Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (22 page)

       
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In Mississippi, girls who misbehaved or were placed on suicide watch were “stripped naked and left in a windowless, stifling cinder-block cell, with nothing but the concrete floor to sleep on and a hole in the floor for a toilet.”

Although solitary confinement is legal, its humanity is dubious, especially when it comes to children.
All manner of international guidelines and declarations on the human rights of children have deemed placing them in punitive solitary confinement cruel, inhuman, and degrading. A 2012 report from Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union determined that
“the conditions that accompany solitary confinement . . . constitute violations of fundamental rights.”

Unable to justify the practice, administrators often resort instead to obfuscation. “We don't like to call it isolation,” the head of a system under fire told a television reporter. The regulations in her system explicitly allowed for youth to be kept in their cells for twenty-one hours a day, but an internal audit found even those limits were regularly exceeded:
some were locked in their cells for all but forty minutes a day.

“They say that he's not going there for punishment,” said a mother whose son had showed her the scars from his suicide attempts when she visited, calling them “his ticket to freedom” (by which he meant death).

“We want to protect him, so we're going to put him in solitary,” this
mother was told when she called the facility to protest—despite the fact that solitary confinement had
triggered
the suicide attempts administrators later used to justify it. “It is all backwards, you know.”

“Backwards” is exactly the right word.
Solitary confinement is a standard response to concerns that a youth is suicidal, despite the fact that half of all young people who kill themselves in juvenile facilities do so inside solitary cells.

Martín was fifteen the first time he was arrested and sent to a Massachusetts Department of Youth Services facility. Fights, he said, were a regular occurrence. Engaging in them carried consequences, but so did ducking out of them: life could be intolerable for a boy who had shown fear.

The punishment for fighting, however, was even worse. “They put you in a dark room. It is a cell, but no lights are on, or they keep you in your cell and they take everything in there out. They would leave you there for a whole day. You would sleep on the metal, the plain metal.”

If “a whole day” seems lenient, consider the fact that Martín was in solitary long enough, or frequently enough, to witness multiple suicide attempts by those in neighboring cells. One boy, he remembers, tried to kill himself by jumping off the top bunk headfirst and smashing his head on a bolted metal table.

Darren spent about a year banished to “ad seg,” or administrative segregation—one of the various euphemisms for solitary confinement. His
brief stretches of daily “recreation” consisted of pacing inside a metal cage. That, said Darren—who was otherwise more inclined to analyze than to condemn the treatment he had experienced behind bars—“is inhumane.”

“Inhumane” may be an understatement. The American Correctional Association, which establishes professional standards for adult and juvenile facilities,
limits the isolation of juveniles to a maximum of five days. Forcing Darren to endure a year in ad seg seems all the more excessive given the precipitating offense: he refused to take medication prescribed by prison doctors for psychiatric conditions that were diagnosed only after he was locked up.

Darren had demurred for two reasons. The first, he explained, was the advice his mother had given him before he went away. “I'm my mom's
son, and my mother told me not to take any medicine. I refused medication, so the board decided I was ‘not taking responsibility for my actions' and ‘not participating in the program.' So I was in isolated programs for a year at a time.”

The other reason Darren refused to swallow the handful of pills prescribed him was that he had no reason to believe they were medically necessary. Prior to his incarceration, no one had so much as hinted that he might be mentally ill. “I didn't want to take medications when I knew there was nothing wrong with me,” he explained, without any apparent rancor. “I knew there was nothing wrong with me; I was making conscious decisions to be rebellious.”

The new diagnoses he was given seemed at best situational. “ADD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and some type of anger issues,” he recited dryly. “I'm pretty sure if you were fourteen years old, you would be angry too, if you were locked up” for a ten-year stretch. “I had a lot of issues, but they had a problem distinguishing between
child
behavior and
criminal
behavior. In addition, I was an adolescent going through my hormones. I understand that a kid can be traumatized going through that situation. . . . But I feel that the way they were dealing with it was ineffective.”

“Ineffective” seems generous. Putting young people in isolation for any period of time, experts concur, is one of the surest means there is to
induce
psychiatric symptoms. Darren spent multiple months-long stretches in ad seg for his refusal to swallow psychotropic medications and to accept the labels that came with them. Even if he had suffered from, say, attention deficit disorder—much less the collection of diagnoses he was disciplined for rejecting—it is hard to imagine a surer way to exacerbate it than long-term isolation. That Darren would be placed in this vulnerable position because, ostensibly, he was showing signs of mental illness is beyond counterintuitive.

As with Darren, it was the quest for some sense of control that landed Cherie in “the other place.” It brought her, in fact, to the very cell she'd mentioned when speaking of the girls who had been forcibly placed in solitary after talking about suicide. Cherie was banished for seeking a different escape route: a return to an out-of-state treatment center where her life had been more bearable.

It was a reasonable goal, but Cherie was offered no positive way to
pursue it. Instead, she walked a knife's edge of rebellion behind bars, refusing to go to school and breaking as many rules as she could in the hope she would to be returned to court to be reevaluated, and perhaps moved to a “placement” more appropriate than prison. For a while, she had so many write-ups she was dropped down several phases, to use the behavioral-modification terminology Cherie had internalized, losing most of her phone privileges and gaining only more hours exiled to her cell. When she was allowed out of her room, no matter how briefly, she was required to wear a bright yellow jumpsuit, a humiliating reminder of her reduced status.

