Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (45 page)

Another defining characteristic of the evidence-based programs is that all are grounded in an understanding of the trauma that many youth who come before the court have experienced and still carry. Rather than re-traumatizing these youth, as incarceration often does, these interventions work to help them address and heal from it.

As the
Report from the Attorney General's National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence
points out, “These youth are not beyond our ability to help if we recognize that exposure to violence causes many children to become desperate survivors rather than hardened criminals. There are evidence-based interventions that can help to repair the emotional damage done to children as a result of exposure to violence and that can put them on a course to be well-adjusted, law-abiding, and productive citizens.”

Despite the widespread agreement about the effectiveness of these three evidence-based programs in particular, they remain tremendously underutilized. While a handful of states have launched major initiatives to implement these models, nationwide they remain available only to a small proportion of those who could benefit—about 5 percent of those who meet the criteria for participation, according to a 2007 study. The waste this represents is nearly incalculable, measured as it must be not only in dollars but also in lives.

Many see the failure of the juvenile prisons as evidence that those held there are themselves beyond all hope. Above and beyond their impact on the lives of those they serve, expanding efforts such as MST, FFT, and MTFC could also help to combat this defeatist perception. By demonstrating that young people, including those charged with serious offenses,
can
be reached and rehabilitated—outside of a locked environment and in their own homes and communities—these programs knock the last leg out from under the argument that juvenile incarceration is a necessary evil.

Despite the contrast between the much-documented failure of juvenile incarceration and the consistent success of the evidence-based interventions, Mendel has observed that
“even in jurisdictions where such programs have been adopted, they often remain small-scale pilot projects in otherwise unreformed systems.” In other words, most or even all of the travesties described in the preceding chapters—the countless children traumatized, beaten, raped, and killed inside our juvenile prisons, and the harm caused to victims of crimes that we
know
how to prevent but have
chosen not to—could be avoided, if we simply acted on what we know. That we have not done so, despite all the evidence, should be occasion for shame—and for action.

All that is required is shifting the balance from favoring failure to supporting success. Interventions that have been proven effective must become the national norm, not boutique exceptions. Meanwhile, the time has come to quit studying, analyzing, investigating, and, most critically,
relying on
an intervention that has proven ineffective, destructive, and often disastrous: large-scale juvenile incarceration.

It would seem to be simplicity itself. What, then, is stopping us?

Replacing juvenile prisons with community-based programs proven to work, crucial as it may be, is also unlikely outside the context of a larger transformation. Genuine change in the way we treat young people who step outside the law must be predicated on a new way of
seeing
them—a 360-degree perspective that encompasses not only their deficits but also their strengths; not merely their offenses but also their aspirations.

One mechanism for this shift in perspective is an approach known as Positive Youth Development (PYD). A paper co-authored by New York probation chief Vincent Schiraldi, Mark Schindler, and Sean J. Goliday describes PYD as

a combination of identifying and building on youths' strengths as well as meeting their needs . . . a PYD approach views the youth as an active participant in the change process, instead of as a client or target of change. While traditional juvenile justice work with young people has often favored control of their behavior as a central goal, for PYD, connecting the youth with community resources is the focus. For example, a traditional juvenile justice approach might involve sending a youth to job counseling and ordering community service as a punishment; PYD, in contrast, looks to engage the youth in career exploration and career-path work experience and use community service as service learning and job preparation.

That Schiraldi and his co-authors point to the importance of education and employment in the larger context of PYD is more than incidental, as
both school and work themselves protect against future incarceration and point to future success. The Alliance for Excellent Education has calculated that a 5 percent increase in male high school graduation rates would reap an annual savings of approximately
$18.5 billion in crime-related expenses. Other research has found that
youths with jobs are less likely to break the law. Incarceration, meanwhile, both curtails a young person's education—often permanently—and limits her job prospects long after release.

Victor Rios is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
. The book examines the impact of what Rios calls the Youth Control Complex—the constellation of individuals and institutions, penal and otherwise, that converges to label young people of color living in poor neighborhoods, limiting their opportunities and criminalizing actions that are either ignored or considered “mistakes” when better-off white youths are involved.

Youth prisons are the end phase of the Youth Control Complex Rios describes, one that encompasses everything from zero-tolerance schools in which a kindergarten scuffle is more likely to lead to handcuffs than a talk with the principal; to the heavily policed streets low-income youth of color travel; to the child welfare system, which, like the public schools, has become a feeder system for juvenile lockups; to popular culture, which perpetuates the figment of hoodie-clad hordes at the gates.

As do Schiraldi and his co-authors, Rios advocates a complete shift in the way young people of color are both perceived and treated. Rios describes himself as a former gang member and juvenile detainee whose goal is to ensure that his own trajectory—going on to college and becoming a professional—does not remain an “anomaly” for youths growing up in neighborhoods like the one where he was raised.

Noting that of the forty Oakland, California, youths whose progress he studied closely, only three found mentors or the equivalent to help them toward adulthood, Rios proposes replacing the Youth Control Complex with a Youth Support Complex, “a ubiquitous system of support that nurtures and reintegrates young people placed at risk.” Rios's larger vision includes a reimagined juvenile justice system but does not stop there. He calls on schools, politicians, community groups, and community members
to step up to the challenge of creating an environment where all young people are held to high expectations and, at the same time, allowed to make mistakes without the devastating consequences incarceration brings.

