Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (9 page)

But yes, I get scared going into these places. A prison itself—with its coils of razor wire, clanging metal doors, and uniformed guards—is a frightening place. In most cases, instilling fear appears to be the architectural and institutional intent, and I have by no means developed immunity.

Prisons scare me. Prisoners do not. Call me a hug-a-thug (you wouldn't be the first), but the distinction is based on lengthy experience. Some young prisoners I've met have been reserved to the point of silence, a few have been manipulative, and others prone to anger (as have some I've met among the free) but soulless, frozen-faced predators, as far as I can tell, are merely a figment of the criminological imagination—a potent figment, both politically and culturally, but a figment nonetheless.

Inside the girls' unit where I visited my friend Eliza, I got to know some of the other girls, along with their parents, grandparents, and children. Like Eliza—like the great majority of juvenile offenders—most were not there for committing violent or serious crimes; they were runaways, shoplifters, disturbers of the peace. Most, however, had been the
victims
of violence—beaten by boyfriends, assaulted by strangers, knocked around at home, and
then
brutalized in prison.

The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's
Survey of Youth in Residential Placement offers an overview of what lands youth in juvenile prisons. Contrary to the notion that anyone who makes it to the so-called deep end of the juvenile justice system is by definition a super-predator, the most common route to custody is a property offense (45 percent of those surveyed). Forty-two percent reported status offenses (acts for which only minors can be arrested—running away, truancy, underage drinking), 23 percent “public order” offenses, and 30 percent technical violations of probation. Twenty-eight percent cited drug offenses. (The total is more than 100 percent because young people were asked what led to their current custody situation and many listed more than one offense.)

Twenty-six percent of those surveyed were locked up on assault charges and another 14 percent for a robbery.
Only 11 percent of youth in custody were there for the kind of crimes associated with the super-predator image: murder, rape, or kidnapping. Forty-four percent reported being
drunk, high, or both at the time of their offense, and 55 percent said they were with a group of other youths.

Studies in New York, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina, and elsewhere flesh out the national picture, confirming the federal study's conclusion:
the great majority of those confined as juveniles pose little to no danger to the public. Another misconception is that youths commit the majority of crime in the nation.
In 2008, only 12 percent of violent crime and 18 percent of property crime nationwide were attributed to youths. According to the FBI, youths under age eighteen accounted for just 15 percent of all arrests.

Even this last number is likely inflated by police discretion.
According to Lisa Thurau of the Massachusetts-based Strategies for Youth, which works to improve relations between police and teenagers, 21 percent of young people referred to juvenile court in 2005 were sent before a judge on charges of “disorderly conduct” or “obstruction of justice”—vague catchalls that, when it comes to teenagers, are very often euphemisms for what Thurau calls “contempt of cop.”

In interviews with police officers over the course of a five-year investigation, Thurau found, “officers have routinely told me they will arrest a youth for being rude, for ‘giving attitude' and for not submitting to officers' authority.”

“Whether the youth has committed an offense does not determine the outcome,” Thurau writes. “This focus on the offender rather than the offense is a characteristic of juvenile justice, and speaks volumes about what and who is viewed as criminal.”

This was certainly so when it came to Eliza, who was sixteen when she introduced me to juvenile hall, and the road that brings young people there.

In a literal sense, I drove that road with her—she asked me to take her to turn herself in. The twenty-mile journey took us several hours. We stopped at a bookstore where she picked out a stack of novels—Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid—which I promised to bring in to her one at a time: she was not allowed to carry anything with her when she went inside. At a mall off the freeway, she chose a lunch of ice cream and candy, a child's last meal.

I had known Eliza since she was fourteen, when she wandered into the youth newspaper I edited, sat down at a computer, and released an eloquent, punctuation-free stream of autobiography interspersed with well-informed political rants.

Abandoned by her mother as a baby, Eliza had lived with her great-grandmother until she was eleven, when the state deemed her incorrigible and her great-grandmother incapable and took charge of Eliza's care. By the time I met her, Eliza had cycled through more foster- and group-home placements than she could keep track of before finally deciding she would be better off on her own. She was staying on friends' couches, crashing where she could—part of the uncounted, indoor homeless. Enrolling herself in high school and lying about her age to get wait-ressing jobs, she had managed to stay under the radar for two years.

Then her mother came back to town with a new boyfriend and asked Eliza to move in and give her one more chance. It was a matter of days before an argument with her mother's boyfriend turned violent. He took his belt off and came after Eliza; she managed, somehow, to throw a television set through the window. Her mother called the police, and when they arrived Eliza was the one who got swept back into the system, sent to juvenile hall and then another group home.

Though she'd promised to try to stick it out until Sunday, when I'd be allowed a visit, I was not surprised to get a phone call from the supervisor, his voice strained. Eliza, he told me, had been threatening to leave, didn't need him or anyone else, could make it on her own. But when he put her on the phone she was quiet, almost squeaky, resigned. Two of the other girls had been after her since the day she arrived, she told me. They “couldn't tell if she's black or white” (in fact she is black, South American, and more), accused her of behaving like she was “all that,” didn't approve of the gap between her teeth. They would corner her in the hallways and challenge her to fight, later, in the basement, when no staff were around.

She had no interest in fighting them, no interest in any of the petty power struggles that determine dominion in this tiny, self-referential universe. That disengagement was as central to her unpopularity as her caramel-colored skin or her fancy vocabulary: there's nothing more infuriating than a new kid who refuses to play by the rules. So the other girls kept poking at her, which was hard to take, she reminded me, because she
“had a lot of anger”—the loose, swirling kind that barely remembers its source, that simply hovers, until it finds a trigger or a target.