Rebellion, Cherie learned quickly, came at a price. When she refused to wear the yellow jumpsuit, she wound up “just like that girl I told you they had on suicide watch. They put my food in there and locked me in. It was summer, hot as fuck in there, and I'm in my room burning up. Can't come out. Only could have one book.”

Cherie learned a crucial lesson from the experience: no matter how miserable she might become, she would keep it to herself. She would never, no matter what, so much as hint at ending her life.

“You feel me? 'Cause they would have put me in this unit for the crazy bitches. Them bitches
was
crazy—I mean, like, really lonely. I did what I had to do to make myself get up out of there.”

The experience taught Cherie not to speak of suicide, but it also gave her reason to consider it. She swears she will kill herself if they try to send her back.

The question of what exactly constitutes torture has been a matter of some debate of late, leaving the leaders of the free world at odds. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, religious and sexual humiliation: all have been condemned and all have been defended in the context of the debate over how far to go to address the threat of terrorism. Amid this controversy, the international consensus that the use of solitary confinement is a form of torture is all the more striking.

The United Nations is not the only body to have taken up the issue. U.S. courts have also spoken, albeit less definitively. As far back as 1890, the Supreme Court teetered on the brink of declaring extended solitary confinement unconstitutional.
Writing for the majority in a case brought
by a man who had been kept in solitary confinement for a month, Justice Samuel Miller observed that “a considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” All this, the Court found, raised “serious objections” to the practice.

About a century later, the federal judge charged with oversight of the California Youth Authority (now renamed the Division of Juvenile Justice) in the wake of a sweeping class action insisted that the Division of Juvenile Justice limit the use of isolation to those situations when it was “absolutely necessary.” Despite this court order, juveniles inside California correctional facilities continued to be held in isolation, often with little respite.

A U.S. federal court has also ruled on the issue. That ruling, coming out of a Texas civil suit, limits solitary confinement to three hours for juveniles—three hours more than the UN would call humane, but the closest we have to a national standard.

This standard meant little to Curtis, who spent a year in solitary before his twelfth birthday. Or Jared. Or Cherie. Or Will. Or Darren.

Many of the young people I interviewed had personal experience with solitary confinement. Of all the aspects of incarceration they described to me, “the hole” emerged as the most difficult to withstand. Their accounts of the experience were strikingly similar: solitary is so dehumanizing, they told me in one way or another, that personality itself can begin to erode.

When I first met Eliza she was fourteen, a veteran of dozens of foster and group homes who had recently decided she'd do better on her own. A young man who worked for the youth newspaper I edited brought her to my desk one afternoon, promised I would be dazzled by her genius, and then left me to listen to a long, diffuse stream of ideas and anecdotes that bore out his claim.

At the time, Eliza was living on and around Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, bunking with college students in dorms or apartments when they'd have her, and in doorways or parks in between. She was in pain—to think
otherwise would be unforgivably sentimental—but she was also, somehow, all right. Surviving was something she'd grown used to, and she was buoyed not only by friends but by dreams.

More than anything, Eliza wanted to go to college. She knew she was smart enough and held on to a deep faith in the power of education, instilled by her adored great-grandmother. Education, she believed, was the bridge back to mainstream society, where, for all her bohemian trappings, she most hoped to find refuge. To say she faced obstacles during her teen years is an understatement: she had no money, no family support, and nowhere stable to live. But the years passed, and though she never stopped careening from one place to another, she managed not only to survive but to keep growing.

On top of her myriad strengths, she had one formally documented achievement: a GED. It was the sole benefit she'd drawn from a stint in juvenile hall, where she'd been kept for six months “awaiting placement” in yet another group home.

Throughout her years of wandering and waiting inside cells, higher education had remained her holy grail, and once she turned eighteen she honed in on college with a hungry intensity. She called me the day she enrolled in community college, exuberantly listing the courses she'd chosen: communications, music, history, and art. She was performing regularly as a rapper and spoken word artist at local clubs and had just been promoted from cashier to waitress at an upscale hamburger place. On a good night, she could bring home $100. She was renting a room in a friend's apartment while she saved up to buy a used sailboat from a friend. She could live in the cabin and sail on the bay—a home of her own and a vessel of freedom all at once. Once she caught up on her general education credits, she hoped to transfer to Juilliard, because she had heard that Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro were among the alumni.

“I'm looking for a harbor,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she meant it literally.

Eliza's high spirits lifted my own. Her confidence gave me hope not only for her but for all the other kids I knew who'd been labeled “at risk”—of delinquency, recidivism, addiction, unemployment—all those written off as least likely to thrive.

Perhaps that is why her next call came as such a blow. I hadn't heard
from Eliza for a few weeks by then, but I wasn't worried. I figured she was busy with school, caught up in the whirl of the new semester.

She wasn't.

Along with registering for classes, Eliza had submitted paperwork for financial aid. As an “independent student,” a ward of the state with no parental support, she knew she was entitled to the full package. What she didn't know was that her run-ins with the group homes had left her a memento: an open warrant. Until she cleared the warrant, there would be no financial aid, no college.

Eliza was offered two options for closing out the warrant: weeks of community service or three days in county jail. The community service would have set her enrollment back by a full semester. If she did the jail time she could still make it to the first day of school. After what she had been through, she figured, what more could they do to her?