Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (35 page)

Barry Krisberg visited Tryon as a consultant to the state and was so appalled, he recalled, that he told his hosts, “It's a good thing I'm working for you guys, because if I was working for the Department of Justice, I'd be reading you your rights.”

Their reaction was telling. “They asked me to put it in writing,” Krisberg recalls. “They were completely open and helpful.”

Even as they struggled to improve conditions at places like Tryon, Carrión and her team were continuing the efforts that Mattingly and others had started to reduce the demand for space in locked facilities by creating alternatives in the community. Deputy Commissioner Felipe Franco, who heads up the office of Children and Family Services Division of Juvenile Justice and Opportunities for Youth, believes this effort has put New York in a particularly strong position when it comes to shutting down facilities. “Because there was enough investment in the front end in preventative services, [the commissioner] was actually closing empty beds, not just transferring kids from the custody of the state to the community,” Franco pointed out. “The kids were
already
in the community . . . [so] she had the luxury to close the facilities.”

This planning, along with Tryon's persistent “failure to change,” created the criteria for closing it, Carríon said. That is exactly what she did: closed down Tryon and, over time, seventeen other state facilities. When unions resisted, citing state law that called for a year's notice, she cleared the kids out anyway and staffed an empty building until she could close the doors for good.

“I think it's difficult for people to grasp how heroic the closure of those facilities really is,” said New York probation chief Vincent Schiraldi. “The status quo has its own power in a way that is very difficult to understand until you really prick it and make it bleed.”

When Carrión arrived, the state was running a system that, in her words, was “grounded in punishment and compliance, and relied on restraint and the use of force to impose order.” More than 60 percent of youth from New York who were in custody were being held for misdemeanor-level offenses (85 percent when it came to the girls). The overwhelming majority of those in institutions were young people of color, an injustice to which Carrión reacts viscerally.
“It literally broke my heart to go in and look at these kids that are all black and brown,” she told a reporter of visiting her own facilities. “And I'm thinking, these could be my kids. They look like my son. They look like my nephew. There are all these black and brown faces, and I can't stand it.”

At the symposium, she told those assembled that “it became evident that too many young people were being placed in state juvenile institutions because of mental health needs or other social service needs, not because
these young people pose a significant threat to public safety.” Despite this, she continued somewhat heatedly, no one “thinks twice about depriving the young person of their liberty. Not a second thought.”

“These young people clearly could be served in their community. The harm that we were inflicting on already troubled youth was evident in the poor outcomes and the high recidivism rates that characterize the system.”

New York had been spending “$272,000 a year [per youth] to operate a failed system,” Carríon emphasized. “We know that incarcerating young persons is not in their best interest.”

These are fighting words in the upstate regions where that $272,000 per kid was keeping local economies afloat. But Carrión is very clear about whom she considers her constituency.
“I am not running the Economic Development Agency for upstate New York,” she has been quoted as saying. “I will no longer export black and brown kids to finance the upstate economy.”

As an administrator, Carrión is not only exceptionally responsive to critics of her locked institutions, she is foremost among them. Rather than moving cautiously, she has proven herself a master of the crisis opportunity. As one critique after another poured in, Carrión found ways to leverage even the most scathing to glean resources for the youth in her care.

Carrión had been commissioner for less than two years when the Department of Justice issued its report on four state institutions plagued by allegations of excessive use of force. That investigation found that staff
“routinely used uncontrolled, unsafe applications of force” that resulted in “an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures.” The victims of these assaults were children and young teenagers (in New York, only those aged seven to fifteen can be found delinquent; those sixteen and older are treated as adults), the majority of whom were not hardened criminals but simple misdemeanants. In some cases it had taken nothing more than a child's mocking laughter or defiant silence to provoke a beating, investigators found.

The Department of Justice praised Carrión's efforts to rein in these abuses, but overall, she summarized,
“they found that our system practices, grounded in a punitive correctional model, violated the constitutional rights of children in our care.”

The thirty-two-page report (three years after its publication, Carrión remembered the exact length of the document) was
“devastating. At least it was for me.”

Nevertheless, she said, recovering her normally brisk tone, “this commissioner did not oppose the investigation by the Department of Justice. . . . We settled right away.”

Instead of seeing the report as an obstacle, Carrión saw an opportunity to “focus public attention on the failures of the system” and “leverage needed resources to reinvest in the system. There was no other way I was going to get resources to do half of the things that needed to be done.”

Rather than trying to brush the report under the rug or minimize its findings, Carrión waved it like a battle flag.
She was carrying that flag when she met, at her request, with senior members of the judiciary—men and women with the power to send youth to the very facilities the report had savaged. Her facilities.

“Everything in that report is true,” she told the judges. “I don't know how often you visit these facilities, but when you go, what you see is really not what's happening there. There are no services.”

Next, she went after any misconceptions the judges might have held about the kids. Her “secure facilities,” she told them—those reserved for the most serious offenders—did house young people who posed a real danger. But the remaining facilities—nonsecure or limited secure, in New York State terminology—did not. Instead, kids were being held there “because they had serious mental health needs. They had educational deficits. Every other system had failed them and we were the system of last resort. [But] they weren't causing a significant risk to public safety.”

