora and Laura Kagan, Million Dollar Block Project, Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation,
www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects.php?id=16
.

    
6
  
we spend $88,000 per year to incarcerate a young person
: Richard A. Mendel,
No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration
(Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011), p. 20,
www.aecf.org/OurWork/JuvenileJustice/~/media/Pubs/Topics/Juvenile%20Justice/Detention%20Reform/NoPlaceForKids/JJ_NoPlaceForKids_Full.pdf
.

    
6
  
more than eight times the $10,652 we invest in her education
: Expenditures were $10,652 in fiscal year 2010. Stephen Q. Cornman, Jumaane Young, and Kenneth C. Herrell, “Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: School Year 2009–10 (Fiscal Year 2010),” National Center for Education Statistics, 2010,
nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/expenditures/findings.asp
; see, e.g., Ed Mendel, “Per-Pupil Spending Rankings All Relative,”
San Diego Union-Tribune
, April 13, 2008,
www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080413/news_1n13pupil.html
. For school spending as of 2010, see Lam Thuy Vo, “How Much Does the Government Spend to Send a Kid to Public School?”
Planet Money
blog, NPR, June 21, 2012,
www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/155515613/how-much-does-the-government-spend-to-send-a-kid-to-school
.

    
6
  
youth prison
: State-run juvenile facilities operate under a number of names, most of them euphemistic. I use the term “youth prison” (as well as other terms) because, based on my experience, it is the most accurate descriptor.

    
6
  
education spending dipped to less than $8,000
: Cornman et al., “Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: School Year 2009–10 (Fiscal Year 2010).”

    
6
  
the cost of a year in a youth prison reached a high of $225,000
: Susan Ferriss, “Steinberg Calls for Social Services Shift to California Counties,”
Sacramento Bee
, May 30, 2010, cited in Douglas N. Evans, “Pioneers of Youth Justice Reform: Achieving System Change Using Resolution, Reinvestment, and Realignment Strategies,” Research and Evaluation Center, July 2012, p. 12,
johnjayresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/rec20123.pdf
.