Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (26 page)

Girls reported treatment that bore a striking resemblance to the degradations they had already experienced. Staff called them “hood rat,” “slut,” and “little hooker” and threatened physical violence at the first sign of noncompliance.
“Once girls have crossed the threshold into the juvenile justice system, they become vulnerable to multiple additional violations, beginning at the moment of their arrest and continuing through detention,” Acoca writes. “The abuses that a majority of girl offenders have experienced in their homes, in their schools, or on the streets are often mirrored and compounded by injuries they later receive within the juvenile justice system.”

The trauma girls experience inside locked facilities, in other words, exacerbates the very wounds that propelled their entry—as destructive a cycle as one can imagine.

After Gabrielle fled her father's house, a friend's mother helped her purchase a plane ticket back to California—the only destination she could think to name. She tried several times to tell her mom what had happened in Texas, but her mother would not hear her. “It just made her get higher. She got higher, and she got higher, and she got a little bit higher.”

Less than a week after she returned from Texas, Gabrielle left her mother's house for good, this time with no destination in mind. Because she was raised under the ethos
What happens in the house stays in the house
, it did not cross her mind to call Child Protective services. She was too young to work a legal job, though, or to apply for public support. That left selling dope.

Gabrielle was good at it right from the start. She paid a drug client to sign the lease on an apartment, invited a friend to move in to keep her
company, and soon found herself the doyenne of “one great big party house.”

“I was out on my own, in my own little world,” she recalled, “and I did everything I felt was good for me.”

Violence, for example, felt good for her—so far, it was the only thing that had kept her close to safe. “I was probably the most violent girl out there,” she said, sounding neither proud nor ashamed of the years she spent gangbanging.

Chronic violence of the sort that Gabrielle grew up with can stymie children's development in myriad ways. Uncertain when violence will take the life of someone close to them (by young adulthood, Gabrielle had lost nine of eleven brothers), they may protect themselves by avoiding close connections. Many become hypervigilant, alert to threats both real and perceived. With their guard always up in anticipation of the next attack, their relationships fray or disintegrate entirely, leaving young survivors, as Gabrielle described it, “In [their] own little world”—more alone and, paradoxically, more vulnerable than ever.

Gang affiliations may come to seem the only safe allegiance. The strength in numbers they provide buffers traumatized youth from feelings of powerlessness and helps them feel less vulnerable to further victimization. But gangs offer this sense of safety and connection at a price, pushing members into a cycle of escalating violence and eventual incarceration.

“It's what I knew,” Gabrielle said of her own trajectory. “From in my mom's house to out of my mom's house . . . Wherever I was, it was violent. Going back and forth to Texas and L.A., here and there, everything was violent. So I thought it was normal to be that way.”

A December 2012 Department of Justice report suggested that children exposed to violence may turn to violence themselves as
“a source of power, prestige, security or even belongingness.” For those like Gabrielle who grow up knowing nothing else, violence can become its own sort of language, a means of being heard when words and tears don't matter. If Gabrielle became, as she put it, “extremely extreme,” perhaps she was shouting particularly loudly.

Children raised amid physical violence and psychological trauma frequently spin into a self-destructive cycle that catches adult attention only when it tips into delinquency. Even then, that attention is limited to labels
and sanctions: “bad,” “delinquent,” “troublemaker,” or the more clinical “lacking character and positive motivation.”

As a result, few adults get past asking, “What is wrong with you?” and ask the question that trauma researchers have identified as essential to healing:
“What happened to you?”

Young people rarely miss the fact that their own offenses draw a sort of attention that offenses against them do not. As a training document aimed at juvenile court judges instructs,

victimization, particularly victimization that goes unaddressed, is a violation of our social contract with youth and can create a deep disregard both for adults in general and the rules that adults have set. Distrust and disregard for adults, rules, and laws place youth at a much greater risk for delinquency and other inappropriate behaviors. . . . System professionals would benefit from recognizing that imposing only negative or punitive consequences will likely do little to change the youth's patterns of aggression, rule breaking, and risky behaviors because such a response does not address the impact of traumatic stress on the child.

Had there been any room for “What happened to you?” in Gabrielle's trajectory, in other words—much less had the adults who committed crimes
against
her ever been held accountable—her life might have followed a very different course. Both Gabrielle and those she would go on to harm or to frighten might have been saved unnecessary grief.

Those who work in law enforcement are not blind to the trauma their young charges have experienced. Those most sensitive to the connection between trauma and delinquency may find themselves faced with a variant of what new York City probation commissioner Vincent Schiraldi called cognitive dissonance. Their job is to hold young people “accountable” and foster better “choices,” with little room to take into account the larger context: that young people who wind up arrested and incarcerated have often grown up in environments so barren, so devoid of opportunity, that those “better choices” are out of their reach.

Jason Druxman is supervising probation officer of San Diego County's Youthful Offender and Community Transition Units. As California
empties out its state juvenile prisons, he is working hard to implement a treatment-based model at the local level while struggling to keep up with the influx of young people who were, just a few years earlier, the responsibility of the state.

Square jawed and clean-cut, with a military bearing, Druxman looks like a younger, taller tom Cruise. He wants very much to believe that every kid is “reachable,” but experience, he has found, sometimes tests that faith.

“I go to the homes,” he began, “and I can tell you, what I see is so depressing.” Druxman described a house where three siblings, all on probation, were recently injured in a gang shooting. Their mother had just died and their father was newly paroled.

