Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (24 page)

Facilities that rely on solitary confinement justify it as necessary for individual and institutional safety. In testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing on solitary confinement, Federal Bureau of Prisons director Charles E. Samuels spelled out the official perspective: “The use of restricted housing, however limited, remains a critical management tool that helps us maintain safety, security, and effective reentry programming for the vast majority of federal inmates housed in general population.”

The argument that the use of solitary confinement improves institutional security is contradicted by the evidence. In fact, jurisdictions that have made a coordinated effort to
reduce
the use of solitary confinement have seen a marked improvement in institutional safety.

In 2007, for example, the Bexar County, Texas, Juvenile Probation Department joined a privately funded initiative aimed at building an environment where control is maintained via positive relationships rather than brute force and isolation. Over the next four years, as the institution reduced its use of solitary confinement by approximately 40 percent and mechanical restraints (e.g., handcuffs, leg irons) by half, it experienced a 30 percent reduction in injuries and more than a 60 percent reduction in suicide attempts. Other benefits included less staff turnover and improved relationships with youth.
These findings not only demolish “institutional safety” as a justification for solitary confinement; they make the notion of using it as an attempt to
prevent
suicide appear patently absurd.

Corrections administrators who do not use solitary confinement consistently make the same case against the “institutional safety” argument. Isolation is not only counterproductive, they say; when there are strong and trusting relationships between staff and youth, it is unnecessary.

Missouri—which runs some of the safest and most effective juvenile facilities in the nation while largely eschewing solitary confinement—may offer the clearest counterpoint to the argument that solitary has any value as a safety measure. Widely acclaimed for its network of small, noninstitutional placements, Missouri's juvenile justice system ranks far better on
recidivism and other measures of effectiveness than those in other states. According to a recent study, only 8 percent of the youth who passed through Missouri's system wound up in the adult system within five years of their release—a rate that is dwarfed by that of most other states.

Mark Steward, who retired as director of Missouri's juvenile justice system after seventeen years and now works with other states to replicate the Missouri Model, has said that Missouri facilities virtually never use isolation, retaining only seven isolation rooms in a system with more than seven hundred beds. Over a ten-year period, Steward has maintained, none of the state's five regions has used an isolation room more than five times, and some have not used theirs at all.

Tim Decker, Missouri's current director, told me the same thing: isolation is almost never used in his facilities. The trusting relationships youths form with staff and one another within the intimate, carefully designed therapeutic programs make that kind of extreme measure unnecessary.

Eddie Figueroa, the director of New York State's Red Hook Residential Center, shares Decker's perspective. Figueroa, who has been at Red Hook for twenty-nine years, knows each young person there by name and views the kids in his care not as bad seeds but as
“fallen angels.”

“Room confinement” (the preferred euphemism in the New York system) does not exist at Red Hook, Figueroa said. “If a kid is having a problem, I'll say, ‘Come with me,' ” a simple yet powerful invitation conveying a message that runs directly counter to banishing kids to isolation cells. Then he talks with him. Very often, he said, that is all it takes.

“We'll come out here,” he said, gesturing to the courtyard where we stood among carefully tended flower beds. “My thing is, if I can't talk to them, I'm in the wrong business.”

“Don't do nothing stupid,” Figueroa might tell a kid who is about to blow up (or already has). “Just call time-out. Go walk. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you're going to feel a whole lot better than you do now.” It is a simple message that, conveyed with the affection Figueroa radiates in all his interactions, is remarkably effective at keeping all involved safe.

Solitary confinement, in Figueroa's view, does just the opposite, by undermining any potential for trust between a young person and facility staff. “If they want to blow off some steam,” he continued, referring to
the sort of outburst that can land a kid in solitary elsewhere, “you don't have to lock them up for that. I equate [doing] that to—imagine a lion in a cage. You poke it, you make fun of it, go ‘ha, Ha, ha.' One of these days, you stick your arm out and it's going to rip your arm off and have you for lunch.”

In 2012, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held a hearing with the stated goal of
“Reassessing Solitary Confinement.” Senator Richard Durbin, the committee chair, contextualized the discussion with the dramatic assertion that “America has led the fight for human rights throughout the world.” America also, the senator noted, leads the world in the incarceration of its citizens, with “by far the highest per capita rate for prisoners in the world.”

“What do America's prisons say about our nation and its values?” Durbin asked. “What does it say when we consider how we treat the people who are in prison?”

The senator pointed to a replica of a solitary cell, which he had stepped inside for a few minutes—not long enough, he acknowledged, to allow him even to imagine “what it must be like to spend extended periods of time, hours, days, weeks, months, years in that confining space.” He quoted a man who had inhabited a similar space at a so-called supermax prison. That inmate, said the senator, “fairly described it as being like a space capsule, where one is shot into space and left in its isolation.”

“If I had one request to my colleagues on this judiciary committee,” Durbin implored, “it is to visit a prison. Do it frequently. See what it's like.”

In Durbin's plea I heard echoes of the many young people who expressed the wish that the prosecutors, judges, and legislators who share the power to send them to juvenile prisons would pay even a brief visit to those places; that they would make some effort to understand the impact of their decisions.

Durbin observed that since the “tough on crime” 1980s, the use of solitary had become much more widespread, leading to “an alarming increase in isolation for those who don't really need to be there,” especially vulnerable groups such as children.

