Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (41 page)

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end
.

—Benjamin Disraeli

He told me that I had a soul
.

How did he know?

—Valjean's soliloquy,
Les Misérables

I
T WAS A LAZY
, humming, late spring afternoon, and I was standing with my daughter and her fourth-grade class atop a hill in Marin County, California, where a docent had brought us to examine bugs and leaves. The view was tremendous, encompassing the San Francisco skyline, the green hills of Berkeley, and, incongruously, the two-hundred-building complex that comprises San Quentin State Prison, looming over the San Francisco Bay like something out of a Stephen King novel.

“That's where the heroes put the bad guys,” the docent said offhandedly as she pointed out the prison to the dusty, distracted children.

As the schoolchildren dutifully gazed across the water at the place they kept the “bad guys,” I thought of Jared, who was nineteen years old and fresh out of San Quentin the first time I met him, having landed there at sixteen for his role in an attempted robbery. A friend brought him into the
youth newspaper I edited. Hesitant at first, he quickly became one of our most prolific writers and a valued member of our editorial team.

That did not stop him from pointing a gun at my head in the office one afternoon—a “joke” that frightened me more than anything I can remember. There was no particular tension between us, and I didn't think Jared would hurt me on purpose, but he seemed visibly drunk at the time. The volatile combination of alcohol and a firearm scared me enough that it would be years before I could run into him without a wave of fear.

For a good while after that afternoon, my affection for Jared, not to mention what I'd understood until that day to be my values, was overwhelmed by a powerful desire to see him gone. It didn't matter where—I had no desire to see him suffer or “pay”—but, loath as I am to admit it today, I would have slept better had he been behind bars.

As the children rested on the hilltop, my mind wandered to a more recent afternoon, nearly two decades after that terrifying encounter. Jared leaned beneath an expansive elm, my young son, an aspiring magician, at his feet with a deck of cards. Jared watched intently, matching the earnest demeanor of his raconteur. Jared sat there patiently for at least half an hour, evincing a bottomless supply of wonder as my son ran through his entire repertoire.

We were gathered that afternoon along with friends to scatter the ashes of a man we'd all loved: a professor who had, at the urging of his wife, taken Jared into his family home. This aging iconoclast had seen past Jared's glowering visage to a bright spark of intellect and curiosity no teacher before had recognized. At his kitchen table, he had offered Jared private seminars on history, language, and religion that had fanned that spark into a lasting flame.

“This family saved my life,” Jared told me days after the professor's death.

The professor's decline had been slow and agonizing, as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's ravaged first his mind and then his body. Jared had cared for him during these years, washing, feeding, and shepherding his erstwhile mentor with the patience of a monk.

Once, the professor stumbled on the stairs to his house, nearly tumbling to a devastating fall. It was Jared who caught him, the strength—both
physical and psychological—he had begun to cultivate in order to survive behind bars now allowing him to cradle this elder-child with a gentle confidence.

“It's a corrupt belief,” said Aaron Knipis, a clinical psychologist who was in trouble with the law himself by the time he was twelve years old, answering a reporter's questions about a twelve-year-old charged with first-degree murder, “to think you can know the heart and soul of the child and predict the course of their lifetime.”

More than anyone I know, Jared has underscored Knipis's message: that a single act or even a series of acts, however menacing, is not the sum of a man and cannot tell us with any certainty who he might become, especially if that man is still a boy. My conversations with Jared have helped me to think through a central question: How
do
young people change? What rehabilitates? If not prison, what
will
keep us safe?

“At my core I'm a good dude. I know I am. I got heart. I don't mean heart as in courage, I mean
heart
,” Jared told me recently, his voice dropping to a near-whisper on the final “heart.” “But sometimes I may do some bad shit.”

I thought of the Jared who had come out of San Quentin: the suspicion in his gaze, the gun in his hand. How had he regained his trust in humanity after what he experienced there? What had allowed
me
to regain my trust in him? How had he become the man he is today?

Like every other young person I've interviewed or known who has come back from crime and profoundly changed his life, Jared answered this question by talking about a relationship: a long-standing bond with an adult who stood by him; a connection that wouldn't evaporate overnight and wasn't contingent on his own good behavior. A bond, in other words, that was unconditional, as freely offered as it was returned, predicated on nothing besides mutual affection, evolving over time into a sense of family.
That
had changed his life, the only thing that ever does.

“I still believe in humanity because you have people like her,” Jared told me, speaking of the professor's wife. She had taken him into her family without a second thought and over time had come to love him like a son, while her own sons had embraced him as a brother. “You got people like that. There's an element in her that ain't human. It's like something angelic.”

“I've been places that other people haven't, experienced things that
other people haven't,” he continued, “and when I engage with a person, I can
see
them. I can see their core. I know who they are.”

Jared was indicating, not for the first time, that he was not quick to trust, in other people and perhaps in his own future, in what life had to offer to someone with his past. But in the woman who became a second mother to him as well as a trusted friend, he found a spirit large enough to embrace him in all his complexity: a good dude who might do some bad shit, which is to say, a human being. Through their relationship of many years, Jared gained the kind of trust, in others and himself, that allows for joy even amid his constant vigilance. He can hold hands with his girlfriend, or watch his children play, and recognize in these moments his part in the web of human community. That, he taught me, is “rehabilitation”—a prerequisite, perhaps, for the cessation of crime, but something much deeper as well.

