Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (18 page)

The double standard reflected in these figures is mind-boggling. When
young people on the outside commit acts similar to those for which guards receive, at most, probation—and more often no sanction of any kind—they are considered serious offenders and are punished far more harshly than are predatory guards.
Under civil commitment laws, they may be confined indefinitely—even forever—if a court determines that they are “sexual deviants” who are unlikely to be rehabilitated (despite the fact that juvenile sexual offenders have far lower recidivism rates than almost any other group). Under the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, children who have been adjudicated delinquent for a wide range of “sex offenses” designated as serious (including, bizarrely, public urination, as well as
consensual sex between two minors that is prosecuted as statutory rape and posting naked pictures of one's underage self online) find themselves, in addition to whatever immediate sanction is imposed, on long-term public sex offender registries. These youth, according to a
Human Rights Watch study,

are stigmatized, isolated, often depressed. Many consider suicide, and some succeed. They and their families have experienced harassment and physical violence. They are sometimes shot at, beaten, even murdered; many are repeatedly threatened with violence. Some young people have to post signs stating “sex offender lives here” in the windows of their homes; others have to carry drivers' licenses with “sex offender” printed on them in bright orange capital letters. Youth sex offenders on the registry are sometimes denied access to education because residency restriction laws prevent them from being in or near a school. Youth sex offender registrants despair of ever finding employment, even while they are burdened with mandatory fees that can reach into the hundreds of dollars on an annual basis.

Residency restrictions can make finding housing so difficult that families are driven into homelessness. And the stigma never lifts. A boy adjudicated for a sex offense at age ten may find, at age forty, that he is barred from dropping his own children off at school or hosting a birthday party at his family's home. As a result of the registry requirements, children of onetime juvenile sex offenders find themselves
“harassed and ridiculed by their peers for their parents' long-past transgressions.”

Imagine what this double standard must look like to a teenager convicted of a sex offense and sent to a facility where the odds that he will be abused by a guard are about one in ten—and the odds that the guard will experience any consequence at all are negligible.

The Office of the Attorney General reported that prison staff who sexually abuse inmates
“often do not believe they will be caught, and even if they are caught do not believe they will be punished. Moreover, staff can generally conceal their actions because . . . they control the prison environment. . . . In some cases, prison staff will cover for abusive colleagues by serving as alibis or lookouts. Moreover, staff know that wards are reluctant to report sexual abuse, and that even if they do, they are unlikely to be believed.”

In 2006, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union released a
report on girls in New York State custody. The interviews in the report reveal the widespread culture of impunity that has allowed the sexual abuse of incarcerated youth to continue unabated for so long.

Ebony V. was repeatedly abused by staff at two New York State facilities. Her story illuminates in painful detail both why girls who have already been victimized are especially vulnerable and why so much abuse by staff goes unreported.

“Ebony V. stated that girls at Lansing [Residential Center] known to have previously been commercially sexually exploited, as she was, are at risk of being targeted by male staff members,” the researchers wrote. “When asked to describe this targeting, Ebony V., who was 16 at the time of her incarceration, described the conduct of male staff, including her abuser, who was her facility-assigned counselor.”

Ebony's first-person account cracks the veneer of the report's otherwise formal language with its detail and directness.

The male staff would flirt with me, like [the abuser]. [He] continually made me repeat my story in detail, he made me do things I did to them to him. He said what I was I would always be that. When I said: “I'm going home, I'm not doing this anymore.” He said, “You like doing this, you like having sex.” . . . It was very exploitative in there. I was living better than I was on the street but I was still living street life in there. I was still being sexually exploited by the staff there. A
staff member had sex with me. . . . Even when I was in there, he was under investigation for inappropriate behavior with girls on the unit.

“At that time my body had been through so much trauma that it didn't matter,” Ebony told investigators when they asked why she had not reported the assaults to facility administrators. In addition, the fact that Ebony's abuser was already under investigation for assaulting the girls in his care, yet had continued access to Ebony and others, sent a clear message about the indifference with which she would be met if she did file a complaint.

The message that staff could do with her what they would was conveyed in myriad ways. Once, Ebony recalled, another staff member walked into her abuser's office and caught him in the act. Instead of intervening, or reporting what he saw, he simply bolted: “He said: ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh I'm sorry' and closed the door.”

The double standard that caused her to be arrested for prostitution (despite the fact that she was below the age of consent), then placed in the custody of a guard who made her reenact the very acts for which she had been arrested, was not lost on Ebony. According to the HRW/ACLU report, Ebony

ran away from an abusive home and was prostituted by a man in his thirties. She was arrested on a prostitution charge and held in the Lansing facility, where she was again sexually exploited. Contrasting what she viewed as the justice system's lenient treatment of adult men who buy sex from children with its harsh treatment of commercially sexually exploited girls, Ebony V. said: “The system is made for us to fail. Put it like this: A young person like me can get arrested and get put away for a year and a half, then another year for what adults did to her. A lot of times it's not our fault, it's an adult's fault and they treat us like adults in there.”

At a hearing held by the National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence,
Sheila Bedi testified about her efforts working for the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of incarcerated children in Mississippi and Louisiana. Noting that “the vast majority of [incarcerated children] have
committed very low level offenses,” Bedi underscored the pervasive double standard that turns a blind eye to the far more serious crimes committed
against
these young people, who are in captivity (and thus easy prey) ostensibly as a result of their own far lesser transgressions.