As the senator wrapped up, however, his rhetoric deflated. Early in the hearing, he had spoken directly to the sister of a boy who killed himself in solitary. But he made no further reference to the notion of a ban on the practice—something he had, quite movingly, told the young woman might have saved her brother's life.

“That's why I've advocated for change in the Justice Department's new prison rape standards,” he intoned instead, “to help ensure that sexual assault victims are only placed in solitary when absolutely necessary.”

This profoundly limited closing recommendation leaves out the vast majority of youth subjected to solitary, whether for punishment, protection, administrative convenience, or the simple whim of a guard. It even leaves the door open to subjecting sexual assault victims to the torture of solitary confinement as long as it has been determined to be “absolutely necessary.”

Once again, the prospect of “reform” appears to elude even the reformers, vanquished before the battle has even begun. The solitary confinement of juveniles can be “reassessed” again and again—in reports, hearings, investigations, statements, and so on—but unless it is actually
curtailed
, no amount of talk or paper will make any difference to the children who endure it to this day, every day.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that placing youth in solitary confinement is not only counterproductive but tantamount to torture, the best even those political leaders most concerned about the practice can offer is a call to mitigate just slightly a practice they concede is both abusive and criminogenic. This speaks volumes about the depth of the struggle against entrenched institutional cultures and practices.

Meanwhile, the use of solitary confinement persists in juvenile prisons across the country—despite lawsuits, federal inquiries, advocacy campaigns, media exposés, hearings, and more. The persistence with which these institutions cling to the practice raises a troubling set of questions: Why
are
those who run juvenile institutions so reluctant to give up their isolation cells? if those who run our juvenile prisons perceive a practice that is considered torture under international law as essential to the function of those institutions, what does this say about their attitude toward the children in their care?

If—as the continued reliance on isolation in juvenile facilities indicates—solitary confinement is a tool our nation's juvenile prisons cannot or will not do without, then scrambling to find an alternative means of sanctioning young prisoners (or protecting them, sorting them, assessing them, etc.) may be a fool's errand. If we want to get the kids out of solitary, we need to get them out of these places altogether.

8

“HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE”

Trauma and Incarceration

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. . . . And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.

—John Steinbeck

The saddest part of a juvenile judge's job is watching the progress of a tiny victim as he or she is molded by the system into a delinquent and eventually a criminal.

—Estella May Moriarty, Circuit Court judge, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

“G
ABRIELLE
,
WHAT IS IT
?”

Her mother's voice was strained as she struggled to reach this daughter so diffident and distant, to penetrate the enforced separation of the visiting room table, and then the greater chasm of all those years of silence.

“It's like you don't care,” said the mother to the child who had been so early exiled, so traumatized that caring was a luxury dispensed with long ago.

“Like you have a death wish, or a wish just to say . . . ,” her mother struggled on. “Just talk to me,” she exhaled, hinting at defeat.

Just talk to me.
the words hung in the air. How many times—as a
lonesome child, a teen on her own, a rape survivor, hostage, gangster, gunshot victim, perpetrator, ward—had Gabrielle longed to do exactly that? how many times had she
tried
to talk, to ask for help or just to be heard, to tell her distant, drugged-out mother what had been done to her and what she had done in order to survive it, only, each time, to be silenced or ignored?

Mom, I'm here. I'm alive . . . I am your kid . . . I am right here, whether you notice me or not
. For years, this script had played inside Gabrielle's head. But now she was grown, and one strike away from going away for life. She carried four bullets inside her body, lodged too deep in her legs and hip ever to be removed. Just as unremitting were the psychic wounds—years of physical and sexual abuse in her father's home, drugs and neglect in her mother's, and the unremitting violence of life on the street.

Was she now supposed to forget all of that—the years lived in loneliness, silence, and radical self-reliance?

Drugs had come first for her mother for so many years that Gabrielle had long since stopped looking to her for help or protection. Where there might have been connection there was scar tissue instead, formed in the wake of one assault after another, woven by now into a protective emotional carapace she could no more easily shed than she could her own skin.

And now, when she'd just about shut down completely—when the damage was done and her life was on the line—her mother was speaking to her as one might a young child, asking her tenderly where did it hurt.

Mom, I'm here. I'm alive . . . I am your kid . . .

Through all the years of enforced invisibility, all the times she'd been rebuffed or ignored or coerced into silence, Gabrielle had never lost the longing to be known. Now she weighed the options—the safety of silence or the risk of revelation—and discovered she was brave.

“Do you remember trying to kill yourself in front of me?” Gabrielle began.

“Not really.”

“Do you remember why I came back from Texas?”

“Not really.”

“Do you remember me being a kid?”

“No, Gabrielle. Not really.”

“You were so high that you remember none of this,” Gabrielle persisted,
holding her mother's gaze across the table. “But I was sober, Mom. These are the things that I do remember. . . .”

Walking onto a juvenile unit is like entering a trauma ward, an emotional MASH unit where the gore is no less visceral for being interior.
While only a minority of the young people we incarcerate have committed violent crimes, most have themselves been the victims of violence: assaulted as children; raped as adolescents; shot, shot at, or stabbed on the street. The teenagers we put through the trauma of incarceration are, with a few exceptions, traumatized already, hurt children now formally consigned to what they call “a world of hurt.”