Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (14 page)

In the absence of a consistent reporting mechanism, the best source of information about abuse behind bars often comes from litigation initiated by family members, advocacy groups, or the U.S. Department of Justice. The federal entity charged with enforcing the Eighth Amendment (which forbids cruel and unusual punishment), the Department of Justice is responsible for investigating allegations of abuse behind bars and can sue those jurisdictions in which abuse is egregious enough to test constitutional limits.

A 2011 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation includes an overview of successful civil rights suits across the country. Abuse is pervasive throughout the nation's juvenile facilities, author Richard Mendel concludes, with documentation of “systemic violence, abuse, and/or excessive use of isolation or restraints” in thirty-nine states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, going back to 1970.

In each of these instances, “states have been identified not for one or a handful of isolated events, but for a sustained pattern of maltreatment,” according to the Casey report.
Fifty-seven lawsuits, many brought by
the Department of Justice, have turned up enough evidence of violence, abuse, and other violations to require court-imposed remediation.

The thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation that result from these myriad investigations leave little question that the punishment doled out inside our nation's juvenile prisons is cruel. But as evidence of widespread abuse turns up in state upon state, decade after decade, it becomes increasingly difficult to view it as “unusual.”

In New York, a supervisor with that state's Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees both the delinquency and dependency systems, said young people sometimes returned from upstate juvenile facilities with bruises, contusions, or even broken bones. Each time, she would pick up the phone and report these instances of alleged child abuse to a branch of the same agency suspected of inflicting them.

Only a handful of states, it turns out, have
not
been determined to have systematically brutalized the youth in their care.
A review of all fifty states found only eight where there was
not
conclusive evidence of system-wide mistreatment.

Reading the results of Department of Justice investigations or class-action lawsuits—catalogues of brutality running on for pages—is a painful experience. But there is also something bracing about the bald exposure of abuses behind bars. Surely, one imagines, once these horrors are exposed both in the press and at the highest levels of our legal system, something will be done about them. Reforms will be instituted, the children made safe.

Those who author reports on abuse in juvenile prisons tend to foster this reformist faith, ending the most chilling investigation with an optimistic list of suggested reforms. The language ranges from academic to outraged to crisply legalistic, depending on the authors, but the recommendations themselves are generally quite similar: conduct further inquiries, form new committees, consult experts, draft protocols, hold trainings, and the like. Beneath these procedural suggestions lies a single mandate: quit beating up the children.

Federal law and a number of court decisions have made it clear that
incarcerated youth do not forfeit their human rights along with their liberty. Yet as lawsuit follows lawsuit and consent decrees pile up, abuse
remains endemic to our nation's juvenile prisons. It has persisted for decades, despite investigations, exposés, admonitions, and court orders; despite
public displays of outrage and official commitments to change.

No matter how vehemently we profess ourselves “scandalized” when another investigation brings new abuses to light, the seemingly gratuitous cruelty of captor toward captive is so widespread, and so long-standing despite multiple reform efforts, that it raises a troubling question: is it even
possible
to eradicate the abuses that occur with such regularity when large numbers of vulnerable young people are held captive far from the public eye? Or is there something inherent to this particular structure that makes such abuses inevitable?

From “chemical restraints” to shield-bearing “extraction teams” to age-old tools like the fist and the boot, today's incarcerated youth face
a range of mechanisms of assault that taxes the imagination.
The restraint chair, for example, may sound like an artifact from a medieval dungeon, but it is used in juvenile facilities to this day.

Ricardo spent twenty-one months in a Massachusetts Department of Youth Services facility. There, he was strapped into the device—a high-backed, padded contraption fitted out with belts, cuffs, and similar devices—in order, he was told, to address his “anger problems.”

“They put you in a fucking room by yourself with the chair in the middle . . . a big-ass room with one chair, and you are strapped down to it. . . . They strap you down and sit you like this”—Ricardo stooped to demonstrate the pinioned position that seemed to be imprinted in his muscle memory—“and you have to sit there for five to six hours by yourself.”

“They strap you down,” he repeated, his voice rising with a fury the passage of time seemed not to have diminished.

“I am able to speak about almost every event of my life like it isn't me,” said twenty-year-old Stephanie, who survived rape, stabbings, and more during the years she spent as a sex worker in order to care for herself and her brother. The siblings had lost their father to AIDS, their mother to addiction, and their grandparents to age, and it had not crossed Stephanie's mind that the responsibility for their care might fall to anyone but her.

Eventually, she landed in an upstate New York juvenile facility. “Really, it was like being an adult,” Stephanie said. One girl, she recalled, was
restrained on a classroom rug that had been salted so heavily that “maybe an hour later, half her face was all gone. It looked like a third-degree burn. They put a fan across her and told her to ‘thug it out.' ”

The literature on children and trauma makes clear that one does not have to be the direct victim of violence to experience lasting harm.
Witnessing violence can also have long-term effects. “I detach myself out of the situations that happen,” explained Stephanie. “So when I speak about the situations, it is like they aren't whole situations for me. I guess it is just years of going through traumatic things.”

Like Stephanie, battle-scarred children often find ways to distance themselves from the most profound traumas, describing horrific experiences in tones that are incongruously matter-of-fact. It's different for a parent. No matter how much time has passed, when a mother describes being helpless to protect her child as he is raped, beaten, brutalized, and abandoned by a system that has claimed him in the name of his best interest, her pain is as raw as if she were describing events of a moment ago. One mother recalled the horror and betrayal she felt the first time she was permitted to visit her then twelve-year-old son. Arrested along with two older boys for theft of a car stereo, he'd been sent to what authorities had promised her would be a “therapeutic program.”

