Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (29 page)

“Definitely, the [court] was not doing that shit,” Luis concluded. “Hell no. They treated me like a monster, and I became the monster. You can't teach someone values unless you
show
them values. The only course of action they had for me was negative reinforcement.
We are going to give you more punishment, more time
. . . . A few fuck-ups later, you go to YA [State Youth Authority].”

On the day he was first released from juvenile hall, Luis said, a year after the break-in, his probation officer taunted, “I
love
your case. You have done so much shit inside juvenile hall that if you fuck up, you are going straight to YA. And you know what's going to happen then.”

The PO's prediction was fulfilled within the month. It was, Luis remembers, his twenty-ninth day of freedom, and he was out with his brother when two police cars pulled up, flashing their lights.

“You got anything on you?” one officer asked.

Luis did: a four-inch kitchen knife, wrapped in a bandanna.

“Good-bye, dog,” Luis called out to his little brother from the back of the cruiser, unable to wave because of the handcuffs. “I'm going to YA.”

“You like fighting?” a guard asked Roland, looking him over. “Well, you're gonna love it here.”

“I'm not a bitch,” Roland responded carefully. “I gotta do what I gotta do.”

Roland had been sentenced to juvenile life—he would be locked up for seven years, until his twenty-fifth birthday. Now he was trying to make it through intake without identifying himself as either troublemaker or target. The guards whose job it was to orient him and five other new arrivals seemed glad to break it down.

They would face violence at the hands of fellow inmates, the handcuffed boys were told, and when they did there would be no recourse. All the institution had to offer was this brief induction, a CliffsNotes distillation of the law of the jungle: “If you fight one individual, he has three friends that are going to jump in, so there ain't no one-on-ones anymore. So you better make friends soon, because this one person you going to fight has two friends, these two friends each have two friends, these two
friends of two friends have two friends. So your whole time here you're going to fight. So make sure you pick a good fight, and make sure you make friends before that.”

What the fuck?
Roland thought.
These were the
guards
talking?

“This ain't like prison,” the intake officer reassured the newcomers. “There's no stabbing. Only slicing [with razor blades].”

Man I'm scared. . . . I'ma have to fight, I'ma have to fight.
Roland began to gear himself up internally, silently giving himself a critical once-over. His first thought was that he needed to bulk up. “You need to have some sort of meat in order to fight while you in jail. In order to take somebody's punches.”

On the unit, Roland wasted no time learning the ropes. The guards, he said, could unlock each cell via remote control and would entertain themselves on a slow night by clicking several locks along a hallway filled with youths who had been primed to fear one another.

“Every time the door opens, you'll jump up to make sure nobody's coming to your room,” Roland recalled. “You'll be sleeping and the door opens, somebody's running to get you. [Or] you'll be laying down and sometimes you'll hear two doors open, and you just hear fighting.
Pow pow pow
. . . . Come on, really? Are the doors going to open on accident? No. [The guards] do it because they so bored in there, they want some type of entertainment. That's what we are.”

Some of the staff, Roland added matter-of-factly, would beat the kids up themselves. “The staff, all they do is work out in the gym 'cause they in the jail setting, so they walking all big and muscular.” Sometimes, Roland alleged, two staff members would gang up on a single ward, manipulating events so that the security cameras did not tell the full story.

“Say the staff just went inside to punch me in the face. The other one, all you see in the camera is him running in.” The paperwork might say that the young target in this scenario had tried to choke the first guard, and the second had heroically come to his colleague's rescue. “Little do they know, the staff punched me and the other one jumped in.”

Other times, Roland said, assaults were more straightforward: a ward mouths off and the staff “just punch him in the face and close the door.”

Roland entered the Youth Authority in a different frame of mind than did Luis. The violence that had suffused his childhood had risen to the
surface, and what Roland could not contain he passed on to others. He had become a danger and required intervention in the name of public safety as well as his own future—a perfect candidate, theoretically, for the juvenile justice system.

The intervention Roland received within that system, however, could not have been more counterproductive. Rather than helping Roland to quell or control his anger, every aspect of his experience behind bars seemed custom-made to exacerbate it, to turn a hurt and rageful kid into a full-grown menace.

Today, Roland understands he made a choice while locked up: “Instead of . . . telling myself I'ma do good, I said, ‘I can't be a bitch.' ” But just as on the outside, young people in prison make choices from among the ones they have. The bitter lesson Roland learned behind bars—hurt or be hurt—did nothing to counter what he had learned on the street and in his violent home. Instead, it reinforced that terrible dichotomy.

“If you back down in YA, you're pretty much a target,” he explained. “If you let somebody step on you, everybody going to step on you and you going to be that welcome mat. That was crossing my mind—that was not going to happen; it's not. . . . I was like, I'm going to go in there and if somebody look at me wrong; if somebody said, ‘You're a bitch'; if somebody laughs at me, I'm gonna fight. I'ma prove to them I'm not a bitch. Sure enough I walked in, people are looking, I'm like, ‘What the fuck'—started fighting.”

The same drugs and gangs with which Roland had grown up now suffused the culture in his new environment. The same ethos—predator or prey—held sway. And the “counselors” whose job was to support his rehabilitation had much in common with his abusive father: “If you're doing something not right, they're going to pepper spray you and tackle you to the ground.”

