Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (13 page)

The predictions that had made DiIulio famous, it is worth noting, had
by this time been entirely discredited. Rather than rising precipitously, juvenile arrests for violent crime were steadily decreasing, reaching a low not seen since the 1970s or earlier.

In fact, the super-predator era, and the sweeping changes in law and policy that accompanied it, coincided with a drop in juvenile crime of historic proportion. According to the federal government, juvenile
violent crime arrests peaked in 1994 (at more than 500 per 100,000 juveniles) and then began to drop sharply, to fewer than 300 per 100,000 in 1998.
Between 1995 and 2004, the juvenile arrest rate for serious property and violent crimes fell fully 45 percent, and the juvenile homicide rate plummeted even further, decreasing by 70 percent over the same period. This drop was not a by-product of tougher laws or longer sentences; researchers who investigated that theory found just the opposite. Juvenile crime was dropping across the board, but the drops were steepest in those states that did
not
jump on the lock-'em-up bandwagon. Those that passed the harshest juvenile crime laws generally saw a smaller decline in the juvenile crime rate.

One would expect that a massive national decline in juvenile crime—combined with clear evidence that locking kids up not only did not
cause
this drop but, if anything, diminished it—would trigger a pendulum swing away from the tough-on-kids pole. In fact, the opposite happened: even as fewer young people committed serious crimes, more and more of them wound up behind bars. The only way to pull off a stunt like this was to lock kids up for increasingly minor offenses. Spurred on by the incendiary language of the super-predator era, that is exactly what we did. In 2004, for example,
more than twice as many young people were adjudicated on charges of disorderly conduct as in 1995.

Whether he was motivated by the awkward failure to materialize of his army of doom, or by the discovery that his Rolodex was sacred, DiIulio took pains to dissociate himself from the effects his words had on uncounted young lives. “I'm sorry for any unintended consequences,” he told the
New York Times
. “But I am not responsible for teenagers' going to prison.”

Yet it was precisely the rhetoric of DiIulio and his colleagues—amped up by the media and abetted by politicians who found in the super-predator trope a golden opportunity to pound their chests and pledge to keep the
streets safe by legislating ever-escalating sanctions—that snowballed into a PR campaign against a generation. And that rhetoric had results: teenagers went to prison, by the thousands, for longer and longer terms.

As manufactured fear of youth crime spread across the country, juvenile courts raised the stakes again and again in a struggle to keep up with the harsh penalties that growing numbers of kids faced in adult court, and with what they perceived as public sentiment.
“Super-predator thinking threatened the notion that we needed a separate system of justice for kids,” the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Bart Lubow observed.

As a consequence, juvenile courts were pressured to show that they weren't “kiddy courts” that “coddled” young thugs. Putting youth in adult courts and prisons upped the ante in terms of society's response to juvenile crime. That meant that those who remained in the juvenile court—albeit for relatively minor offenses, because the heavy hitters were now being transferred to adult courts—were now at the top of the food chain. Hence, juvenile court judges were imposing their highest sentences on cases that, prior to the super-predator, would have been middle-of-the-roaders. In effect, super-predator thinking had a gross inflationary effect on the punishments imposed on juveniles, regardless of court of jurisdiction.

As more children were swept into the juvenile justice system (and pushed out of it, into adult court) the public—steeped in the super-predator rhetoric—began to lose faith in the fundamental tenets of a separate juvenile system. The juvenile court was intended to rehabilitate, but
these
kids, we'd been told, were beyond any such hope. The overheated rhetoric of the era “left no plausible role for the juvenile justice system in stemming the coming tide of super-predators,” scholars would later assert.

Just desert advocates promoted the use of punitive laws, policies, and practices in the juvenile justice system, including three strikes laws, determinate sentences, longer sentences, sentencing to boot camps, electronic monitoring, drug testing, shock incarceration, and other punitive measures. Such policies and practices, which deemphasize prevention of juvenile crime and rehabilitation of juvenile
offenders, became common in the juvenile justice system through new state legislation.

So it came to pass that less than a century after the juvenile court's inception, the goal of “child saving” was overwhelmed by a powerful movement to recriminalize juvenile wrongdoing—to return the court's focus to a child's decontextualized actions, regardless of his age. Today, all fifty states have provisions for trying juveniles in adult court for a variety of charges—not only acts of violence but in some cases drug possession or even public order offenses. At the same time, large state-run juvenile facilities have been refashioned to resemble their adult counterparts, their rehabilitative mission buried under mountains of hardware and punitive regimes.

Over the course of three decades, as Barry Feld wrote in 1999,

judicial decisions, legislative amendments, and administrative changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative social welfare agency into a scaled-down second-class criminal court for young people. Politicians and the public have repudiated the court's original rehabilitative premises and endorsed punishment of young offenders. Judicial opinions and statutory changes have rejected procedural informality and incorporated imperfectly many of the safeguards of the criminal court. These substantive and procedural reforms have converted the historic ideal of the juvenile court as a welfare agency into a quasi-penal system that provides young offenders with neither therapy nor justice.

As a concept, the super-predator has by now been entirely discredited, but there are some insults you just can't take back. By the time the storm had passed, new laws were in place, new youth prisons built, and a new ethos firmly entrenched. Isolation had supplanted rehabilitation as the primary function of the juvenile facility. The mandate was now explicit: keep
them
away from
us
, whatever it takes.

