Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (42 page)

But when I asked her what she thought should be done about the issue, she surprised me, as she often did, by challenging the premise. “Everyone says you have to get a job; you have to get an education,” she said ruefully. “I'm not sure I want those things anymore. The greatest value I have right now is someone who spends time with me. I don't think many youth value success if no one cares whether they succeed.”

None of this is unique to justice-involved children. What they need, in the end, is what all children need. Any difference lies not in their nature but in the extent to which that nature is denied. Teachers don't place gold stars on students' schoolwork because the shiny foil itself will motivate the children. A child will work most diligently, the teacher understands, if by doing so she can succeed in making someone proud.

Eighty to 90 percent of American teenagers, recall, will go through a period of delinquency at some point in their teens. The vast majority will grow out of it as they grow up, entering adult life unhindered by the consequences of what
George W. Bush memorably described as “youthful mistakes.” Seen through the lens of its near universality, juvenile delinquency begins to look less like an aberration than a developmental stage. If this is so, “What rehabilitates?” may not be the right question. More important, perhaps, is “What do children need?”

Like Freud's famous query into the hearts of women, this question has generated a mountain of research, all of which reveals what we already know: what children need is us. Children flourish in the shelter of loving
adults. Not only the research but every conversation I have had with a young person leads to this same understanding.

Children need relationship in order to thrive—to navigate the maze of challenges and changes that constitutes growing up, and to ready themselves for the lifelong task of finding their place in the world. They need relationship, at the most primal level, to survive. Human infants have a longer period of dependency than any other species.
Babies who are not held or touched—those in institutions, for example—may die in their cribs, even if their material needs are met.

These are human truths we deny with some difficulty. To pull it off, we rely on distancing tools such as the super-predator trope to convince ourselves that the kids who come before the juvenile court are so profoundly “other” that they do not suffer as our own would when we lock them away—so fundamentally different that isolation, against all odds and evidence, might even improve them.

Our penchant for isolation has filtered into other efforts to mold or improve children perceived as troublesome. The preschooler who won't observe “quiet time” is expelled from the circle and forced to endure a shameful and solitary time-out. Later on, in grade school, she can be suspended (pushed away) or expelled (pushed out) if she continues to act out.

“Acting out” is a broad phrase, encompassing both acts of delinquency and childhood misbehavior that falls within the law. Either way, the need for attention is the emotion that is most often being “acted out.” Yet we respond with the official
withdrawal
of attention—a practice that, repeated over time, attenuates a young person's ties to the community just when she is crying out most clearly to be kept close.

Just as most of the young people I spoke with remembered the moment when they veered into delinquency, many were able to pinpoint the next fork in the road—what, or
who
, steered them back toward safety and hope. Again with remarkable consistency, young people pointed to an adult who had listened without judgment and let them know they mattered. Often that adult evolved into something like a mentor, but before an angry kid can listen to even the wisest guidance, she generally first needs to be listened to herself.

For Gabrielle to find that pivotal person,
it took being treated for a drug
problem she did not have. She's not clear why, finally, she was placed in a treatment program—maybe they just couldn't think of anything more to do with her. Whatever the reason, P. House—a treatment wing inside the prison where Gabrielle had landed—is where she ultimately found the sense of connection she needed to help change her trajectory.

It started with a counselor who, Gabrielle recalled, “rocked. Her and me would sit down and we would talk and talk.” With the support of her counselor, Gabrielle gradually lowered her guard and began talking with some of the other P. House residents as well. “Now I'm hearing grown women tell me about what happened when they were kids, older ladies than me, and they were telling how they dealt with it and how their family dealt with it. I started to identify with some of these ladies: ‘Oh, they just kind of ignored you, too? Okay, so I am not the only person . . . Then I started to learn more about myself: okay, so
that
is why I became violent.”

A woman who had absorbed thirty years of abuse before finally getting “tired” enough that she killed her abuser helped Gabrielle understand why Gabrielle's mother had not left her own violent marriage sooner. Gabrielle wrote to her mother—who was now clean and on her own—and learned through their correspondence that the violence Gabrielle had thought was her solitary burden was part of an intergenerational legacy. As a child, her mother had been raped by her own father and, like her daughter, had “stuffed it” for decades. When Gabrielle had returned from Texas with the revelation that
her
father had raped her, it had shaken her mother's defenses so deeply that she had simply shut down in order not to hear it.

“I'm sorry that I didn't pay attention to you,” Gabrielle's mother wrote, “but I did not know how.”

Gabrielle was going through a profound transition. The spark of trust that started with one counselor who listened allowed Gabrielle not only to reach out but also to look within—to begin, to quote the poet Adrienne Rich,
“diving into the wreck” of her own suppressed history, “to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.”

The more deeply Gabrielle delved into the sources of her anger and the bone-deep hopelessness that drove her criminality, the more clearly a new path ahead of her emerged. Somewhere along the way, she realized that she was done.
It is what it is
no longer worked for her. Prison was not where she wanted to grow old.

When her parole date came around, Gabrielle asked to be assigned to a treatment program in another city. She walked out the gates with a new sense of resolve, determined to find the life she finally believed that she might actually deserve.

“That's where I really found out who I was,” she said of this next program. Once again, she was in treatment for a nonexistent drug problem, but her counselors understood that and adapted the language and framework to fit her needs.

