Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (16 page)

“You very clearly had a system where, when there was trouble, you call this ‘flying squad' of people who beat the kids up and locked them in their rooms,” Schiraldi soon discovered. In addition to what he described as “a thriving sex-for-overtime trade” among staff, he continued, “People were selling drugs to the kids. Pretty much everyone knew who it was—kids and staff—and nobody snitched. People who go to church on Sundays and are nice to their families.”

For new staffers, all of this can lead to what Schiraldi referred to as cognitive dissonance—the internal conflict engendered when what one believes, or is told, clashes with perceived reality. Cognitive dissonance can be so uncomfortable that a common reaction is to ignore, or explain away, the dissonant reality, rather than confronting it.

For new staff at a facility such as the one Schiraldi described, this is how the syndrome might play out: “You first go into a unit thinking you're there to help kids, and something like that [e.g., abuse] happens. You've got a moment to make a decision. Do I go along with this? Do I snitch? Or do I quit?” he began.

“The people who don't snitch and don't quit, who stay, who came as good people wanting to help? Now a little bit of evil has crept in. It's like the first time people dropped the pellets in the death canister. I'm sure it feels different the first time than the hundredth time. . . . You're working in a dangerous environment where no one has a plan on how to make it not be dangerous, so you sort of do what you did when you were a kid growing up: when there's physical force involved, you react with physical force.”

Noting that abuse has been a fact of life inside juvenile facilities for more than a century, Schiraldi cautioned against demonizing the individuals who work inside them today. “It's important to put ourselves in that spot and not just cluck or shake our heads at what staff end up becoming like, because the power of that indoctrination—and the power of the cognitive dissonance and rationalization that goes on for staff, when this is all they've ever seen in their lives—cannot be overstated,” said Schiraldi, who recalled being “indoctrinated” himself as a recent college graduate working in a group home. “It's the banality of a particular form of evil that really does set in, and it sets into the good people and the bad people alike.”

During my travels, I had a conversation with a clinician who worked for a large state juvenile system in the throes of a major reform effort. He spoke of another kind of dissonance: the kind that can ensue when staff who have been indoctrinated (as Schiraldi put it) into one way of doing things are abruptly told that way is wrong and asked to make radical and rapid changes.

“It's hard to consider and practice something new when there's no room to slow down or to practice,” he began, attempting to explain staff resistance to reform. “If you make a mistake, you're going to get called to [the] child abuse [registry], you're going to be fined, you're going to be put on administrative leave—and you're working sixteen hours a day.”

When I pressed him to be more specific about what kind of “mistakes” might trigger a call to the child abuse registry, he seemed to acknowledge that the term “mistake” as he was using it could encompass child abuse (“I'm not saying that they're not valid calls, because they are”). But given the difficult working conditions, he also cautioned against blaming the individual.

Many staffers, he pointed out, were working in “an environment where there's chronic stress and violence,” where “kids come in with violent behaviors and attack people.”

“From a trauma-informed perspective,” he told me, skating between the first and second person, “to attack back, to protect myself” is “a natural reaction. . . . You move from the frontal lobes, where you process and understand what's going on, to the hind brain, which is the primitive brain.”

“I think the lack of staffing, and the burnout, all contribute. . . . I don't think you can blame it on individual staff. We're all accountable for our own behavior, and that's what we tell kids, too, but at the same time, we need to look at the bigger picture and say, ‘What has happened here?' Because nobody says, ‘I want to grow up to be a child abuser,' right?”

Just as no child, I thought, says, “I want to grow up to be a prisoner.” The young people who
lived
inside the same environment of “chronic stress and violence” that the clinician had cited, it seemed, to excuse staff violence—children who could not go home at the end of a shift—were rarely viewed through this “trauma-informed” lens. They were not granted the latitude to make “mistakes” under pressure—not when they were sentenced, often after childhoods filled with violence and trauma, and not when they were on the receiving end of “discipline” behind bars so harsh that it would qualify as child abuse were those subjected to it seen as fully human.

In fact, when it comes to the kids, the legal and cultural shifts of recent decades have increasingly
foreclosed
consideration of “the bigger picture” the clinician referenced, requiring the courts to demand “accountability” absent the sort of context he advocated when it came to abusive guards.

We're all accountable for our own behavior, and that's what we tell kids, too. . . .

Like all adolescents—all people, for that matter—incarcerated youth respond more powerfully to actions than they do to admonitions. They do as we do, not as we say. How, then, I wondered, could we expect youth to keep their cool behind bars when even the adults in charge could not? Is it reasonable to demand they do better than the adults around them at
acting from their “frontal lobes” when we now know that this region of the brain (responsible for capacities such as connecting an action to a consequence, or considering its impact on others) is not fully developed until the mid-twenties? Can we expect young people to demonstrate this kind of control despite, in many cases, lifelong histories of trauma, “chronic stress,” and the strain of incarceration in a chaotic, unpredictable environment—one that, per this clinician, was taxing enough for the guards to drive them to violence?

Guards were to be excused because they sometimes worked double shifts. The kids lived in the same environment 24/7. But when—“from
a trauma-informed perspective”—the adolescents slip into the “hind brain,” they face consequences far harsher than the guard, who may have his pay docked.

Even as the abuses inside juvenile facilities started to become more comprehensible to me, this glaring double standard continued to rankle. It was hard not to wonder how many lives might be different if the kids we consign to abusive institutions were offered even a small percentage of the “second chances” their keepers are granted.