If they did not pose a threat, she asked the judges, why are you sending them to me?

For their own good, the judges responded. They were remanding youth into state custody because it was the only way those youth could receive mental health services.

“There are none in my facilities,” Carrión informed the judges.

“At that point,” she recalled, “I didn't even have a psychiatrist. There was
no
[staff] psychiatrist for the system. I had contract psychiatrists, and very few of those, and [the judges] didn't know. They absolutely didn't know. This was all new information.”

Despite her successes in reforming New York's system, Carrión's outrage has not dimmed with experience. “These places are never going to be good,” she said, echoing Jerome Miller's assessment of large state lockups decades earlier. “It doesn't matter what we do.”

For the very small number of kids who genuinely posed a threat, Carrión elaborated, everything possible should be done to make the places where they were confined both humane and therapeutic. Beyond that, she insisted, “Young people should never be tied to these places for services. That's inappropriate. You don't deprive your people, your children, of their liberty in order to get services. In order to go to school, right? I make that argument and it's incredible to hear even some judges who really feel like it's appropriate to send kids to training schools in order to get them into sports. It's just unbelievable.”

Carrión's meeting with the judges did have an impact. After the meeting, the deputy chief judge issued a memo quoting her almost verbatim. The memo, according to Carrión, underscored that state facilities must be used only as a last resort, reserved for those who posed a genuine risk to public safety.

“After that meeting, the judges almost had to stop sending kids to me,” Carrión recalled. “They just stopped. . . . It was very important to cultivate that [relationship], because they control the front door.”

When Carrión met further resistance to the culture change she envisioned, she reached out to the
New York Times
and other media to ensure that they were well informed about “the failures of the system, the punitive culture, the abuse, the lack of effective services and supports, the high recidivism rates, the exorbitant cost to the taxpayers.”

State and national media were quick to take the bait, running stories and editorials highlighting the failures of the New York system, especially its overreliance on institutional placement.

“People said, ‘What?' ” Carrión recalls, with just the faintest hint of mischief, of the public outcry that followed. “ ‘You can't continue to do that!' ”

Public outrage may have helped advance her goals, but it did not, Carrión acknowledged, “make me popular with my staff. I was not welcomed in any facility. But I still went.”

Somewhere along the line, Carrión found time to read Jerome Miller's
book. “It's incredible what the similarities were,” she said, pointing to “the craziness that goes on when we try and do the right thing.”

Felipe Franco was more specific. “The commissioner has gone through everything Miller said in the book,” Franco told me. “When people were trying to sabotage our efforts, they allowed [youth] to escape. Restraints went up. Everything that she went through, she had already read about.”

“She might not have taken the job if she had read the book” sooner, he added drolly.

Actually, she probably would have—Carrión does not appear one to duck a challenge—but Franco's quip points to something else that Miller and Carrión have in common: a willingness to lose their jobs rather than compromise their values.

“It requires a tremendous sense of urgency,” Carrión conceded. “You really, really have to care about young people and be committed that this can't continue one day longer. You have to
feel
it. In every young person in my facility, I see my son or daughter; I really do. There can only be one standard. The standard we have for our own children is the standard that we need to have for young people that we institutionalize.”

Vincent Schiraldi appears to have heeded Miller's advice as well. When he started out in D.C., he gave each member of his executive team a copy of
Last One Over the Wall
. Then he went about closing the District's scandal-ridden youth prison, replacing it with a sparkling, smaller, model facility complete with its own charter school and a large sculpture in the lobby made from melted guns. He also moved kids to the community at a rapid clip, despite virulent opposition from the
Washington Post
, among others.

“I came in with an opinion,” Schiraldi conceded, in a bit of an understatement. “I thought it was important to let folks know it was a new day.”

The day before I met with Carrión, I toured the Brooklyn for Brooklyn Initiative, one of her proudest achievements. By building a network of neighborhood programs, some residential and others that served kids in their homes, the initiative aimed to keep city kids in their homes and communities rather than shipping them upstate.

I told the commissioner what one young man had said to me when I'd asked him about the pros and cons of life in the airy Brooklyn brownstone where, for the moment, he was mandated to stay.

The best thing about being there, he'd said, was he had learned to control his anger.

The worst was so obvious it barely bore mentioning, or so his tone implied: “I'm not with my family.”

Carrión surprised me once again with her willingness not only to accept criticism, but to raise the stakes.

“I think what no one understands in my system,” she said, “is the deprivation of liberty at any level is, for a kid, correctional. Right?”

When it comes to adults, she observed, “We make a big thing, as we should, about depriving people of their liberty. We don't think about that when it comes to kids. We really don't see it as a deprivation of their liberty.”

The problem with this perspective is that it allows placement in a locked facility to become a default response rather than a last resort. “One way or another,” Carrión came to understand, the intertwined systems she supervised (child welfare and juvenile justice) could “keep [kids] forever, without the protections of due process.”

“We want them to finish school. We want them to have a home. We want to ‘fix' them. We never think about the fact that we are depriving them of their liberty. And that is huge. There is a high bar one has to meet in order to be able to do something like that. I am constantly surprised by how lightly we deal with that.”