“Everybody else, I have to worry about them relapsing by going out and using dope,” the director told Gabrielle. “You, I have to worry about stealing my car.”

“Relapse prevention” in Gabrielle's case translated to staving off the street. “Substance-abuse treatment” meant curbing her addiction to violence. Gangbanging was identified as her drug of choice. “Addressing grief and loss” meant mourning her brothers and her own lost childhood, but also “grieving
not
being on the streets and selling dope. . . . I had to grieve all of that, and I didn't even know you could.”

Again, she found a counselor with whom she connected. “I want you to grieve,” this counselor told Gabrielle as she walked her through the process of stripping herself bare enough to start to rebuild.

Each new connection opened onto the next. Gabrielle began an internship with the organization where she would rise to case manager. She met the woman who would become her wife. Day by day, the isolation that had grown so familiar gave way to a web of relationships that sustained and protected her as she started shedding skins.

If they can do it
, she thought as she looked at her competent, dedicated co-workers, each with a history as complex as her own,
so can I
.

Today, at thirty-four, Gabrielle is thriving. She is married to a woman she speaks of adoringly, and she loves her job as a case manager for youth in San Francisco, where she is clearly respected by clients and colleagues alike.

A solidly built woman with broad Polynesian features and a casual style that makes her appear ageless, Gabrielle has a straightforward manner that lets her young clients know right off they will not get much by her. Before long, most find they
want
to live up to her expectations.

Dozens of young people look to Gabrielle as they navigate the rough roads she remembers so well. She's tough, the kids know that, but before she starts lecturing them about “making choices,” she works to ensure that they
have
some choices besides the street. No matter how they stumble, she is there to hear them out. Because without that, she understands all too well—with no one to believe them, much less believe
in
them—how can young people feel they matter enough to “choose” a future that goes any further than a room for the night? Before a young person can choose a better, safer future, he has to be able to imagine himself in it, and before he can do
that
, he needs help believing that he is worth the trouble. That is where Gabrielle's constant unconditional presence comes in.

Now the arbiter herself of what can be expected, Gabrielle looks back on her younger self with a wry perspective but largely eschews judgment. “I think about some of the things that I did and I'm, like, ‘Wow, that was messed up—and it helped me survive, too.' ”

The day I met with Gabrielle in her cramped, file-filled office, the first thing she told me was not to hold back. Nothing I could ask her, she said, could be as demanding as her experience telling her story as part of a restorative justice program inside the county jail—opening her heart and history to men who were locked up for violence, often against women and girls much like herself.

She had gone as a guest speaker, her testimony intended to help the men face up to the pain they had inflicted on others. The men sat in silence as she shared with them the details of her childhood: the years of terror and sexual aggression; the day her father used her broken ribs to break through her defenses; her rape at the hands of the man she had been raised to consider her protector.

Afterwards, one of the men approached her. “He told me that he
heard
me,” Gabrielle marveled, shaking her head at the memory. “That was the first time in my whole life that a male has ever told me, ‘I hear what you're saying.' All of my life, it had never happened that way.”

I hear what you're saying
. This was the connection Gabrielle had longed for throughout her years on the street and then her long imprisonment. From there, it was a short leap to realizing that she had found her purpose: “This is what I should do—really listen to these kids.”

What started as a calling has become a career, one to which her supervisors say Gabrielle is extraordinarily well suited. “I don't know,” she demurred with an uncharacteristic bashfulness when I repeated this assessment. “My guys just take to me really, really well. When I say things to my guys, they know I am not going to sugarcoat it.”

“They all want to be little gang members, and I am, like, ‘Dude, do you know how bad it feels to have bullets in your legs when it gets cold?' ”

Gabrielle has a sixth sense for the wounded child hiding behind the tough facade. She has yet to meet a kid in trouble who—if you really
listen
—is not stumbling under the weight of years of trauma.

Gabrielle answered without hesitation when I asked her a question with which others had struggled: what might have made a difference earlier in her own life?

“If somebody was there for me between fourteen and twenty-five,” she answered, homing in on the years that have been identified as highest risk for crime. “Just to hear the words that I was saying to them, you know? To hear that at home it's bad, that Mom is using or I'm being hit, or I'm being abused. Even if I don't want you to do [anything] . . . I need somebody to hear me. To understand that, listen, I need to talk about this.”

“A lot of my guys,” she continued, “believe in the same thing I did—that what happens inside the house stays in the house. That's what we were taught.”

“Nobody listens to kids,” Gabrielle continued, with a fierceness that made it clear why she inspires such devotion. “Nobody hears what they're saying. . . . But I
remember
when I was a kid, and this and this happened. That's all most of them really need is just for someone to say, ‘I can hear you.' ”

The biggest challenge Gabrielle faces with her guys is not breaking down defenses but building up their confidence, providing a counter to the oft-repeated message that they will never be more than the sum of their crimes. “In their minds,” she explained, “it's what they're
supposed
to do.”

Her role as she sees it is a cross between confidante and cautionary tale. “I am here to listen to you right now, but
understand
me,” she will tell her young clients. “If you keep on doing what you're doing, you are going to end up like me at twenty-nine.”

She might illustrate this point by showing them a worn document stamped
THREE STRIKES
: 25
TO LIFE
.