After almost three hours of driving, her car rounded a bend and the building that housed the putative “program,” and her son within it, loomed before her. Razor wire, guards, and weapons filled her vision. “Twelve years old, and my son was in a prison.”

After a long wait, she was led into a gymnasium-sized room full of bleachers, packed with boys and men from as young as eleven to their mid-twenties. When she finally located her son in the crowd, she barely recognized the rail-thin boy. His eyebrows had been shaved off, highlighting a round indentation on his temple. He had a huge black eye, a busted lip, and, when she looked more closely, a bruise on his rib cage in the shape of a boot.

“Mom, this is what happens,” he told her in a flat tone that scared her as deeply as did his physical condition. “A guard did this. They want you to know who's boss.”

When a boy with a swollen face meets his mother in the visiting room and answers her anxious questions with an offhand “That's just the way
it is,” it is unlikely that he has truly grown immune to suffering. More likely, the alternative to feigning diffidence—to beg her for assistance she is powerless to provide, and see his own helplessness reflected in his mother's face—is simply too painful. A young prisoner is likely to learn early on that those who love him are as powerless as he in the face of the omnipotent “system.” No matter how brave a face he may wear in the visiting room, this is a hard lesson. If he can no longer be a child and take shelter in the family, then “taking it like a man” becomes the only option—to protect the mother who cannot protect him and to preserve some shard of dignity himself.

For many parents, the second circle of hell is breached when they try to protest what they may at first assume is an anomalous violation of policy, only to learn, as their concerns are dismissed, that their child's experience is in fact par for the course; that, despite their most passionate advocacy, they truly cannot protect him.

That is, if they are both persistent and fortunate enough to get any response at all from the authorities who now control their children. Many parents describe being treated as criminals themselves: the “type of people” who would raise a delinquent child, and so neither credible nor even worthy of an audience with busy administrators.

The boy with the boot-shaped bruise was being held at the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth in Louisiana, which teetered at the extreme end of a dismal spectrum. The
New York Times
called it “so rife with brutality, cronyism and neglect that many legal experts say it is the worst in the nation.” Broken bones, black eyes, fractured jaws, and gang rapes were daily occurrences. A Department of Justice investigation found that
dozens of youths went to the hospital with serious injuries each month.

“It eroded years of parenting that taught my son, as well as my other children, to tell the truth and trust in authority,” this mother said of her son's experience behind bars. “It stole any confidence in himself that I had managed to instill. And it taught him at a very vulnerable and too young age that authority can be corrupt, without limits or moral boundaries.”

“The worst of all of this is that he seems to believe he has no value to add to the outside world,” she continued, “that he deserves the harsh treatment he has received, because he is a bad person.”

What, this mother has struggled for years to answer, could counteract a message that had literally been beaten into her child? What will it take to restore his faith in his own humanity, much less that of adults in positions of authority?

Eventually, after intense pressure from parents and other advocates, Tallulah was forced to close its doors. Similar scandals, fueled by lawsuits and family and media pressure, have shuttered some of the worst dungeons in other states as well. But while the phrase “isolated incident” is often invoked when this kind of pressure forces a response from officials, the problem is rarely one of “a few bad apples” among the staff, or among the institutions themselves. Brutality and victimization are in fact often “the way it is” inside juvenile prisons—leaving those sent there scarred by new trauma, which is itself a predictor of future incarceration.

By countenancing this ongoing abuse, juvenile institutions instill a “survival of the fittest” mentality that is in direct opposition to the values that judges tell families their children are being sent away to learn. Trapped within a culture built on fear and impunity, young people are more likely to adapt than to protest—objecting, they learn early, is futile or worse. Adapting to prison culture offers some protection, but the price is steep: a brutal and destructive coming-of-age.

Inside a correctional setting, a child's ability to distance himself from emotion—the “machine down” mind-set—is adaptive. Young prisoners may come to believe that a “me against the world” posture is the only thing that will get them through their time. This defensive stance, while effective in the moment, works against the goal of rehabilitation. To “do time” well can require suppressing the instinct toward empathy, developing an immunity not only to one's own pain but also that of others.

For some, the next step is to go from ignoring another's suffering to inflicting it. Ward-on-ward violence and the psychological manipulation that accompanies it reflect the culture of violence and power to which young people learn to adapt. In an environment designed to strip away all agency, tormenting a weaker neighbor can come to seem the only means of regaining a sense of control.

Louis was eleven years old the first time he was sent to Washington, D.C.'s now-defunct Oak Hill Youth Center, then notorious for its culture
of abuse. Oak Hill, said Louis, was “anything goes”: a chaotic,
Lord of the Flies
–style environment where it was “your so-called bullies,” not the staff, who ran the facility.

“And myself, I can say honestly, I was one of them,” he acknowledged.

Louis established his status in the pecking order through the kind of petty domination that can make life miserable for those on the other end. “I would tell somebody, ‘Don't go in that shower—that's mine. Give me that tray.' Other stuff, just to take anger out.”

As he got older, Louis said, he “started to wise up” and backed off the intimidation tactics. By “taking my anger out on somebody else who's going through the same thing I'm going through,” he realized, he was helping to perpetuate the same miserable cycle in which he was trapped.