Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (34 page)

The first time I encountered Gladys Carrión, then the commissioner of New York's Office of Children and Family Services, she was standing
behind a podium at a
symposium on the legacy of another iconoclastic administrator, Jerome Miller. A legend among the juvenile justice cognoscenti, Miller is best known for closing down every last training school in the state of Massachusetts during his tenure as director there forty years ago.

Barry Krisberg described Carríon as “The contemporary Jerry Miller. A child advocate who used to be a legal aid lawyer, she's
for
the kids. She cares about them. It's pretty rare in this juvenile justice world that you'd have someone who cares that deeply for the youth and their families.”

Like Miller, who was a psychiatric social worker on the Ohio State University faculty when he was
appointed to run the Massachusetts system, Carrión did not arrive as an up-through-the-ranks system veteran. Born and raised in the Bronx, she started her career as an attorney at Bronx Legal Services and had become a senior vice president at United Way of New York City when she was tapped for her current job.

Carrión may not be a typical administrator, but she can talk like one when she needs to, breaking down the state's complex, multilayered system and its equally arcane taxonomy like a born bureaucrat. But that is just housekeeping. Once she gets going on her true subject—the kids—her commitment is unmistakable, as are the reasons she is both loved and loathed with such personal intensity.

As commissioner, Carrión oversees the child welfare and juvenile justice systems for the state of New York, along with a hodgepodge of other human services. Hewing to the legacy of Jerome Miller, she is working as fast as she can to do herself out of a job (at least when it comes to running juvenile prisons).

For a lifelong crusader such as Barry Krisberg, there may be no higher praise for a public official than likening her to Jerry Miller. While no other state has managed to dismantle its juvenile incarceration apparatus as thoroughly as did Miller in the 1970s, his efforts were broadly influential. After Miller turned Massachusetts on its head, other states followed suit, albeit more cautiously, closing institutions and moving toward community alternatives until the advent of the super-predator turned the tide again.

As the newly appointed head of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, Miller was tasked with running a network of juvenile institutions that one historian described as
“nightmarish outposts of abuse
and neglect, where callous state workers meted out punishment destined only to reinforce . . . antisocial behavior.” Miller entered a reformer and departed a revolutionary, having lost faith in the prospect of turning the state's militaristic reform schools into healing environments.

Miller may have given up on the institutions but not on the kids. Doing them justice, he came to understand, would require far more than tinkering—or even restructuring.
“Training staff in new methods of supervision or therapy techniques, reorganizing the department, and reclassifying the youngsters wasn't likely to have much lasting effect,” Miller wrote in
Last One Over the Wall
, his account of his experience in Massachusetts, “without a reordering of the goals and values behind the actions.”

In that book, Miller recalls the day he realized that this kind of shift in values was not going to happen without drastic measures. He'd just gotten word that a frustrated supervisor at the Lyman school—the state's oldest reform school—had locked two boys in cages in the basement and driven away with the keys.

“It hit me with the full force of conviction: our months of training, meetings, and working with staff and administrators were not going to make the difference I wanted,” Miller writes. “As I looked around the department and the superintendents, directors of education, chaplains, planners, and others in leadership roles, I saw that most would be there long after I left. They could outwait and outlast me. I'd made a mistake in concentrating on making the institutions more humane. The idea of
closing
them seemed less risky.”

As far back as 1662, Massachusetts distinguished itself as the first colony to execute a juvenile. In 1646, it enacted the first
stubborn Child law, which legitimized the practice of executing the merely incorrigible. Faced with this long-standing culture of punishment and control, and intractable resistance from many who currently staffed and ran the state's juvenile facilities, Miller decided that bold action was required.

Perhaps it was the extremity of what he had seen—youth who tried to run away from the
industrial school for Boys, for example, had their ring fingers broken and were relegated, naked, to “The Tombs,” isolation caverns with neither toilets nor windows—but when Miller made his move, he did not stint on drama.
He took the brass locks off the isolation rooms at one newly closed institution, had them mounted, and gave one
to Governor Frank Sargent, one of the few in power who did not oppose his efforts.

Over the course of eighteen months, Miller managed to close all the state's reform schools, replacing them as quickly as he could with a network of group homes and family supports. In the process, he became an icon to those committed to transforming the juvenile justice system, many of whom were in attendance at the symposium forty years later.

Despite the forty years that separate the two, Miller and Carrión share a similar mix of devotion to the kids and a seeming indifference to their own political futures.
“As a new commissioner five years ago, I inherited a juvenile justice system that, by any measure, had been broken for many, many years,” Carrión told the audience at the symposium on Miller's legacy, “an agency unwilling to take the necessary steps to implement meaningful change. Despite the death of a young person under restraint, numerous investigations and reports all documenting the grievous conditions and failures of both management and staff to protect and adequately meet the needs of youth in custody, few in government were paying attention, and the voices of the advocates fell on deaf ears.”

“Much to my surprise, no one was suing us,” she noted drily.

“That has been remedied,” she added, after an impeccably timed pause.

There is, recall, a recipe for closing juvenile prisons, a constellation of elements that together trigger change. Lawsuits, scandals, exposés, and advocates; falling juvenile crime rates and empty state coffers: the right mix can close an institution. Line them all up and the places fall like dominoes. The fly in the ointment is the question of values. Are we shutting down youth prisons because it is, for the time being, practical? or are we freeing children because doing so is
right
? The answer may determine whether the changes that have taken place over the past decade turn out to be just another pendulum swing or the beginning of the end of the juvenile prison.

