Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (21 page)

As the federal report's authors delicately point out,
“some widely accepted recommended practices did not necessarily correspond with an institution's incidence of sexual victimization.” All the policy and procedure in the world, in other words, won't get guards to keep their hands off the kids as long as the overall culture of an institution is one of disrespect and coercion.

The report bolsters this analysis by way of a very different example as well—the Missouri Division of Youth Services Fort Bellefontaine facility.
This institution lacked all the trappings of protection—no PREA coordinator, no PREA-specific policy, no orientation for residents on sexual victimization, and no specific policies on dealing with its aftermath—but nevertheless boasted the lowest victimization rate of any facility surveyed.

In a remarkable bit of testimony, Missouri Department of Youth Services director Tim Decker did his patient, methodical best to explain to the panel how it was that—despite a lack of policies, protocols, or procedures prohibiting them from doing so—he nevertheless managed to keep his staff from raping the kids in their care.

It was not, he explained, simply a matter of telling them not to (although staff in Missouri do in fact receive extensive training on “boundaries”). Rather, it was part and parcel of the larger Missouri Division of Youth Services culture, which focuses on rehabilitation, not punishment, and relies on small, homelike settings rather than large institutions.

In Missouri's youth facilities, Decker told the panel, “Young people are in the constant presence of caring staff, learning firsthand what it means to have healthy relationships with peers and adults.”

According to Decker's testimony, “Many aspects of traditional institutional and correctional practices in juvenile justice include punitive and coercive approaches that devalue and objectify young people, creating fertile ground for safety issues and sexual victimization. It should be no surprise that if the way we control the kids is through coercion that we will . . . have a growth of other coercive behavior such as sexual victimization.”

“Sexual victimization in institutions cannot be effectively dealt with in isolation or as a singular issue,” he elaborated. “At the core, all forms of institutional abuse create a lack of safety for young people, staff, and eventually for the public, because young people get released without having the root causes addressed.”

“Culture trumps everything,” Decker summarized, using one of his favorite maxims. Neither education, nor detection, nor investigation, nor discipline, he said, is as effective as creating an environment of trust and mutual regard.

“A humane culture of care,” he concluded, “is ultimately what keeps young people safe, not hard work, fences or cameras.”

7

THE HOLE

Solitary Confinement of Juveniles

It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.

—John McCain, senator and former POW

“I
SEE HOW THEY
do them bitches.”

Direct, outspoken, and quick to laughter, Cherie in this instance was skirting a sensitive question: Was she ever placed on suicide watch during her time in a state facility for girls? Her response seemed at once answer and evasion. But the details that eventually spilled out made it clear why, no matter how low she might have felt, she would never have allowed herself even to hint at the kind of desperation that gets a girl put on suicide watch.

“Little broad talking about ‘I wanna kill myself'? They open her door up, rushed her, five of them, grabbed her, dragged her to the other place, stripped her butt naked, put a wool blanket in there, and she was in that room for four days, no clothes, none,
no
clothes—only a wool blanket, and the room she was in.”

The “other place” was a barren isolation cell—the treatment of choice for those whose despair was deemed a danger. Harsh as it is, the widespread use of solitary confinement is the natural end point of a juvenile justice system that is predicated from the very start on isolation.

There are many ostensible rationales for solitary confinement inside juvenile prisons.

       
You can place a child in solitary confinement for his own safety: to protect him from others whose real or threatened violence staff cannot contain.

       
You can place a child in solitary upon his arrival, in order to evaluate him, no matter how thick the file that arrives with him.

       
You can place him there as punishment, for violations of procedure as well as acts of violence. You can lock a child down for possessing a pencil.

       
You can place a child in solitary as punishment for the acts of others—entire units or even facilities may be on “lockdown” because of anything from gang concerns to understaffing.

       
Should he land in an adult prison, you can lock a child down to ensure that there's “no trouble” while you execute another prisoner. (“Pre-gas, then gas, then twenty-four more hours,” one young man recited.)

       
You can place a kid in solitary for talking about killing herself, despite evidence that this may be the best means there is to push her over the edge.

The rationale may vary, but the mise-en-scène does not: a room, perhaps a bunk, a metal toilet, and a door—a door that doesn't open, except for an hour or two a day of “large-muscle” exercise. Sometimes the door has a slot at the bottom, so that even the guard who brings food, or the teacher toting worksheets, can slip in the legally mandated sustenance without mitigating the child's solitude by so much as a glance.

Young people's description of the conditions inside solitary confinement are remarkably consistent: small cells, often windowless, with little besides a metal toilet and a concrete slab for sleeping. Some youths are allowed a thin mattress, while others are given one only at night.

Individual facilities often devise means of making conditions even worse. In Rhode Island, for example, a federal district court described a juvenile corrections institution that
“maintained a dark, cold solitary confinement room where boys were held for as long as a week, wearing only
their underwear, and without toilet paper, sheets, blankets, or changes of clothes.”
Other facilities restrict the diet of those in disciplinary confinement to a “baked nutritional loaf,” meant to sustain life while remaining as unappetizing as possible.

