Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (25 page)

In 2010, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention released its
Survey of Youth in Residential Placement, a sweeping look at the histories of young people inside the nation's juvenile facilities. The nationally representative survey of 7,073 souls revealed that childhood trauma was so pervasive as to be nearly universal. Seventy-two percent had been directly victimized (“had something very bad or terrible happen to you”), and nearly as many had witnessed extreme violence (“seen someone severely injured or killed”).
Thirty percent had been sexually or physically abused. For a quarter, that abuse had been “frequent or injurious.” None of these categories was mutually exclusive.

Among girls, trauma is especially pervasive and is frequently described as a “pathway” into the juvenile justice system. According to the U.S. Congress,
“Most of these girls [who enter the juvenile justice system], up to 73 percent, have histories of physical and sexual violence, and their entry into the criminal and juvenile justice system is linked to their sexual and physical victimization.” One heartbreaking example comes from a study by the Oregon Social Learning Center, which found the average reported age of
“first sexual encounter” for girls in the juvenile justice system to be 6.75.

In 2012, the federal Office of the Attorney General released its
Report of the Attorney General's National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence
. The head of the task force, Robert L. Listenbee Jr., was later appointed to head the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This makes the task force's conclusions on trauma and juvenile justice all the more striking.

The vast majority of children involved in the juvenile justice system have survived exposure to violence and are living with the trauma of that experience. If we are to fulfill the goals of the juvenile justice system—to make communities and victims whole, to rehabilitate young offenders while holding them accountable, and to help children develop skills to be productive and succeed—we must rethink the way the juvenile justice system treats, assesses, and evaluates the children within it. . . .

The relationship between exposure to violence and involvement in the justice system is not a coincidence. . . . When young people experience prolonged or repeated violence, their bodies and brains adapt by becoming focused on survival. This dramatically reduces their ability to delay impulses and gratification, to a degree even beyond that of normal adolescents. Youth who are trying to protect themselves from more violence, or who do not know how to deal with violence they have already experienced, may engage in delinquent or criminal behavior as a way to gain a sense of control in their chaotic lives and to cope with the emotional turmoil and barriers to security and success that violence creates.

Research on brain development over the past two decades has shown that the areas of the prefrontal cortex responsible for cognitive processing and the ability to inhibit impulses and weigh consequences before taking action are not fully developed until people reach their mid-20s. . . . Science reveals that the developing brain, in early childhood and throughout adolescence, is very sensitive to harsh physical and environmental conditions. Traumatic violence, in particular, can delay or derail brain development, leaving even the most resilient and intelligent child or adolescent with a severely diminished capacity to inhibit strong impulses, to delay gratification, to anticipate and evaluate the consequences of risky or socially unacceptable behavior, and to tolerate disagreement or conflict with other persons.

A caveat: kids behind bars are individuals, each with his or her own unique history and character—no more or less so than anyone else. Many young people doing time were neither abused nor neglected as children,
and most—including those who have grown up amid violence—have family who love them and are heartbroken when they are locked up. Generalizations do a tremendous disservice to the thousands of families that are fighting for their children's lives and freedom every day.

Respecting the diversity of young people's experience does not, however, require ignoring the devastation many have experienced. Too many of the young people we try to hold “accountable” via isolation enter our youth prisons already overfamiliar with rejection, isolation, and profound and chronic trauma. Being tossed into a cage serves only to underscore the despair and sense of worthlessness the trauma they have lived through has often instilled.

As I listened to young people who were or had been incarcerated describe childhood worlds in which not only emotional needs but even the most basic survival needs often went unmet, unless they found a way to take care of things themselves, where the street corner supplanted the backyard and adults in authority saw them as a number or a nuisance, a tragic cycle revealed itself. The brutal bottom line, these young people showed me, is that by relying on incarceration to address an ever-widening range of youthful misdeeds and larger social ills, we are isolating children who are already alone.

Gabrielle came as close as anyone I met to being bereft from the very beginning. Violence and abuse had suffused her whole family—fifteen siblings and parents in two states—for as long as she remembered.

Her mother, a doctor, got hooked on Oxycontin too early for her daughter to know a “before.” By the time she developed a tolerance and was looking for something harder, she'd connected with a new man who was able to supply it. Cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, crack—“anything she could get her hands on, my Mom did it.” By the time it became clear that the boyfriend was abusive, Mom was in too deep to find her way out. The decades of domestic violence that followed became one more secret for the kids to carry.

If there was little respite in Gabrielle's childhood, there were fleeting moments when rescue felt possible, when hope seemed to hover for a moment like a taunt. Once, her mother nodded out at work and someone made a call to Child Protective Services. Social workers whisked the younger children into foster homes. Then they sent them back.

“Oh, we were wrong, she was just sleepy,” Gabrielle mocked, imitating the social workers who couldn't, or wouldn't, see past the middle-class trappings of her home. The house to which they returned her was “perfect on the outside”—her stepfather's vintage Cadillac gleamed at the curb, and a genuine picket fence framed the front yard—but inside was mayhem.

“If you walked in, you'd be like, ‘What the hell just happened?' they [her mother and stepfather] are in there fighting, the closet doors are broken again because they have thrown each other into them—it was terrible.”

Even through the narcotic haze, Gabrielle's mother understood the need to get her daughter out. Soon after the close call with Child Protective Services, Gabrielle found herself on a plane to Texas, bound toward the home of a stranger—her father.