That night's fight started at the dining table. Eliza used a polysyllabic word, showing up her less erudite adversaries, and they either slammed down a dictionary (by their account) or threw it at her (by hers), suggesting she look up those big words of hers. She lunged, they fought, and she wound up ripping out a big chunk of one girl's hair, leaving a gaping bald spot, the quintessential mark of humiliation. (Even a decade earlier, when I spent a miserable year trying to be a “counselor” in a group home myself, “I'll snatch you baldheaded” was the threat of choice when things went sour between the girls.) Eliza took off before police could get there.

When I got to work the next morning, Eliza was already there, asleep on the couch. She woke up and began to bounce around the office, alighting on desks, soaking up all the attention in the room, thirsty for more. “I looove Nell,” she announced to nobody in particular when I walked by. The declaration was clearly preemptive: she had screwed up and was afraid that meant I wouldn't love her anymore. That's generally how things happened within the rigid emotional economy of life in “the system”—the umbrella term young people use to describe those agencies and institutions that have come to assume control over their lives.

Eliza regretted her AWOL, though she left not impetuously but because she felt herself backed into a corner—the police were on their way and she wasn't prepared to go back to jail. She did want to go back to the group home, though, and was willing to take whatever medicine was prescribed in order to be allowed to hold on to her last shard of freedom. She felt it was a good placement, relatively speaking, and that had been my impression too—to the degree that any place that takes eight young women, strangers to one another, each carrying her own load of pain and rage, and throws them together in an enclosed space can ever be called a home. Eliza wanted my help in negotiating her return.

Her probation officer, who had not been easy to reach in the past, returned my call immediately when I left a message that Eliza was in our office.

“I've discharged her from the program,” the PO informed me, her voice like a door slamming shut. “She needs to turn herself in.”

“Needs to” is one of the more frightening euphemisms one hears from representatives of “the system,” used to describe actions that they are determined to compel. Eliza may have had no
choice
but to turn herself in, but on her list of needs, which ranged from love and attention to a jacket to a high school education, incarceration was actually pretty low. But until she met this “need,” I was told, she could forget about the rest of them. We were talking about an
offender
, I was reminded. There would be no deals here, no bargaining, no “working together” on her behalf. I must deposit Eliza behind bars posthaste and let them do with her what they would.

Eliza took a few hours to consider her limited options, then asked me to take her to juvenile hall. “Slow down,” she kept saying as we crawled along the freeway. By the time we reached the exit, we were pressing the forty-mile-per-hour minimum speed limit, and I could sense how much it was costing her to submit voluntarily to a system that had treated her with both indifference and disdain.

The sun was setting by the time we arrived. Eliza was stripped of her clothing and belongings, issued slippers and a thin cotton jumpsuit, and ushered out of sight to shower and be deloused.

After that, I had to grovel and plead for permission to visit, since my role corresponded to none of the categories on the little blue visitors' pass: parent, guardian, custodian. Pointing out that no one else could check those boxes either (except, in theory, the state, which she had fled) got me nowhere with the gatekeepers. They were accustomed to kids like Eliza—not just “other people's children” but nobody's at all. Who was I—who was
she
—to expect special treatment?

For the next six months, Eliza's childhood, actual and legal, ticked away while she sat suspended in a sort of sleep in her darkened room. Every so often—when another group home administrator explained to me why she was not “appropriate for the program,” when the guard at the front desk arbitrarily changed the rules, when another court hearing was canceled without warning or explanation—I got just a taste of the rage that is generated when helplessness meets irresponsible power. Your mind looks for avenues, ways out of or around the dead end before you, and then, hitting only brick walls, lashes out. That may be one reason why there is such seemingly random venting in juvenile institutions—the throwing
and breaking of things, as well as the viciousness young people sometimes show one another. Legitimate anger is blocked off, dammed, until, as inexorably as water, it finds another outlet.

Each time I came to visit, Eliza's greeting was the same: “Who asked about me?” I brought messages and books and learned to play dominoes. Sometimes, when she was feeling especially hopeless, we would decorate the apartment she hoped one day to have, stocking the refrigerator and filling the closets, building her a home out of images and words.

Most of the time, she sat in her cell and read. “I lived in my books,” she told me later, “until I could get away. I read about heroines who were kept in towers. I read about women who survived obstacles, and reading about survivors made me feel like one. If they could leave slavery and defy Rome, so could I.”

I believed her, for a time.

NO, WHITE LADY, I DON
'
T WANT YOUR PURSE
.

Jared had emblazoned this slogan on a custom-printed T-shirt. He wore it often on the days he came to work at the youth newspaper office in order to ease his transit through San Francisco's Financial District, where sidewalk crowds parted at his approach.

To my surprise, the shirt did not evoke a hostile, affronted, or even discomfited reaction in its target demographic. Instead, passersby appeared to take it literally. Some did a quick double take as their eyes traveled from his shirt to his face and back again, but few appeared embarrassed to be confronted so baldly with the prospect of their own prejudices. Instead, many visibly relaxed, as if they were taking his T-shirt at its word. The grip on purses loosened and the wake around Jared narrowed.

“How does this make you feel?” I once asked Jared after witnessing this phenomenon.

He gave me that particular half smile that young people reserve for well-meaning adults to whom they are willing to give the benefit of the doubt despite their glaring naïveté.