Solitary confinement exists in the American imagination as a punishment reserved for the profoundly dangerous—our Hannibal Lecters: those so irredeemably violent that even our highest-security prisons can barely contain them. Or we think of it as something that takes place somewhere distant: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, offshore “black sites” where unspeakable torments are administered to enemy combatants. We rarely imagine it as a home for children, despite the fact that this use is commonplace.

Our ignorance is fortified by official obfuscation. There are as many euphemisms for solitary confinement as there are justifications for using it on the young: “ad seg,” “time-out,” “special housing,” “room time,” “room restriction,” “special management programming,” “protective custody,” even “reflection cottages.”
of the many names for solitary confinement, “dead time” may be the closest to reality. But as the Youth Law Center points out, no matter the nomenclature, “it all comes down to the same thing: a young person locked, alone, in a tiny room.”

The American Friends Service Committee calls the practice
“no-touch torture. . . . No one who has ever experienced more than the briefest time in solitary would call it anything else, because it was designed to destroy the mind and break the spirit.”

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry opposes the practice as well, asserting in a 2012 policy statement that “the potential psychiatric consequences of prolonged solitary confinement are well recognized and include depression, anxiety and psychosis. Due to their developmental vulnerability, juvenile offenders are at particular risk of such adverse reactions. Furthermore, the majority of suicides in juvenile correctional facilities occur when the individual is isolated or in solitary confinement.”

These examples are part of a long line of similar protests over the course of at least a century. Oscar Wilde served two years' hard labor in a British jail in the late nineteenth century on charges of gross indecency. The writer was so appalled to witness children locked alone in empty cells that as soon as he was released he wrote to the
Daily Chronicle
.

This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes the grown man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the appalling thing. To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity. If an individual, parent or guardian, did this to a child, he would be severely punished. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would take the matter up at once. There would be on all hands the utmost detestation of whomsoever had been guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence would, undoubtedly, follow conviction. But our own actual society does worse itself, and to the child to be so treated by a strange abstract force, of whose claims it has no cognizance, is much worse than to receive the same treatment from its father or mother, or someone it knew. The inhuman treatment of a child is always inhuman, by whomsoever it is inflicted. But inhuman treatment by society is to the child the more terrible because there can be no appeal.

More recently, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez called for an
“absolute prohibition” on the practice of keeping juveniles in solitary confinement and has deemed anything over fifteen hours in solitary torture for adults. “Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause” to juveniles especially, he warned, “it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The
United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty forbids the practice as well, in a 1990 resolution supported (but not followed) by the United States.

The United States has chosen to flout international standards on this as it has on other matters of criminal justice.
Young prisoners in America are routinely isolated for weeks, months, even years.
A comprehensive national survey by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 35 percent of youth in juvenile corrections facilities had been subjected to solitary confinement. Despite differing euphemisms for the practice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that
“room confinement remains a standard procedure in most juvenile facilities.”

State data are hard to come by, often turning up only when litigation demands it. But what does exist indicates that the practice of placing juveniles in solitary confinement is frequent and routine.

       
•
   
Youth in Ohio facilities spent an average of fifty hours in solitary over the course of a single month, a year
after
investigators insisted that “the extended … use of isolation (i.e., segregation) must be immediately revisited and dramatically changed.”

       
•
   
In California, where a major reform effort is under way and many facilities have closed, there is evidence that
solitary confinement may actually be a growing problem in those that remain open.
“Incredibly, the practices from 10 years ago persist today, as youth languish in windowless 8.5 x 11 feet cells.”

       
•
   
In New York City, nearly 15 percent of adolescents between the ages of sixteen and eighteen spend at least part of their pretrial detention in solitary confinement.

       
•
   
Investigations of Illinois's juvenile facilities found that youths were frequently placed in isolation
“for transgressions as minor as eating a guard's food.” A 2011 visit to illinois Youth Center St. Charles found
injured or sick youth housed in solitary rather than the institution's inadequate infirmary.
A separate look at the Harrisburg facility found 122 instances of solitary confinement within a single month.

       
•
   
In Georgia, mentally ill youth locked in isolation units
“were restrained, hit, shackled to beds and even toilets, put in restraint chairs for hours, and sprayed with oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray or pepper spray by staff.”

       
•
   
A survey undertaken at the Texas State facility at Giddings in March 2012—well into a major statewide reform effort—found that 87 percent of youth surveyed had been “confined to [their] room as punishment,” 45 percent on ten or more occasions.

       
•
   
In New Jersey, reports emerged in the mid-1990s that girls at a state facility were being drugged with psychotropics and then tossed into “seclusion,” while those at the state's main boys' facility were subject to “extreme” isolation. In 2010, the Juvenile Law Center filed suit on behalf of two young people held in solitary,
one of them for fifty days and another for 178. “T.D.” entered with a history of suicide attempts, according to the suit. “Juvenile Justice Commission's response to T.D.'s deteriorating mental health status was to confine him in a seven by seven foot cell with no view to the outside world for nearly seven months. T.D. was often forced to sleep on a concrete slab and was denied access to books, personal belongings, peer interaction, recreation, and exercise.” The second plaintiff alleged that he was placed in isolation under similar conditions for a total of fifty-five days for being the “victim of repeated assaults by other youth, or for minor behavioral infractions such as cursing. . . . Notably, when either T.D. or O.S. asked for services, they were warned that such gestures or requests would only extend the period of time they would be secluded.”