Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (23 page)

There was, as it turned out, more they could do to her.

The jail dorm she entered was at triple capacity, and Eliza had a face that launched a thousand battles: eccentrically pretty, ethnically ambiguous, and radiating a directness often read as a challenge in institutional settings. Then there was her “attitude,” a survival skill that had calcified from a habit to a trait. She had just three days to get through and saw no need to bow down to a dormitory despot in order to ingratiate herself, much less be initiated into a hierarchy in which she had no interest.

The fight that followed was more or less inevitable. Eliza had learned to stand her ground at an early age, but she hadn't yet developed the capacity to walk away. A little girl alone is tremendously vulnerable, and she had been through things at which she'd only hinted. She had made it clear, though, that she was done with being victimized, that no one would ever lay hands on her again.

Perhaps that was what landed Eliza in the cold cell: the fury she brought to what might otherwise have been an ordinary scuffle, and the fierceness with which she struggled when guards came to break it up. So much of her daily energy went into bottling up her anger that, once she lost control, there was no turning back.

Cold cells are intended, ostensibly, for the dangerously psychotic, to keep them from hurting themselves or those around them. They also are intended to break the human will. The CIA has used them to extract
information from terrorism suspects, a practice that has been condemned as torture.
But even the CIA shows more caution than Eliza was offered. According to an ABC report on the harshest interrogation practices used in the so-called war on terror, a prisoner cannot be placed in a cold cell unless the decision has been “signed off at the highest level—by the deputy director for operations for the CIA.” Eliza, as far as she could tell, was just tossed in the cell.

A cold cell may be the size of an ordinary cell, but it generally lacks even the meager amenities of that already barren space. The chamber Eliza described had no bed, no toilet, nothing—just tiled walls and a drain in the floor. As is common practice, Eliza was forcibly stripped of her clothing before she was thrust into the cold cell. Then she was left there—naked, freezing, alone, and unheard.

The door had barely locked behind her before she started screaming. At first, she screamed in anger, as others had before her, but this girl's cries had a startling volume and intensity, a piercing tenor that the guards found intolerable. If she wanted out, she recalls being instructed, she'd have to stop that screaming.

Had she been able to hold on to her composure, as she'd been determined to do when she walked in the front gate to dispatch her three-day debt to society, Eliza very likely would have stopped screaming. But by then it was too late. It wasn't a question of defiance or willful disobedience. Inside the cold cell, Eliza was simply beyond the reach of reason.

Eliza's chest constricted and she felt like she was dying. She pounded her fists against the wall for hour after hour, long after her strength would normally have given out. And the screaming—she just could not stop screaming. Eventually, someone from jail psych showed up to sedate her. How much time had passed, Eliza could not say; in the cold cell, time quickly lost all meaning. But once she had been medicated into submission, Eliza finally managed to stop screaming. And then they let her out—just as they had promised.

The girl they carried out was not the one who'd entered. Her eyes had a distant look, her tone a blank emptiness, which were unfamiliar. When I visited her soon after, I had never seen a spirit so utterly flattened.

Later, when she could, Eliza told me more about what happened in the cold cell. “I regressed,” she explained.

Shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Eliza had requisitioned a copy of her dependency court file, a thick stack of documents dating back to her infancy. She'd known that her mother, adrift in her addiction, had abandoned her repeatedly when she was little. She had not known how early this abandonment had started, nor just how extreme it had been. According to the records, child protection workers had discovered Eliza alone in her crib—naked, filthy, famished, and trapped. Her mother had routinely left her behind when she went out to score. If a foray proved successful, she might be gone for days.

Many youth who are placed in solitary confinement are survivors of abuse and other trauma.
“Placing them in solitary confinement exacerbates already fragile conditions, sometimes with devastating results,” the Youth Law Center's Sue Burrell has written. “This is especially so for the many youth who have already experienced abuse, neglect, or previous institutionalization. Locking them away subjects them to re-traumatization.”

A staff psychiatrist at a California prison put it even more bluntly. “It's a standard psychiatric concept,” she told a researcher. “If you put people in isolation, they will go insane.”

Inside the cold cell, Eliza unraveled. Trapped, helpless, naked, and alone, stripped of control and deprived of all comfort, she'd felt time spin backward. Some deep part of her returned to early childhood, reliving the primal terror of a baby left to starve and the bottomless solitude of her earliest cage: her crib. In this regressed state, Eliza instinctively did what she had as a baby: she screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed until, finally, somebody came for her. That is one part of the experience that she recalled clearly: the sound of her own cries as they echoed off the walls.

In the years since Eliza's sojourn in the cold cell, she has struggled with addiction and stints in psychiatric hospitals. She became involved with an older man and gave birth to twin girls. The last time I saw her, we met at a half-empty shopping mall outside the welfare office. After enduring more than she was willing to say, she had recently taken the girls and moved into a domestic violence shelter. She no longer dreamed about college. All of her energy was focused on survival.

Not long before the cold cell, Eliza had called to celebrate enrolling in college. I remarked on how far she had come and asked what she thought
accounted for her tenacity, her seemingly unshakable sense of herself. “My distrust for authority saved me,” she had replied. “Whether I was in jail or not, I was always free because I never thought I belonged there. I never let anyone convince me I did.”

