Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (11 page)

“Nine,” he said, letting the word hang in the air for a moment. “That is when I stepped out in the world on my own, with all of my young wisdom.”

The tide had begun to recede before that, when Jared was eight and his parents split up. Dad moved out. Mom was using crack. His older brother got locked up. His sister got pregnant and moved in with her boyfriend. Eventually, “it was just me and my little brother. We used to steal clothes off of people's clotheslines from different neighborhoods to have clean clothes to wear to school.”

Dinner went from home cooked to canned food to cornflakes to nothing.
Jared learned “what it's like not to have food for three days, and have to go rob somebody.”

Jeff Adachi, the public defender of San Francisco and a lifelong advocate for young people in trouble, has heard many stories like this over the years. For him, they point the way to a new question. Instead of focusing only on what “rehabilitates” young people, he proposed, why not look also at what “dehabilitates” and intervene there rather than waiting for a crime? Do most kids remember when and why they began to veer off a safe course and into the realm of delinquency? he wondered. What life events set children on the roads that converge at the prison gate?

“You take a kid who's not good or bad, just tabula rasa,” Adachi mused. “And then at some point—what happens? You always hear, ‘This kid started having problems when he was ten years old, or twelve years old, or he did really well until he was sixteen, and then something happened.' What if we could go backwards, and find out at what point in time an intervention—intensive family services, say—would have made a difference, and figure out what the problem was for that individual at that point in time?”

No one forgets the withdrawal of home and family, the leaching away of hope. Some kids remember not a sudden breach but a gradual ebb, connections receding like a tide going out, until they wake up one morning to find themselves stranded. Others speak of something more abrupt: a grandmother's death or a parent's arrest, and a childhood swept away with the force of a riptide.

By the time Jared was nine, he had lost everything. “My mom is totally gone on crack. We moved to our grandma's house in the Fillmore. The family sold the house, everybody took their money and started using dope with it, so we didn't have anything. So we ended up in the Tenderloin [District] selling dope.”

He soon learned that he was not the only one. “By nine, all those other kids out there were in the same situation. However they got there, we were there on the street, and they became my friends.”

Whatever safety these children had lay in sticking together. “If somebody messed with us, we'd jump them.” Otherwise, they kept a low profile.

“In kids' minds?” he continued, referring to children like himself and his friends, back then. “It's desperation. A lot of kids' moms and dads aren't
there, or they are there and on dope. Or the dad's in jail and the mom's on dope. So these kids have grown up having to fend for themselves—selling some weed or some ecstasy pills or even crack or heroin. That's not
bad
, because they have to take care of themselves, and they're doing what they gotta do. In their minds. But they're still kids.”

It wasn't long before Jared was arrested. His tone was flat as he described the treatment he received in what would be a string of institutional placements.

“The absence of love plays a big factor. The group homes. These people don't genuinely care. If I slam a bowl of food down in your face, slam it down on the table, you can feel it,” he said. “People forget, these are kids, they need love.”

The trajectory Jared described was clear enough. From canned food to cornflakes to starving to stealing; from a bowl slammed on a table to a tray slipped through a cell door.

“And then you got some that are hardened,” Jared mused, talking about the kids he grew up with. “For some, it's normal to walk around with a pistol. But for society, that's not normal.”

“What are you doing with this .357 Magnum?” he continued, offering an imagined dialogue between “society” and the child.

“I'm going to school.”

“Why do you need a gun?”

“Because these dudes from the other side of town go to school and I'm the only person from my neighborhood that goes there and I don't want to get jumped. Or robbed. Or beat up every day.”

“And so it's
normal
for some kids,” he reiterated, leaning across the table as if to bridge the gap between the world he was describing and what Jared, who is black, dubbed “Caucasian Acres.” In this barely hypothetical subdivision, he explained, the actions seen as “normal” on the block where he grew up are met with incomprehension and then incarceration.

Jared had no interest in portraying himself as a victim. He described the “normal” he knew as a child: “pulling runners” (eating quickly, without paying, then literally running) at the all-you-can-eat soup and salad bar at Sizzler to get a reprieve from the bottomless hunger, pooling the day's take with four or five other kids until they had enough to pay an addict to get them the key to a hotel room in a flophouse. But he was not making
excuses, much less looking for pity. He was trying, with words, to bridge two realities.

Tough-on-crime hard-liners like to speak in terms of “choices”—good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, lock 'em up. Jared was offering a more nuanced perspective: children make choices from among the options they have—choices that are rational, under the circumstances, yet reprehensible to the denizens of Caucasian Acres.

“But society,” he elaborated, “says, ‘Throw them away. They're corrupt. They don't have the mind-set of a child.' ”

Several years ago, I set out to explore the daily lives of homeless youth in California. Aided by a crew of about forty currently or formerly homeless peer researchers, I heard from kids who'd spent the previous night alone behind a Chevron station, camped along the banks of the Sacramento River, or simply on the street. Despite childhood histories horrific enough to raise the antennae of any sentient social servant, the only adults earning a taxpayer-funded salary who'd ever shown an interest in them had come wearing a badge, shining a flashlight in a kid's face, interrupting scant sleep, gloved hands shaking down precious possessions, handing out tickets the young recipients obviously couldn't pay—tickets that, piled high enough, morphed into bench warrants, landing them finally in juvenile hall. All this for the original sin of being parentless and having the temerity to try to survive anyway.