When he described his own dealings with young people, this clinician sounded both wise and compassionate. He spoke of instances when he had relied on patience and communication to help young people calm themselves, rather than reflexively turning to physical restraint. He had listened and talked his way through outbursts to which others might well have reacted with force. Nevertheless, his implicit plea for a “trauma-informed” pass on reporting guards for child abuse remained disconcerting.

What, I wondered, did this double standard do to young prisoners' moral development, their sense of the broader social contract, and their own stake in it? If a “trauma-informed perspective” was used to justify crimes
against
youth in custody, committed by adults who possessed near-complete authority, was it reasonable to expect those same youths to internalize the lesson that growing up means being “accountable for your own behavior”?

“Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil,” the author and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel has said. For Darren, the indifference of the guards who went about their shifts as if it were just another day at the mill, seemingly oblivious to the suffering of the boys who knelt at their feet, remains the most difficult aspect of his incarceration with which to come to terms.

It should not be surprising that Darren's struggle would include questioning his own faith. In the same interview, Wiesel elaborated on the corrosive power of the kind of disregard Darren had faced.
“The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference,” he said. “The opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.”

According to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,
eleven thousand young people engage in suicidal behavior in
juvenile facilities each year. In California, a recent study calculated the rate of suicide attempts in juvenile halls as close to twenty-four per thousand youth in custody.

That so many young people seek to end their lives in the loveless, hopeless void of juvenile prisons—that they lose faith not only, as Darren did, in God and man, but even in the value of their own lives—would likely surprise neither Wiesel nor Darren.

Darren had been baptized and raised in the Catholic Church. His most traumatizing experiences, which took place inside the institution charged with his rehabilitation, caused him to question, and for a time nearly abandon, his religion. Just like the child who hides his suffering from a parent who is powerless to help, letting go of his faith seemed preferable to crying out to a God who would permit such inhumanity.

This kind of crisis of faith, Darren said, was a “common theme” behind bars. “People lose their religion in there.”

Darren's faith may have been shaken, but his seeker's nature remained. While he was locked up, Darren began attending Native American religious ceremonies, “exploring, trying to find answers to the questions I was asking spiritually, Mentally.”

I asked Darren what those questions were, what he was seeking as he looked to new gods and theologies.

“How can people in here do the things that they do to kids?” he responded. “To us?” During the two weeks he spent on his knees, boys who could not make it to the twice-daily bathroom calls were forced to urinate where they knelt and to clean it up themselves as best they could or else face a beating.

“God let the people in here do the things that they do to the kids,” Darren said, leaving the rest unspoken.

Despite a decade behind bars in a barren and abusive environment, Darren emerged with both ambition and compassion, as well as a powerful sense of mission drawn from his own suffering. Today, he works as a liaison between local businesses and homeless people, mediating solutions intended to prevent his clients from ending up behind bars. Darren, in other words, is one of the “beat the odds” kids whose stories the public is so hungry to hear.

Darren is far from alone in his post-prison achievements, and stories
like his are as important as those of kids whose lives are derailed by their experience behind bars. But the beloved trope of the “kid who beat the odds” is double-edged. It inspires us but also soothes our collective conscience, allowing us to avoid asking why the odds are so stacked to begin with.

“What I would like,” said Darren, who is acutely aware of both the value and the risks inherent in holding himself up as an example, “is to dissect the explanation
behind
the odds.”

“Think about it long term,” he continued. “The population we are dealing with now are adolescents. I was an adolescent, still [needing to be] nourished, still developing. And these were the things that were orienting my disposition.”

“Some people going through this situation,” Darren warned, slipping into a first-person plural to indicate his ongoing solidarity with those still behind bars, “we're going to be the backlash. We don't have the fundamental necessities for communication. We got nothing to lose.”

During the months he spent on an isolation unit, Darren had listened helplessly to the cries of a boy in another cell as guards beat him for kicking at his door. It was clear to Darren that the boy was not deliberately trying to be provocative; like everyone else on the unit, he was simply desperate for some kind of human contact. How could the guards not see this? How could they answer his plea only with violence? And God—the God Darren had worshipped without question for as long as he could remember—where was He amid this desolation?

The fashionable café was quiet on this spring afternoon, its clientele a mix of underemployed twentysomethings inking their thoughts into moleskin notebooks and thirtysomethings tapping away at laptops. If Darren turned heads, it wasn't because he stood out but because he so perfectly fit in, his sunglasses perched just so atop his knit cap, framing a handsome and animated brown face.

At thirty, Darren was bright with promise and ambition, determined to turn even his deepest traumas into something of use to others. It was difficult to imagine him locked for months on end in an isolation cell, struggling to hold on to his humanity as well as his sanity.

“The question,” he asked, “is where is the public when this is going on? When I heard that a kid got beat up by the staff, I would wonder. . . . It
was a kid being ‘defiant,' since he was kicking the door. But we are all social creatures. If you were locked up . . .”

Darren let the rest of this sentence go unspoken, but his intent was clear. He was joining the many who ask those who have not been there to imagine; to try, at least, to place ourselves in the shoes that kicked the door.

“The kids would do things to act out, to get attention or social interaction,” Darren said, trying to explain why a boy would kick his door when logic and experience told him it could bring only a beating, “since we are social creatures. To get some type of contact—unfortunately, in that type of fashion.”