The last time I saw her, listlessly pushing her double stroller through the empty mall, Eliza was pondering a different sort of question:
Why did he hit me? Did I deserve it? I must have done something, for people to be able to do these things to me . . .

Curtis, who was sent to the California Youth Authority at the age of ten, was repeatedly consigned to an isolation cell for fighting—an activity he found hard to avoid as the smallest kid in the building. In all, he estimates, he spent a year in solitary—twenty-three hours a day in his cell, his main human contact the nurse who brought him medication twice a day. If Curtis banged on the walls or threatened suicide, a psychiatrist might eventually materialize. Otherwise, there was no one. “Education” came in the form of worksheets and crayons slipped through the door.

According to Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, this is common practice.
“Young people in solitary confinement . . . commonly reported being denied access to adequate education. Youth in some facilities were regularly provided with a packet of educational materials for in-cell self-study, but often their completed work went ungraded and their questions unanswered.”

“While solitary confinement is harmful to all human beings, it is especially so for children,” the Youth Law Center's Sue Burrell wrote in testimony submitted to a congressional subcommittee investigating the practice.
“For youth locked in a tiny room, a moment is an eternity, and it seems that the confinement will never end. And because youth in such confinement lack the maturity to put their current circumstances into a long term perspective, many feel hopeless and depressed. . . . The message conveyed to them is that they are worthless and beyond all help.”

Sentenced as an adult and sent to San Quentin State Prison at the age of seventeen, Jared was, like Curtis, the youngest prisoner in the building. Also like Curtis, he quickly found himself in solitary confinement.

“Imagine being locked in a bathroom for twenty-three hours,” he ventured in an effort to convey the feeling to someone who had not experienced
anything like it. “You come out for breakfast and you come out for dinner and then once a week you get to go outside for two hours on the yard.”

Jared was not placed in isolation because of any infraction. It was simply “procedure,” he explained, which required that all new arrivals be segregated in order to be “screened” before entering the general population: “Screening—like who are you, do you have AIDS, are you detoxing off some kind of drug, where's your mind at? Do you have some kind of mental health issue where they have to isolate you from the general population because you ain't right upstairs? they have to figure all that stuff out, and it's a long process.”

Jared had been screened several times already, at juvenile hall, at the Youth Authority, and presumably during the process that led to his being adjudicated as an adult. Nevertheless, screening him once again upon arrival at San Quentin took forty-five days, all of which he was required to spend in a locked cell, allowed out only for brief periods each day.

How, I asked Jared, did he hold it together?

“You figure it out,” he answered. “It's like somebody throws you in the water and either you drown or you swim.” It was left to him to devise some means to structure the empty days. “Do push-ups and sit-ups, read, meditate. You gotta structure this in your mind. If not . . . for me, I would've went crazy.”

“It split me,” Jared said of the experience. “I had to split who I am and create a part of me that was able to cope with being isolated.”

Curtis used a similar term—“fragmented”—to describe his mental state. “I felt like I was cut into pieces,” he said.

In this, Jared and Curtis had much in common with other youth trying to survive in solitary.
Researchers have found that the experience of isolation is so devastating that many find ways to dissociate from their own emotions. Like so much else learned behind bars, it's a habit of mind that may be useful—even necessary—in the moment but can have damaging long-term consequences as young people try to build lives on the outside.

“One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement,” physician Atul Gawande observed in a much-discussed piece in the
New Yorker
magazine, “is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction.”

Some
“begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world,
people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control,” psychologist Craig Haney told Gawande.

Gawande described a study of monkeys kept in isolation from birth. Once they were released into the company of other primates, they tended to “go into a state of emotional shock.” Those isolated longest never recovered. A monkey released after just three weeks refused to eat and starved itself within days. According to psychologist harry Harlow, who conducted the study, twelve months “almost obliterated the animals socially. . . . They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.”

“We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others,” Gawande elaborated. “We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”

“Children,” he added, “provide the clearest demonstration of this fact.”

Research conducted by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union confirmed this assertion.
“Many of the young people interviewed spoke in harrowing detail about struggling with . . . serious mental health problems during their time in solitary. They talked about thoughts of suicide and self-harm; visual and auditory hallucinations; feelings of depression; acute anxiety; shifting sleep patterns; nightmares and traumatic memories; and uncontrollable anger or rage.”

Alyssa spent four months in protective confinement at sixteen:
“It may sound weird but I had a friend in there that I would talk to,” she told the researchers. “She wasn't there, but it was my mind. And I would talk to her and she would respond. . . . She [would tell] positive things to me. It was me, my mind, I knew, but it was telling me positive things. . . . It was a strange experience.”

Sometimes youths turn to maiming themselves in solitary. “I'd see the blood and I'd be happy. . . . I did it with staples, not razors. When I see the blood and it makes me want to keep going. I showed the officers and they didn't do anything. . . . I wanted [the staff] to talk to me. I wanted them to understand what was going on with me,” one young person told the researchers.

Those who hoped to communicate with their keepers via self-harm were sorely disappointed. One young man who took to cutting himself
with a razor reported being further sanctioned for “making the room unsanitary.”

“That's when I started going crazy,” he reported. “I guess I was fighting two wars—myself and then the officers.”