I'd thought I'd been on the margins before, but hearing from children who slept in public bathrooms when they did not sleep in cells, hearing that there was no system for them but one that criminalized their extreme vulnerability, I was beginning to feel I had stepped out past the limits of my comprehension. “Dirtbag,” “fuckup,” “lazy,” “worthless,” “lower than the low,” these children had answered when we asked them how others perceived them. Could it be, I wondered, that we had turned on the children? Had we
nothing
to offer the most vulnerable among them but the cold hand of the law?

“What do they want us to do?” one teenager asked bitterly, referring to the officers who wrote him tickets for loitering when he could walk the streets no longer, then placed him in handcuffs when those tickets went unpaid. “Just crawl off somewhere and die?”

How many of the children Jared had grown up with—hungry, lonely,
and just about invisible, until the will to survive ran up against the law—had considered that same question in the back of a police car, bound for the one institution that, as I heard over and over, “had a bed waiting for me”? How many understood that the system's meager promise—three hots and a cot—came with a condition: that they slip back into the invisibility that allows the rest of us to enjoy untroubled sleep?

In testimony before the Attorney General's National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence, Annie E. Casey Foundation president Patrick McCarthy underscored the failures of the system that is often the only one to take notice of children like Jared. “Whether we call them training schools, reform schools, juvenile correctional facilities or youth prisons,” McCarthy testified, juvenile institutions

too often have become places of poor treatment and abuse rather than rehabilitation and hope. Recidivism rates are dismal, suggesting that these institutions fail to protect public safety. Abuse and poor treatment are rampant. . . . The sad irony is that as many as three-fourths of the young people incarcerated in these often brutal facilities have themselves been victims of trauma and violence. . . . And following their incarceration, they are more likely rather than less likely to commit violent acts. You would be hard-pressed if you tried to design a less effective response to a child's exposure to violence than to lock him or her up in overcrowded, loud, brightly lit, depressing, frightening conditions with a large group of other children with similar problems, little or no privacy and no sense of personal safety, and then fail to provide a decent education or an opportunity to build skills; neglect to address the mental health, substance abuse, trauma and family issues that contributed to the delinquent behavior; and then release him or her to the streets with little hope for a future of promise or possibility. This is not a recipe for success.

As they cycle ever deeper into the juvenile and criminal justice systems, many young people lose any faith they may have had that they are expected, or even permitted, to succeed. Success comes to seem the purview of others, reserved for the denizens of Caucasian Acres.

Behind bars, many receive the message that they are destined for failure
in explicit terms. “When you're locked up, you're treated like you're nobody. You're constantly reminded that you're nothing, that you're a criminal, that you're never gonna be this, that you're too stupid to do that,” recalled sixteen-year-old Birdy, whose father had deposited her at juvenile hall after she ran away for a few days. “They tell you, ‘We can go home. You can't, because you broke the law. Only criminals are here. Can't you see? Take a look around.' ”

“The probation officers think it's good to be in there—it teaches you a lesson,” she said. “It don't teach you a lesson. It makes you worse, because you start believing what they're telling you. I felt like I was a criminal. Once you get put in the system, you consider yourself a criminal. So when you get out, you think, ‘Oh well, I've been through it before. Why not again?' I started believing I wasn't gonna be nobody.”

“That's a nice way to start building your record,” Miranda remembers the booking officer sneering as she took the seventeen-year-old's fingerprints after she was arrested for fighting at school. For young people who are most profoundly alone, violence can become its own sort of language, a desperate effort to communicate their pain by passing it on. But no one asked Miranda what had so enraged her, asked her anything, for that matter, that would have helped them to see her as an individual. If they had, they would have learned that Miranda's combatant had insulted her mother, who had been locked up since Miranda was twelve; that police had picked her mother up for check kiting while Miranda was at school, leaving Miranda to pack a bag and fend for herself, alone and itinerant throughout her adolescence.

“They look at you like you're just gonna keep spiraling down,” Miranda said of that arrest, “when maybe you're just an angry teenager. Maybe I just needed to talk to somebody. But nobody cares. Nobody cares.”

That children who wind up in juvenile facilities have at some previous point “fallen through the cracks” is a popular metaphor but a spurious analysis. It implies that most children who grow up in impoverished, high-incarceration neighborhoods—who face violence on the streets, in their schools, and sometimes in their homes—have access to functional public systems and community networks, and that those who wind up in trouble simply missed or were missed by these otherwise adequate safety nets.

Spend some time talking with young prisoners and the fallacy quickly becomes clear. The children one meets in juvenile prisons have not fallen through cracks; they have tumbled into chasms. Wandered through deserts. There may not exist a metaphor adequate to the trauma that many have survived.

And then we lock them up, in barren, violent, abuse-filled institutions that are virtually guaranteed to exacerbate the trauma they bring with them and add fresh wounds to old.

4

THE RISE OF THE SUPER-PREDATOR AND THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL

Here is what we believe: America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile “super-predators”—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders. They do not fear the stigma of arrest, the pains of imprisonment, or the pangs of conscience.

—William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, and John P. Walters,
Body Count

“Y
OU KNOW WHAT
I wish?” my friend Lamont once asked, reflecting on life as a black teenager in the fear-crazed 1990s.

“I wish the older folks would have come out to the stoop and told us to quiet down when we got too loud in the street, instead of always calling the cops on us right off. Or at least come to the window if they were too scared of us to come outside. I wish it was like they used to talk about back in the day, when someone else's mom would take a belt to you if you were causing trouble, because anyone's kid was everyone's kid. Back before everyone was scared of us from the day we stepped outta diapers, and it was just cops, guards, and POs left to raise us up.”