Gabrielle's mother had walked out on him when she was pregnant with Gabrielle. Nine years later, Gabrielle stood in his doorway, a small stranger wearing a face he had struggled to forget. In the little girl who looked to him for rescue and protection, all he could see was everything he'd lost. For years, he had been powerless to vent his pent-up venom. Gabrielle's arrival loosed the genie from the bottle. Each time he beat his daughter, he used her mother's name.

A vessel for his violence until she grew old enough to run from it, Gabrielle would carry the force of her father's fury with her when she hit the streets, pumped as full of its explosiveness as a live grenade.

But first, when she was around eleven, the beatings tipped into sexual aggression. Gabrielle did all she could to fight off her father's incursions. If she could get her arms free, she went for his face—a mark might raise questions, and that would get him off of her. If his live-in girlfriend was at home, she'd shout so loudly that her father took to covering her face with a pillow.

The battle over Gabrielle's developing body stretched on for two years. Meanwhile, at school, her older brother, who'd come with her from Los Angeles—“the white sheep of the family,” favored by their father, who'd had a chance to bond with him before their mother left—had become a target. His skinny frame, glasses, and schoolboy demeanor acted as a clarion call to the local bullies. Gabrielle fought often in order to defend
him—or, if she got there too late, to avenge him—protecting her brother with all the fierceness and devotion no one showed on her behalf.

When a football player jammed her brother into a locker, Gabrielle “went nuts.” Years of repressed anger found a target in her brother's oppressor. But she was younger, smaller, and—despite her rage—no match for him. She stumbled home from school that day with several broken ribs.

By the next morning, she was in too much pain to rise and dress for school. That was the first time her father succeeded in raping her, pressing on her broken ribs until the pain overrode her capacity to resist. It was also the last. As soon as her father left the house, Gabrielle packed up everything worth selling and, pushing past the pain, staggered out the door.

Research on treatment for childhood trauma indicates that the most important element is the environment in which treatment is offered.
“Traumatized kids need to feel like they're in a safe and stable environment,” one researcher summarized.

It is hard to imagine anyone arguing that a juvenile prison is anything close to a “safe and stable environment.” Yet a history of abuse not only routinely leads a kid to lockup; it is sometimes even used to
justify
incarcerating the most wounded and vulnerable young defendants. A judge who can be convinced that a child has significant support from her family and community—a safe home and neighborhood to which she can return—may take that into consideration in deciding to place that child on probation rather than consigning her to a locked facility. In the more common inverse, children whose homes and communities are deemed unsafe or inadequate—vulnerable children from under-resourced neighborhoods—may be locked up explicitly because of their profound disadvantage. With nowhere else to send them—prison beds are far more available than therapeutic alternatives, not to mention programs that support struggling families—judges wind up relying on locked facilities, where abuse and further trauma regularly follow.

“Childhood victimization can have long lasting effects. One of which is higher risk of juvenile delinquency,” Robert Listenbee—now the director of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency—has said.

Will, who spent six years in California youth facilities, agrees. “Hurt people hurt people” is the way he puts it.

“I believe people are born good,” he elaborated. “You don't wake up one day [wanting to hurt people]. Usually people who end up in jail have been victims of other things. You gotta
be
hurt to hurt somebody else.”

The correlation between childhood exposure to violence and subsequent incarceration has been firmly established. Taken together, the research tells a story that tracks closely those I heard from young people across the nation. The kids we consign to our violent, abusive, degrading youth prisons—from whom we strip away human connection, enforcing their aloneness and endorsing their estrangement—are drawn from the ranks of the youngest walking wounded. Traumatized, brutalized, beat down, and abandoned, they have grown up too often with little to counter the message conveyed with such force behind bars: that they are worthless, hopeless, something less than human.

Leslie Acoca has interviewed more than 3,200 incarcerated girls and women in eighteen states. Among incarcerated girls, she and others have found, childhood abuse is “nearly universal.” In 1998, Acoca was part of a National Council on Crime and Delinquency research team that interviewed girls in the California juvenile system.
Ninety-two percent had experienced one or more forms of abuse. Nearly a third had been forced to leave home, most often between the ages of twelve and fifteen (a direct path to being
perceived
as delinquent, since homelessness itself is often treated as illegal). Forty percent had been raped or sodomized or both (starting, on average, at age thirteen), and a third had been molested or fondled (average age: five). Forty-five percent had been beaten or burned and one in four had been shot or stabbed.

This kind of trauma is highly correlated with drug use, school failure, and gang affiliation—themselves highly correlated with incarceration.

The most troubling element of Acoca's account may be what the girls reported
without
being asked.
“The maltreatment of girls within the juvenile justice system was not an intended focus of the . . . study, nor was it an articulated question with the interview protocol. Nevertheless, many girls reported experiencing emotional, physical, and sexual intimidation and/or abuses within the juvenile justice system that mirrored and exacerbated
those they had previously suffered at home and on the streets. Some of these abuses were directly observed by researchers.”

The presence of researchers did not, for example, inhibit “procedures in which a group of girls was strip-searched and their private parts visually examined in an open space where they could be, and were, casually observed by male staff members.”

“These experiences seemed to reinforce the girls' perception, born for many with their experience of sexual violation at home and on the streets, that they did not have the right or the power to protect their physical boundaries,” Acoca writes.