5

THE FIST AND THE BOOT

Physical Abuse in Juvenile Prisons

There will always be individuals and societies that turn against their children, breaking the natural order Aristotle described two and a half millennia ago. . . . Regardless of their individual motivations, they all rely upon a societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behavior.

—psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,

Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children

D
ARREN WAS KNEELING, BUT
he was not praying.

Baptized Catholic and brought up in the church, Darren had turned to his faith to get him through the early years of a decade-long confinement, including months spent on isolation units.

Now he found himself forced to his knees, hands cuffed behind his back, stripped to his boxers, one in a long row of boys in the same supplicant pose. They would be required to hold this position for two full weeks, their only respite a daily three-hour block allotted for sleep and a quick meal—a cheese sandwich, milk, and an egg.

Darren had just been transferred from one facility to another when a large-scale fight broke out. No effort was made to distinguish bystanders from those who had joined in. Witness, participant, instigator—it made little difference to those doling out punishment, it seemed to Darren, who had been through this kind of collective consequence before
during the five years he'd spent locked up. Once individuality has been successfully eradicated via uniforms, strict schedules, regulation of daily activity, restricted contact with the outside world, and prison-supplied numbers supplanting given names, punishing the many for the sins of the few comes to seem logical, if not essential to the all-important end of “maintaining order.”

So it was that all the boys in Darren's unit were brought to the gymnasium, stripped to their underwear, and ordered to their knees. They would remain in that posture, bound together in a long row, until the guards chose to release them. Silence was strictly enforced.

Darren was a college student when he spoke with me about his long sojourn through the California Youth Authority (CYA). Earnest and deliberate, he chose his words as carefully as he did his attire—a zip-top blue sweater and matching wool knit cap, a carved silver stud anointing each ear, and the hint of a goatee framing a handsome brown face. There was no apparent anger in his tone, even when he described the worst of the abuses. His voice simply dropped, infused with a quiet, contemplative sorrow.

It was difficult to imagine this poised young man in the supplicant, dehumanized position he had described to me.
But formal investigations into conditions at the CYA (now known as the Division of Juvenile Justice) confirmed Darren's account and worse.

During Darren's weeks on his knees, the silence made the banter of the guards difficult to ignore. “They talk and chat and giggle and joke,” he recalled, a slight edge creeping into his otherwise even manner, “and you just sit there. I was on my knees for two weeks.”

“I lost my religion in there,” Darren said, his even tone breaking for an instant. “I just stopped believing.”

Prostrate before grown men to whom he might as well have been invisible, listening to the guards laugh and joke among themselves as their charges knelt before them, visibly suffering, Darren silently sought answers.
How can the people here do the things they do to children?
he asked the heavens. No answer was forthcoming.

Abuse of the young inside state-run juvenile prisons is both rampant and extreme. A federal survey published in 2010 found widespread abuse and
maltreatment in America's youth corrections facilities. More than a third of youth in secure corrections facilities or camp programs reported that staff used force unnecessarily, and 30 percent said that staff placed youth into solitary confinement or locked them up alone as discipline.
About half had experienced some kind of group punishment, as Darren described, and half said staff applied punishment unfairly.
Fear of abuse was equally pervasive: 38 percent of youth said they feared being physically attacked by staff or other youth. Twenty-five percent feared attack from another youth, and 22 percent were afraid of attack from a staff member. Many lived in fear of both.

In the context of the juvenile prison, the term “abuse” takes on multiple meanings. The following are just a sample of incidents that have come to light in recent years.

       
•
   
In Florida, a three-hundred-pound guard crushed a twelve-year-old boy with his body, suffocating the sixty-five-pound child to death.

       
•
   
In California, groups of correctional officers slammed handcuffed boys face-first into walls or set attack dogs on them, often in full view of security cameras.

       
•
   
In Louisiana, guards assaulted sleeping children, or entertained themselves by pitting boys in fights against each other, leaving them with broken jaws, fractured eye sockets, and an array of other injuries.

       
•
   
In New York, children were restrained with such force that they wound up with concussions, missing teeth, spiral fractures, and other injuries. While physical restraint is intended only for situations where a young person poses a danger, these harsh examples were sometimes the result of affronts as minor as taking an extra cookie or laughing against orders.
“Workers forced one boy, who had glared at a staff member, into a sitting position and secured his arms behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken.”

       
•
   
In Georgia, guards assaulted children who were anemic, injured, mentally disabled, and as young as nine. When one boy collapsed during a punishing exercise regime, a supervisor broke his arm.
A boy who talked in line was punched in the ear so hard that his eardrum was punctured.

       
•
   
In Mississippi, guards ripped the clothing from suicidal girls, then hog-tied them, naked, and tossed them into solitary. They also shackled girls to poles and forced them to run in hot weather carrying logs. Those who threw up from the heat and the strain were
forced to eat their own vomit.

       
•
   
In Arkansas, young people were left naked in solitary with the air-conditioning turned on high, or hog-tied and set outside at night in freezing weather.

According to a 2008 investigation by the Associated Press, thirteen thousand formal abuse claims were reported between 2004 and 2007 by state-run juvenile facilities nationwide.
“Of these, 1,343 instances of abuse had been officially confirmed by authorities. Countless more claims had never been investigated properly, or never filed in the first place due to lack of information or functioning grievance systems, and/or the fear of retribution.”