In many ways, New York resembles other states that have cut the population of their juvenile prisons. Scandals, investigations, exposés, and advocates, as well as the ubiquitous budget concerns—all the ingredients that have combined elsewhere to shut juvenile prisons—are part of the mix in New York as well. But there is also something different happening in New York: the changes there are driven not just by practical concerns
but by deeply held values that, while not universal, cut across multiple agencies and are shared by their leaders. And values—a willingness to acknowledge the depth of the wrong being done to children in the name of the law and the visceral connection to those children that the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Bart Lubow hints at when he speaks of the “My Child Test”—may be the secret ingredient that turns a recipe for reform into a formula for revolution.

In the years before Carrión's appointment, John Mattingly, who retired as commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children's services in 2011, worked closely with the city's probation and education departments to develop
a continuum of community-based and alternative programs intended to keep youth out of the state's notorious upstate facilities. This effort laid the groundwork for the state facility closures that followed. In 2010, Vincent Schiraldi—previously the director of D.C.'s Department of Youth Rehabilitation services and a lifelong advocate for youth in trouble—was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. Schiraldi brought with him a strong personal commitment to keeping young people “close to home,” a phrase that became the name of a legislature-supported initiative to keep New York City youth in or near their homes, in the care of voluntary agencies rather than state facilities.

Carrión herself is also clearly driven by values, not by politics—especially when it comes to the fate of New York's most vulnerable young people. Fearless, self-assured, and blazingly direct, she is the kind of administrator frequently described as a “charismatic leader.” A Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent, she wears her hair in a layered bob that accentuates the roundness of her face. Only when she stands does one realize she is perhaps five feet tall—a good deal shorter, in any case, than most of those with whom she has gone toe-to-toe in her crusade to remake New York's scandal-ridden juvenile justice system.

Carrión began her tenure in 2007. By the time I sat down with her in the cool of her Manhattan office in the summer of 2012,
New York State had closed down eighteen facilities and halved the number of juveniles held in state institutions. Perhaps most remarkably, Carrión had managed to help divert some of the $74 million she estimates has been saved by the closures
into a dedicated funding stream to support community-based alternatives to incarceration.

From the beginning, Carrión and her allies were stepping into a firestorm. In 2006, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union released a report calling New York's
“among the most hostile juvenile justice agencies we have ever encountered.” the report included damning testimony from girls in New York State facilities. “When they restrain kids . . . [t]hey'd have rug burns all over their bodies,” said Stephanie, who was sent upstate at age sixteen. “They hold your arms back and they purposefully push your face in the rug. They have their knee in your back and your arms all the way back.” (A young woman interviewed for this book described witnessing a similar scenario while she was locked up in a New York State facility.)

In November 2006, a particularly forceful restraint left fifteen-year-old Darryl Thompson dead at New York's Tryon Residential Center. According to
New York
magazine,

The boys had been on lockdown for two days—prohibited from playing basketball or doing much else—and it looked like lockdown would continue through the weekend. “Am I going to get my rec?” Thompson asked. “You guys won't give us our rec!”

An aide charged into the bathroom. Whether he pushed Thompson first or vice versa is a matter of dispute, but there's no question what happened next: Two aides pinned the teenager facedown on the tile floor, while a third man cuffed his wrists behind his back. Thompson stopped breathing, left the prison in an ambulance, and never came back.

Despite the fact that the medical examiner ruled Thompson's death a homicide,
the staff members involved were never indicted. Instead,
the state settled with the boy's family for $3.5 million.

In 2007, the newly appointed commissioner visited Tryon for the first time. After she left,
she sat in her car and wept.

In 2008,
a video of a Tryon aide punching a boy in the face started making the rounds.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice threatened to take over New York's juvenile prison system after investigating Tryon and two other state facilities and uncovering
“a litany of abuses: employees restraining kids so often and with so much force that kids had endured concussions, broken teeth, and broken bones.”

New York governor David Paterson had by then piled on with his own investigative body, the Task Force on Transforming the Juvenile Justice system, chaired by John Jay College of Criminal Justice president Jeremy Travis.
That body reached the sweeping conclusion that “New York state's current approach fails the young people who are drawn into the system, the public whose safety it is intended to protect, and the principles of good governance.” Young people in New York State facilities, the task force concluded, lived in dismal conditions, received little counseling and barely cursory education, and risked physical abuse on a regular basis.

At this point, one might think that Commissioner Carrión had herself a mandate. But the politics of incarceration are not so straightforward.
Carrión faced resistance right from the start, especially from those with the most to gain from the status quo—politicians representing the upstate counties that had come to rely on juvenile prisons for jobs and many of those who held those prison jobs. Complaints from facility staff included the assertion that Carrión's effort to reduce restraints like the one that left Darryl Thompson dead at Tryon was leading to more violence inside the institutions.

“It's easy to say, ‘well, you're the commissioner. You tell people what to do,' ” Carrión reflected. “It doesn't work that way.”

Trying to change the culture at a place like Tryon, she found, was virtually impossible. “What I discovered was that despite all the training in the world—literally thousands of hours of training—the behavior of staff didn't change. Young people continued to be abused there, and mistreated, and injured, along with staff.”