Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (32 page)

There was a pause while Jared seemed to think this through. “Maybe that's part of the prison still stuck inside.”

“There's stuff that gets instilled in you from going to places like [prison], and it never leaves,” he continued pensively. “There's no way to unlearn it. It's like eating with a fork. You ain't going to unlearn that. It just ain't going to happen.”

The tension is strongest when he's out with his girlfriend. His love for
her, he understands, is his Achilles' heel. “The wolf recognizes the wolf,” he began, contemplating the protectiveness he feels when he is with her—an emotion strong enough to threaten his sense of control. “I'm not trying to be the wolf. I don't want to be a wolf. But I can definitely recognize the wolf. I don't want to be that. God forbid one of these knuckleheads says something to her . . .”

“I'm a human being,” he added abruptly, as if that had somehow been called into question. “I want the same things that you want. Basic human needs. I want love, you know? I want to be able to go to the park and hold hands with my girlfriend, or watch my kids play. I want to go to the movie theater. I want to feed my family.”

“Yeah, that's another one,” he said with increasing heat. “Poverty and crime—they're directly connected, which is basically connected to education. You don't have education, you're not getting a good paying job, unless somehow you get lucky.”

In a few short sentences, Jared had summarized the vicious cycle that overtakes the youngest prisoners—those whose lives are quite literally arrested before they have truly begun. Inside juvenile lockups, many young people come to see—are
encouraged
to see—education as a holy grail, the only way there is to beat the revolving door. For those few who can find the means to pursue it—especially those who make it into and through college—education can in fact fulfill this promise. A door to employment and a buffer against recidivism, a diploma also functions as an antidote to stigma, debunking the notion that its holder will never be more than an “ex-con.” It is also extraordinarily difficult to obtain, given the myriad barriers that young returnees face.

“Ten years ago today, I got out of the California Youth Authority battered and bruised by such an ignorant system,” Will recently posted online, alongside cap-and-gown photos from his community college graduation in which he is clearly exultant. “Today, I just got accepted to UC Berkeley. A cold cell didn't help me change. Education did! BOOKS NOT BARS! I AM RIDING HIGH RIGHT NOW AND LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT!!!”

Few of his cohorts will experience this crucial rite of passage. Even as research confirms that education is key to staving off recidivism, so does it document the myriad ways in which juvenile incarceration
curtails
education—not just putting it on hold but often ending it entirely.
Fewer than 15 percent of kids who get locked up in the ninth grade will make it through high school, and many will never return to the classroom at all.
Completing the vicious cycle, an individual without a high school degree is three and a half times more likely to be arrested than is a high school graduate.

Researchers who have investigated why it is so difficult to resume an education that has been interrupted by incarceration point to delays in records transfers, lack of specialized services, inadequate planning, and poor coordination among agencies. Then there is the fact that some juvenile offenses are grounds for expulsion. Justice for Families—an organization comprised of parents and other relatives of young people who have been involved with the justice system—interviewed one thousand family members about their experiences.
Sixty-nine percent reported that they faced obstacles when they tried to get their children back into school after release, despite the fact that truancy is often a probation violation as well as a new offense—one of the many catch-22s young returnees face.

I am a human being
, Jared had said.
I want the same things that you want
.

Work, love, play, family: these are the bricks from which a life is built. For Jared and so many other young people, being locked up as teenagers had pushed these goals out of reach, again in a vicious cycle that lasted long after they walked out the gates: an interrupted education curtails employment prospects, making it hard to support—and so to form—a family.

That juvenile incarceration was, in the moment, profoundly dehumanizing was something my conversations with young people had made painfully clear. What I had not quite understood was how a youthful incarceration might shape a life indefinitely; that despite the rhetoric of rehabilitation, clean slates, and new beginnings, what is stripped away behind prison walls is so very hard to retrieve.

PART II

Burning Down the House

10

A NEW WAVE OF REFORM

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

—Paul Romer, professor of economics, Stern School of Business, New York University

T
HE STORY OF JUVENILE
justice is often told in terms of pendulum swings between the opposing goals of rehabilitation and punishment. These swings, however regular, have been limited in range. Whether we tell ourselves that what goes on behind the gates of the juvenile prison is intended to punish or to heal, the legitimacy of placing children in locked facilities is not fundamentally challenged.

Still, after decades during which the growth of the nation's youth prisons seemed inexorable, we find ourselves today in the midst of a shift of a magnitude that would have seemed inconceivable even a decade ago. Across the country, the number of juveniles who are incarcerated is plummeting. But whether the current era will be remembered simply as a particularly vigorous swing of a familiar pendulum or heralded as a moment of genuine transformation remains to be seen.

Over the course of a single decade, the number of juveniles confined in local and state facilities in the United states dropped 39 percent, from a high of 108,802 in 2000 to 66,332 in 2010—a low not seen since 1985. So far, this trend shows no sign of slowing. In fact,
it has picked up speed in recent years.
Fewer juvenile prisoners means fewer juvenile prisons: between 2007 and 2011, eighteen states closed more than fifty facilities in all.

States that were notorious for the fervor with which they locked up their
young—California, Louisiana, New York, Illinois, Texas, and others—have shifted course, some radically. In some of the nation's largest and most prison-happy states, the reductions in juvenile incarceration rates have been particularly dramatic. California, for instance, cut the daily population in state-run juvenile facilities from
about 10,000 in 1996 to
922 in June 2012—a drop of more than 90 percent. Likewise, in the years since the Texas Youth Commission was rocked by a sexual abuse scandal in the mid-1990s, Texas has closed nine state-run youth corrections facilities. The number of young people in Texas state juvenile institutions went from
4,700 in fiscal year 2006 to
1,500 in 2012.