“She'll give people chances,” he said, speaking again of the professor's wife, shaking his head in an abiding wonder at a quality he had so rarely encountered. “I tell my girlfriend this: if it wasn't for her, I would be dead right now. I wouldn't be alive. We wouldn't know each other. I would be fucking dead.”

Instead, there he sat, in the shade of the great tree, patiently engaging with my own persistent boy even as he mourned the man who'd saved his life, whom Jared had shepherded with such tenderness through the ebbing of his own.

Like all great friendships, it struck me, theirs was a bond sustained by reciprocity, not charity. The professor and his wife had been generous toward Jared, but that was not the whole of it. They saw Jared as a young man with much to offer, not merely as someone in need. In fulfilling the unspoken promise between them, Jared had been able to glimpse his
own
promise, to see himself as more than an object of help.

Jared had been lucky in the embrace of this family, but that wasn't the whole story. A chosen son who gave as much as he was given, he had come in from the rain and grown into a man—a man he himself could describe as empathetic. Getting to this place had required a long battle, and the victory belonged to Jared himself. But without the support of this pair who had stood by his side as he found the strength to be the man they saw in him, the odds against him would have been long indeed.

In the weeks after I faced Jared's gun, I fought bitterly with the professor's wife, a dear friend of mine also, over her decision to continue their personal relationship in the immediate aftermath of that afternoon. Confused and still afraid, I felt she was placing her bond with Jared above my safety, above me. For a while—for as long, that is, as I saw myself as victim—I found her choice a bitter pill to swallow.

It was a great relief, years later, as we sat beneath that tree, to acknowledge how very wrong I had been. All of us were safer because of the chance this family had taken in welcoming Jared in and keeping him close as he stumbled his way toward stability. It struck me in that moment that I no longer feared him, a feeling far more freeing than the fleeting security I had felt when, not long after he brought the gun into the office, I learned he had been arrested for something new and was back behind bars again.

Any reason to fear Jared was long in the past and had nothing to do with the man he was today. I trusted him, I realized under that elm, in the deepest way possible. I trusted him with my child.

How? I remember asking him later. How had he gotten to where he was today, when the odds had been stacked so powerfully against him that the law itself had bet against his future by sending him to adult prison when he was not yet grown?

“I had to sit long and hard and think about it,” he answered. “I analyze myself constantly. How did I go from where I was mentally, the me that was out there then, to the me now?”

“If the me that was out there then would have met the me I am now,” he added, laughing, “me then would have kicked my ass.”

“Would ‘you now' fight back?” I asked him.

“Probably not,” he said, suddenly solemn. Jared now is a man with something to lose. He has children who need him; a job he is good at; and a woman he loves, who has pledged herself to marry him. Not giving a fuck is no longer an option, as risky as letting himself care again might be.

As Jared stretched his limbs in the shade of that tree, his avuncular gaze lingering quizzically on my son, it struck me what a long road he had traveled to where he now stood, and what a narrow ledge he walked along still. Jared carries two strikes under California's unforgiving three strikes law. The slightest misstep—a moment's unchecked anger, or a stranger's
misapprehension—could send him away for the rest of his life. How, I wondered, did he live with that uncertainty? How did he keep it from tipping into rage?

“It's that love factor,” he answered. Then he turned to my son and drew another card.

Advances in brain science, age-old common sense—everything points to something a bit more complicated than the carrot and the stick (with the current emphasis weighted toward the stick) when it comes to changing behaviors that stem from complex and often traumatic life experiences. What does work—how change, or “rehabilitation,” happens—is a question with as many answers as there are individuals. At the same time, a single thread ran through my conversations with young people who had been through the crucible of juvenile justice.

Rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship
. The kids who “make it” all point to at least one consistent relationship with an adult they can trust. They have someone walking with them as they do the hard work of changing how they think, act, and respond; how they view themselves and others; with whom they spend their time; where they turn to assuage affronts and sorrows—all of which feeds into the mandate of the law: to change how they behave.

However one frames the question, the answer does not vary: children do best when they are held close. Children grow, children change, children flourish, children thrive in relationships. The “juvenile delinquent”—the one who gets caught—offers no exception to this basic rule.

The second thing young people who have managed to stay free seem to have in common is some sense of purpose: a goal of their own and a fair shot at meeting it. Whether getting into law school, saving enough for a deposit on an apartment, becoming a movie star, or getting a GED, they have something to work toward that matters to them. What justice-involved youths need, it turns out, is what anyone else does: work that gives us reason to get out of bed in the morning and someone with whom to share our setbacks as well as our successes.

These two central drives, ambition and attachment, are closely intertwined. Young people who are raised to believe that they are worthless,
that they will never do or be anything of value—young people raised inside juvenile prisons—often internalize this self-defeating message. Those best equipped to resist it have someone speaking into their other ear not only a different assessment but a different set of standards—someone who aspires to more for them than not to recidivate.

I remember a conversation I once had with Eliza about the then newly named cohort “disconnected youth.” There was much consternation about what should be done to help this untethered population—defined as unemployed, unmarried, not enrolled in school or enlisted in the military—get onto one or more of these presumed tracks to adulthood.

Eliza had grown up in so many “placements”—from foster homes to group homes to juvenile halls—she had lost count. As radically alone as anyone I knew, Eliza knew “disconnection” by heart.