“Realistically, how do you expect a youth to progress in that type of situation?” he asked heatedly. “Most of these homes we go into . . . They don't have a bulb in their lights! How is the youth supposed to even study? Or sleep, when there are cockroaches? I don't know how any of these youth are going to succeed.”

“Prostitution is a huge problem for our girls,” he told me later as we toured the facility, quietly pointing to Crystal, the delicate young woman in sweats and jail slippers who dreamed of becoming a ballerina. Crystal had told me that she no longer cried: her twenty-six-year-old pimp had warned her that crying was evidence of weakness, so she had learned to hold back tears when she was beaten or raped. “Oh well, okay, it happened, forget about it,” she told herself each time. “Keep going. Keep moving forward.”

I asked Druxman how a traumatized girl like Crystal could be arrested for an act to which, under the law, she was too young to consent. Prostitution, he clarified, was not usually the “immediate trigger” for a girl's arrest. More often she might be arrested on a vagrancy or drug charge. “But we know that they are being abused,” he reiterated. “A lot of times they get out and they get sucked right back into that environment, and they are being abused by an individual. So that is a big educational point that we are trying to focus on with our girls.”

I asked him to clarify this one for me also: how does one “educate” girls out of being abused when their abusers are so rarely called to account? Were the girls being held responsible even for their own victimization?

“Kids are victims, essentially,” he ventured. “But the fact is that they are making choices, and unfortunately, the safety of the community has to come first.”

How, I wondered, did this heartsick ballerina pose a threat to community safety? But I didn't have the heart to keep badgering Druxman, whose compassion for the kids was so unmistakable, even if it sometimes collided with the mandates of his job.

Gabrielle did not have the good fortune to run into a Jason Druxman. Despite regular arrests, no one ever inquired into her home life, much less took the time to “educate” her on the perils of being abused. The only ones asking any questions were the cops, and “What happened to you?” was not on their agenda. Instead, Gabrielle grew accustomed to the handcuffs and to biding her time in juvenile hall until a woman she paid to pose as her mother arrived to bail her out.

“Nobody cared at that moment. ‘Just another violent individual.' That's how it was. . . .”

Roland's earliest memories of his Southern California childhood include going to the park, shopping with his parents, and trying to shield his mother from his father's fists.

“For the average immigrant family, we were living [the high] life,” he said—a life built on his father's earnings as a drug dealer. “We had every game console you could think of, everything was nice, but it's not all about that, because deep inside, we were hurting. Even till this day, I hurt, because of my path.”

Roland was six or seven when he began to notice how anxious his mother would grow as the sun began to set. Nightfall meant his father could come home at any moment. “Once I was old enough to realize he was hitting her, it was like, ‘Man, what do I do?' It was every time he came home drunk—almost daily. Maybe two days out of the week he was sober.”

By the time he was eight or nine, his two older brothers had moved out of the house, and Roland had become his mother's main protector. “I am a child,” Roland remembers. “I want to play, I want to have fun. I want to go out and play soccer, play baseball, football.” But whenever he made a move for the door, his mother begged him to stay.

I am a child
. Roland repeated that phrase often, always in the present tense, as he described the travails of his early childhood. Sometimes he seemed to be reminding himself as well as his listener of something those around him did not seem to recognize, mourning the childhood he was not allowed to have.

“She would cry, I would sit there—bored, mad, but I knew it was my duty to sit there.”

Sooner or later, Roland's father would come home. “He'd be hitting on my mom, grabbing her by the hair, tossing her, throwing stuff at her, and I would always try to jump in—knowing I wasn't going to do anything. I couldn't affect him. I was a child. He was a 220-pound guy. I would run in, he would hit on me, and I would fall to the ground and start crying. Bleeding. I knew it was always going to happen, but I kept trying and trying and trying. He would always just dust me off. . . . I would fall to the ground. My mom was crying. Sometimes I'd be crying and she'd end up falling next to me 'cause my dad's beating her up in front of me.”

Like Gabrielle, Roland recalls a few pivotal moments when it seemed as if an adult might recognize his suffering and offer him some respite. More than once, when Roland came to school with bruises and scratches, a teacher pulled him aside and made a phone call home. But his terrified mother was adept enough at lying—“He's an aggressive kid,” she'd tell the teacher, and he liked to roughhouse or fight with his sisters—that no one looked deeper than that initial call.

As Roland got older, he realized that the time for tossing a football in the street had passed him by. His cousins were dealing openly right down the block, and drugs, guns, and violence suffused his community.

When Roland was eight, a drug-trade colleague of his father's—“a big guy, tattoos everywhere”—tried to assault him sexually. Roland's screams were loud enough to scare the man off, but his already acute sense of looming danger was heightened even further. Like everything else, Roland kept the incident to himself:
Don't ask, don't tell
was the family ethos.

At school, he would hang back and watch the other children playing. “I would look at them and wonder if they went through the same thing. That kid right there with a smile on his face—I wondered if his dad comes home drunk all the time. I wondered if his dad beats him up, you know?”

“Violence at home, drugs, alcohol, verbal abuse, that incident [of sexual
assault]—it all just bottled up inside as a child,” said Roland. “How do you let that out? What's your outlet? You don't have an outlet.”

“I was fresh, I had good clothes, good shoes, but inside I was bumming it. I had nothing,” Roland recalled. “So that made me feel like an outcast. It made me feel different, like I didn't belong. And that feeling was traumatizing. I was traumatized, and emotions were all bottled up inside. Emotions of anger and anguish. Feeling—I don't know, you can't explain it—it was eating me up inside, but eventually the monster I have inside, the demon, is going to explode.”