Bedi described the experience of a sixteen-year-old girl who “was left alone with a staff member who was under investigation for sexually abusing another resident in that facility. She was brutally sexually abused, and that same staff member went on to abuse three other girls before he was finally removed from his position.”

“In that same facility,” she offered by way of comparison, “seven girls were shackled for over a month because they were an alleged runaway threat.” Meanwhile, the serial rapist on staff faced no legal penalty at all and was offered multiple “second chances” to victimize more girls before finally—only after ongoing pressure from advocates—being taken off the job.

Young people in juvenile prisons are especially vulnerable not only to abuse itself but to deep and lasting trauma as a result. Many have been sexually victimized already when they enter, and few have seen those who abused them face any kind of legal consequence. When they are themselves locked up and the jailer takes a turn with their now-captive bodies, the message is clear.
Who would believe a girl like you? You put yourself in this situation. You've got only yourself to blame.

In testimony before a 2010 House Committee on Education and Labor hearing on “Meeting the Challenges Faced by Girls in the Juvenile Justice System,” Rachel offered a vivid account of the lasting effects of being victimized behind bars.

Rachel started out by smoking marijuana to “ease the pain” after her mother's death. At fifteen, she was arrested after a fight with another girl and placed on probation, where she was required to report to a day center but offered neither treatment for her drug use nor support for the loss and grief that triggered it. Unsurprisingly, she failed the drug screenings and was sent to an upstate facility where, she was told, she would be able to get treatment.

Instead of the promised treatment for her drug problem, all Rachel found upstate was a predatory staff member eager to exploit it—to abet
and encourage the very behavior for which she was in custody in order to gain sexual leverage over the teenager.

After a few months on campus, a male staff member on campus who was in his 30s initiated a sexual relationship with me in exchange for bringing me drugs. In order to meet up, the staff member would arrange for me to leave the campus and pick me up in his car down the road from the facility. He would then transport me off campus to a local hotel. These activities were never documented and or questioned and although the staff member who I had the relationship with was eventually fired, it was only because he screened positive for drugs—not because he was sexually exploiting me.

When Rachel was first arrested, she was a grief-stricken teenager who smoked marijuana to drown out her sorrow. By the time she was released, her addiction untreated and her trauma exacerbated, her “behavior began to spiral out of control,” she testified. “I started using heavier drugs and then began soliciting my body to support my growing drug habit. It got so bad that I left home and lived on the street, being sexually exploited by adult men in exchange for money or drugs. Eventually I became pregnant with my daughter and I was arrested for prostitution.”

In testimony before the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Chino, a youth organizer and campaign coordinator for New York's Prison Moratorium Project, described the sexual abuse she witnessed and experienced during eight separate incarcerations.

At thirteen, after getting into a fight with a boy, she spent a little over a month at the Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx, on a floor that held boys as well as girls. “I immediately noticed that the male corrections officers seemed too nice to the girls, and were overly familiar with them—putting their arms around them, or touching them on their face, shoulders or waist, and letting the girls touch them,” she testified. “I saw these same corrections officers give these girls candy or extra food, and let them out of their cells when they were supposed to be on lockdown.”

That was not the worst of it. What Chino described next sounds more like the aftermath of war than the administration of justice.

The corrections officers allowed certain boys to enter the cells of girls that the corrections officers did not like or said were not behaving well. I was aware of this because I often heard girls screaming in fear at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, followed by figures in red jumpsuits running past my cell. Only boys wore red jumpsuits. In my one month at Spofford, three different girls told me they were raped by boys who corrections officers allowed to go into their cells. I was terrified and did my best to keep a low profile so that I would not be targeted.

At fifteen, Chino was arrested for assault and sent to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, an adult prison. When an older woman took the younger girl under her wing, getting Chino moved closer to her own cell, offering her cigarettes and food, and coming to her rescue when she got into a fight, the teenager gradually came to trust her. Then her erstwhile protector began touching her, following her into the shower, and trying to kiss her. When Chino went to guards for help, they told her they could not move her unless her life was in danger.

“Early one morning you go to take a shower,” Chino continued, using a distancing second person to tell a painful story,

and when you're washing your hair, the older woman runs up on you and punches you in the face. You're stunned and your nose begins to bleed; she pins you up against the wall and shakes a sawed-off broomstick at you and tells you that she is going to “take” what is hers, meaning that she wants to have sex with you one way or another. You're terrified and on top of everything, you're naked. . . . Even though you want to die right now, you pull her closer to you despite your bloody nose, close your eyes and kiss her. You're devastated, but at least you kept from being raped.

Chino's next stop, the adolescent unit at Rikers Island, was also rife with abuse. Male guards watched the girls shower, and “girls who had no money in their commissary would suddenly have things that are highly coveted in prison—like cigarettes and candy. When I asked the girls where they got those things . . . a girl would say that [a] corrections officer was
now ‘her man,' meaning that he was giving her those items in return for sex and sexual favors.”

Again, this was not the worst of it. “In addition to sexual misconduct and coercion, there were also instances where girls were viciously attacked and forced to have sexual intercourse. One of the lowest points in my life was when a male corrections officer at Rikers raped one of my friends there.” Terrified, the girl did not report the rape.