When Roland's probation officer had told him he was a smart kid who could go to college, he started to see himself as someone with a future. Inside the Youth Authority, he got a different message. Again, he adapted to these expectations.

Young people in general rise or fall to meet adult expectations. A system that expects violence, dishonesty, and minimal potential from and for the young people under its care is likely to get just that. A system or
intervention that manages to communicate higher expectations—one that holds
aspirations
for those in its care, that wants more for them than, at best, not to recidivate—will not only get better responses from those in its custody; it is much more likely to win their respect. And
mutual respect is key to working with young people toward not just compliance but genuine transformation, to helping them meet the various demands imposed upon them but also, ultimately, to find and pursue goals of their own. To grow up, in other words.

9

THE THINGS THEY CARRY

Juvenile Reentry

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irremediable wrong.

—Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis

Breathe in, breathe out, count to ten . . .

“It's useless!” David exclaimed, shaking his head in frustration at the recollection. “I've been to three anger managements and I still got an anger problem.”

Behind bars, David had busied himself amassing vocational certificates: food handling; culinary arts; heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. He took classes on interview skills, wrote practice résumés, filled out sample job applications, and read self-help books in his spare time—did everything he could to prepare himself for life on the outside.

No one had promised David his post-prison path would be easy. But neither had anyone warned him of the truth about the stack of certificates he had worked so hard to gain—that they would have the value of Monopoly
money once employers learned he had earned them behind bars. Now, as one application after another garnered no more than a glance, David's faith in the future was rapidly deflating.

“Reentry”—returning home from a time behind bars—is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to juvenile justice policy and practice: the moment when the efficacy of incarceration itself is tested. For far too many young people—in fact, the great majority—it is also where the tires blow.

A review of multiple studies found that 70 to 80 percent of youth released from juvenile facilities are rearrested within two or three years. The long-term picture is even bleaker. In New York, for example, 89 percent of boys released from state facilities in the early 1990s went on to be arrested as adults. A south Carolina study reached similar conclusions: 82 percent of youth who were incarcerated as juveniles ended up in the adult system down the line. Most ominously, a Montreal study found that involvement in the juvenile system was the single strongest predictor of adult incarceration.
“Holding other factors constant, youth incarcerated as juveniles were 38 times as likely as youth with equivalent backgrounds and offending histories to be sanctioned for crimes they committed as adults.”

That most of those who are locked up as teenagers return to prison as juveniles, adults, or both amounts to something greater than a failure of reentry planning. It reflects the failure of the entire enterprise. If juvenile incarceration sends the great majority of those affected—many of whom first enter the system on minor charges—into a gauntlet of escalating sanctions, it is failing at its central mission: to enhance the safety of the free and improve the prospects of those whose freedom has been taken.

Each year,
roughly one hundred thousand young people under age eighteen are released from secure juvenile facilities. According to the National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition, many
“are placed back into neighborhoods with few youth supportive programs, high crime rates, poverty, and poor performing schools. Public safety is compromised when youth leaving out-of-home placement are not afforded necessary planning and supportive services upon reentering their communities, increasing the likelihood of recidivism.”

More services are certainly needed, but reentry plans and programs, even if available, rarely get to the root of the problem. Young people returning from juvenile facilities face a daunting array of challenges, both external and internal, from limited employment prospects and curtailed education to post-traumatic stress and an institutional mind-set that may have helped them get through prison but works against them on the outside. In this context, the fact that the majority do
not
manage to stay free—that being locked up as a juvenile, no matter how minor the initiating offense, so often leads to a cycle of escalating recidivism and re-incarceration—is hardly surprising. Given the obstacles juvenile incarceration places in young people's paths, the greater surprise is that
any
manage to stay free.

“It's like being naked in a snowstorm,” Cherie said of her return to the “free world.” Seven years out of a juvenile facility, she had only just managed to get her record sealed and obtain her first job, working at McDonald's for minimum wage. In Washington, D.C., David was facing that same blizzard.

David was seventeen when he was convicted of armed robbery. Now he was twenty-two. He had done his time, learned his lesson, and was ready to begin anew. That was all he wanted now—an honest life, a decent living—he said with an earnestness that bordered on desperation. Wasn't that the point of those years behind bars—to teach him exactly this lesson, instill these very goals? But now, in a cruel twist, he was learning that
because
of his time locked up and the stigma that came with it, the goals he had so successfully internalized were out of his reach.

“That's where most of my anger comes from,” David said. “Everywhere I apply, it's like, ‘Your background, your background.' That's the only thing I hear back from the jobs. ‘You meet the qualifications, but your background check . . .' ”

David has good reason to worry about his job prospects. A number of studies document the negative impact that juvenile incarceration has on future employment—not only immediately post-release, but well into adulthood. The National Bureau of Economic Research has found that being locked up as a juvenile
reduced total time spent working over the following decade by 25 to 30 percent.
Even fifteen years down the line, those who had been incarcerated as teens worked significantly less than those who had not. Further research has found that a criminal record cuts
in half the chance that an applicant will get a return call, much less a job offer.
If the applicant is black, the negative effect of a criminal conviction is even more extreme. In D.C., where David, who is black, was trying to find work, the
Washington Post
has reported that
nearly half of the District's former prisoners are unemployed.