The first step, Rios writes, “entails decriminalizing young people's style and noncriminal actions, listening to young people's analysis of the system, and asking them how to develop programs and policies that can best help them.” These are questions I have spent many hours discussing with young people. Some, unsurprisingly, went straight for the bottom line. The policy they wanted to see overturned was the unwritten (although much-studied and substantiated) policy of tossing young people of color behind bars for minor transgressions that white kids commit with impunity and then just grow out of (as do virtually all kids, as long as they
don't
get locked up for them in the first place). Others spoke of more limited, yet still crucial, changes, like ensuring that youth did not lose touch with their families.

Some, like Will, offered detailed programmatic ideas. In fact, Will has already developed the blueprint for a post-prison peer support organization that would be entirely youth-run (or run, age aside, by those who had been there—a need many young people I spoke with identified). Will envisions a place where those who had gotten through the rugged early years of reentry would offer newly returned youths individualized advice and support, structured around those young people's priorities as
they
define them. Asking young people to articulate their own needs before attempting to meet them, Will believes—treating them as individuals rather than “cases” or generic “juvenile offenders” in need of improvement—might help spark the process of
de
-institutionalization that he considers crucial to recovering from prison. Requiring youths to go through a prescribed “reentry program,” on the other hand, no matter how useful, risks leaving them feeling defined once again by their status (“ex-offender”) rather than seen and addressed on their own terms.

This free-form but carefully thought out reentry center is only the seed of Will's larger vision. Coming together, getting to know and to trust one another, joining in conversation and common work—all this, he hopes, will lead organically to activism. The group, as he envisions it, would by that point have built the capacity to provide a public platform for youths who might otherwise be ignored, on the one hand, or else held up as
“poster children”—used to carry the message of others, however worthy it might be, instead of their own.

Still others with whom I spoke, as they talked about what would have helped them most, articulated the central tenets of the most successful evidence-based practices—describing them, however, as something like pipe dreams, having never encountered these programs themselves.

I asked Jared, who had done so much to advance my thinking, what we might do better to meet children's needs. Could anyone have done something to reach him at age nine, when, as he wryly put it, “I stepped out into the world with all my vast knowledge?” What might have made a difference back then?

“My parents staying together,” he responded, with a quick flash of anger he rarely allowed himself to show. “They could have fucking raised me. Instilled in me the things that I needed as a child, and built me up, and built in my mind the tools that it takes to navigate through the world.”

Could anything have helped support his
parents
, I pressed, so they might have been better able to give him what he'd needed as a child?

“I don't know,” he said wearily. It was a phrase I had rarely heard him use. “I don't know. All I know is they didn't work out. For whatever reason, they separated. My mom started using drugs. Heavily. My dad? He left.”

“Who knows?” he said finally, still considering the question. “Maybe if this group, if the two of them, had gone to counseling . . .”

Jared, characteristically, had found his way right to the heart of the question, describing the central ingredient of MST and other interventions that have proven most successful: rather than identifying the child as the sole source of the problem, rather than responding by isolating him from home and family, they recognize that children need families, and that when those families falter children need the larger adult world to support them
and
their families.

But no one in “this group”—by which Jared meant his family—was ever offered counseling. The only hand extended was the cold hand of the law—a response that did nothing to address the root causes of the problem. Jared was not the only one who pointed out the disparity between the scant resources available to troubled youths
before
they commit an act of delinquency and the vast amount spent, later on, to incarcerate them.
A number of experts on juvenile justice—both those who had won their expertise firsthand and those who earned their credentials via more formal channels—pointed to the absence of early support for children in the context of their families, as well as its necessity. This kind of support, they told me, can help a child thrive without taking him from home, especially if we offer it early, rather than waiting until that child trips the wires of the juvenile justice system.

“The real messed-up part,” concurred Will, who spent six years in a juvenile facility, “is the
before
. I was having problems at home a couple years before [getting arrested], and my mom would ask the police for help—‘He's running wild'—and the police said unless he commits a crime, there's nothing we can do. So you have families crying for help before a child commits a crime, but no services to deter that. Then once they're in jail, you throw the book at them.”

For nearly forty years the state of Missouri has operated a network of small, concertedly rehabilitative facilities with staff who are trained and immersed in a culture of caring. The Missouri Model, as it is often called, holds for the kids in its care the same goals a parent does for his own children, its director Tim Decker told me. Staff work closely to help young people become not merely law-abiding but happy and productive, able to pursue their own paths without restricting others.

The Missouri Model consistently shows better outcomes than traditional juvenile lockups. A state analysis of all 15,910 youth designated as juvenile offenders in Missouri in 2007 found that
just over a quarter had recidivated in the strictest sense—with a “new law violation” within their first year out—a rate that is dwarfed by that of other states. Other research has found that at the three-year mark,
84 percent of Missouri system graduates are “connected”: productively involved in their communities through school, work, or both.