This good news is tempered by the fact that conditions in many state facilities remain inhumane and intolerable. Beyond this central wrong lies an array of other concerns. In California, which has achieved its population cuts largely by transferring responsibility for young lawbreakers from the state to the counties, an emerging issue is “justice by geography.” Some counties are responding to the new mandate to keep kids near home with imagination and courage, asking multiple local agencies to collaborate to devise effective community-based responses. Other counties, however, are spending state funds now earmarked for local juvenile justice efforts to build new lockups or expand those that exist. While it is too soon to say with any certainty how the big picture will shake out, recent research indicates that despite the massive cuts at the state level, when local placements are accounted for, California still incarcerates more youth than any other state in the nation.
The state's juvenile incarceration rate (the percentage of the youth population that is locked up) remains among the highest in the nation.

A related concern is whether conditions in local facilities—existing or new—will be significantly better than those in the state lockups they are replacing.
A recent class action lawsuit against California's Contra Costa County does not auger well on this front. The suit alleges that juveniles with mental health problems are held in “unconscionable conditions” in that county's juvenile hall—most egregiously, that mentally ill youth are kept in solitary confinement without regard to their condition, sometimes for months.

According to Laura Faer of Public Counsel, one of several groups that collaborated on the suit, overall conditions at the juvenile hall resemble
those in maximum-security prisons—exactly the situation the shift to the counties was intended to remedy. Wards
“are routinely locked for days and weeks at a time in cells that have barely enough room for a bed and only a narrow window the size of a hand,” Faer told a reporter.

The suit cites California law, which declares that juvenile halls exist for the purpose of rehabilitation and “shall not be deemed to be, nor treated as, a penal institution [but as] a safe and supportive homelike environment.”

One problem that has
not
come up as states close large congregate facilities is a rise in juvenile crime.
Juvenile crime rates have been declining across the board, and violent crime fell 27 percent among juveniles nationwide between 1997 and 2007. Try as they might to claim credit for this trend, the tough-on-tots crowd can't make their case. Juvenile crime rates have dropped across the country, but the drop has been steepest in those states that have
reduced
their reliance on juvenile incarceration. The
throw-the-book-at-'em regions have seen more modest declines.

As they shut down large institutions, states including Texas and California have passed new laws that limit state-level confinement to those who have committed serious offenses (felonies in Texas and serious and violent felonies in California). New York is moving in a similar direction with the 2012 Close to Home Act, which calls for New York City to send only the most serious juvenile offenders into state custody. The city will keep the rest under local jurisdiction, relying on contracts with community agencies. Even before Close to home went into effect, New York had closed eighteen of its thirty-two state facilities.

This shift has opened the door to questions we have, until recently, barely dared consider. Do we actually
need
the juvenile prison—at least in the large-scale, state-run form we have tolerated for so long? or have its costs, both financial and human, finally become so exorbitant, and the harm it wreaks so evident, that we might just find we can get by without it?

For the moment, these questions remain unanswered. But the changes that have taken place over the last decade are significant enough to warrant asking them not just theoretically but in the political forum.

The shift of the last decade also cries out for some kind of explanation. The flaws in the institution of the juvenile prison are certainly not breaking news. In fact, there is evidence that these places have been hurting kids since they first opened their doors under the House of Refuge banner in
the 1800s. This long-standing evidence of harm to children, however, has not previously inhibited us from dispatching children to state institutions. Even when the ideological pendulum swung toward rehabilitation, it did not lead to the kind of large-scale closure of facilities we are seeing today.

The rationale for closing these costly, inhumane failures has been laid out in the preceding pages and made by countless scholars and survivors again and again. The question before us is not so much “Why?” as it is “Why
now
?”

If one were to autopsy the fifty-plus juvenile prisons that have closed in recent years, one would find not a single cause of death but, most often, a combination of contributing factors. When one draws the lens back to encompass those states that have undergone the most dramatic changes, a formula, or recipe, begins to emerge.

First there is scandal: misuse and maltreatment of children that goes beyond the ordinary, and some means of ensuring that these events reach the public eye.

In Florida, there were bodies: a secret graveyard behind one of the state's oldest facilities, and stories of boys beaten until bits of their flesh became stuck to the walls. In Pennsylvania, there was bribery: judges caught lining their pockets with kickbacks in return for sending children to for-profit prisons for negligible offenses. In Texas, revelations of widespread sexual abuse blew up into a scandal that engulfed much of the system.
In Arkansas, an exposé in the
Democrat-Gazette
revealed that young prisoners were “routinely degraded; verbally, physically and sexually abused; hogtied; forced to sleep outside in freezing weather,” and more.

The prison's own panopticon began to turn against it, as security cameras captured footage of guards brutalizing the children in their care—breaking ribs with their boots as they stomped the bodies of their unresisting charges, or setting dogs upon terrified boys who had thrown themselves to the floor in an effort to protect their faces from the animals' teeth. As images such as these turned up on the evening news, the message was increasingly difficult to miss: parens patriae was not, after all, a very good parent. In fact, all too often, it was very bad indeed.

The lawsuits that followed were as inevitable as they were unwinnable for the state defendants. There were dozens of them, all across the country, alleging violations of civil rights in multiple facilities or entire state
systems. Armed with evidence of sickening abuses and inhumane conditions, the plaintiffs regularly prevailed. These legal victories brought not only more bad press but sweeping consent decrees that threatened the status of juvenile prisons as self-governing fiefdoms, above the laws and conventions by which others were bound.