Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (39 page)

This prediction had come true for Danny, who had developed a close and trusting relationship with a staff member down south. But as with his family, he lost that support when he was transferred to O.H. Close. He also lost a psychologist whom he had begun to trust. “Then a new doctor came and she wanted me to open up to her. I only knew this doctor for three months and she expected me to open up and share my life. . . . She told me, ‘Do it on your own pace. I won't force you to present' [in group therapy], but at the same time, she wants me to present by force.”

I asked Danny to clarify what he meant by “force.” His response spoke volumes about the perils of coerced redemption.

It was made clear to him, he explained, that if he did not “open up” in group, he would receive a write-up for program failure. Danny could not afford a write-up. He wanted to go home. But getting there, under the new therapeutic model, would require revealing to yet another group of peers and professionals wounds he preferred not to talk about with strangers (including me).

“So much happened to you in the past you can't even trust people,
but . . . now they want you to open up, knowing that you can't do it,” Danny worried. “I understand we have to open up eventually, but it has to be on our own pace. You have to get to know the person.”

The notion of giving a kid a disciplinary write-up for being unwilling, or unable, to expose his deepest traumas on a fixed time frame seems paradoxical at best. Isn't it the responsibility of a therapeutic program to
help
clients develop that degree of trust? Every time I heard about a kid who “failed the program,” I wondered why the onus was always on the children. Wasn't it possible that the program had failed
the kid
?

Joseph Leavey—who served as deputy commissioner under Jerome Miller when Miller was closing Massachusetts's reform schools in the 1970s—raised similar questions at the forum on the Massachusetts experience. “It used to be that kids were ‘incorrigible,' ” Leavey said. “Then we got more sophisticated, and we said they were ‘untreatable.' . . . But I always tell my staff, no kid is untreatable. There are quite a few kids we haven't figured out how to treat, but at least that puts the onus on us. Because we're the adults. We're getting paid for this stuff.”

At O.H. Close, Connor had given the question of treatment on command some thought as well. “You can be in treatment with somebody that controls you, but you feel you can't open everything up,” he said. “You feel a little bit of resentment towards them because you know that no matter what you say, they have power over you.”

In group therapy sessions, according to Connor, wards were required to discuss the details of the offense for which they had been committed. Sometimes, Connor said, group leaders would compare what young people revealed in group to their court records. If a young person's account conflicted with what was in his file, he said, the paperwork trumped the testimony, and a young person might be accused of failing to “accept responsibility” or “own up to your actions”—a failure that might affect his chances before the parole board.

Most youths, he added, learn their lesson quickly. “You say what the police said happened,” he said. “They want ‘truth,' but they want their truth, not your truth.”

Like Red Wing, O.H. Close has both a therapeutic mandate and a lock-down unit—the BTP, for Behavioral Treatment Program. According to the boys I met, you could go there for fighting, rioting, “any kind of
trouble. Any kind of big conflict or write-ups.” Some went for a month. Six months was the maximum. There were, they told me, twenty to thirty boys there at a time—“same as a regular unit.”

What seemed to me an intrinsic contradiction—treatment and torture—was by no means limited to these two facilities.
At the Giddings School, lauded in John Hubner's 2008 book
Last Chance in Texas
for what he described as a groundbreaking therapeutic program, the majority of wards—86 percent—reported being confined to their rooms for more than twenty-four hours as punishment, according to a 2012 report. Forty-five percent had been isolated as punishment ten or more times during their stay.

Beyond the question of whether a penal institution can truly be transformed into a therapeutic environment or whether the internal contradictions are simply too great, there is the matter of the quality of the treatment itself. Some institutions train their staff in therapeutic modalities; others bring in staff or contract psychologists and psychiatrists; and still others contract out services such as group therapy to outside agencies. The result, inevitably, is a mixed bag. But when therapeutic interventions are not handled with sensitivity to the unique circumstance of incarceration, or to the trauma many young prisoners bring with them—or are just not handled well—they can do more harm than good to a clientele that does not have the option of voting with its feet.

That was Gabrielle's experience. Behind bars, the greatest threat to her safety came in the guise of well-intentioned help: a group for survivors of childhood abuse. The facilitator, she recalled, “sat us in a circle with all these kids that were [physically] and sexually abused, and we told our stories. And then what? We can't help each other right now. We are all kids.”

In group, Gabrielle listened to stories of abuse more horrific than her own. One young woman described being violated as a toddler.

“You all need to listen to her, not me,” Gabrielle remembers thinking, sinking even deeper into self-protective silence. “Now I'm pushing myself out of the way, because that's worse than mine has ever been.”

Eventually, Gabrielle did as she was told and “ran her story.” Then she was instructed to list on paper the various assaults and violations she had
endured and “flush it”—literally, the paper—and along with it (at least in theory) the trauma.

This strategy was, to put it mildly, ineffective. Gabrielle had breached the carefully constructed wall around her feelings only to be told to “flush them” by a well-meaning, undertrained facilitator.

Once Gabrielle had passed the first benchmark—“flushing” years of trauma—it was time for the next: phoning her abuser (in her case, her father) and demanding an explanation.

“Are you freaking serious?” Gabrielle remembers thinking. “You want me to call my dad and ask him why?”

“This is how you heal from this,” the facilitator insisted. “You confront your abuser.” A prisoner, Gabrielle did as she was told.

“I don't understand why you did what you did to me,” she said when she reached her father by phone.

“Did what?”

“You hit me,” she pressed, in search of that elusive “healing” she had been promised. “You raped me.”

“Naah. I think you imagined that.”

Then he hung up.

The effort to turn a locked facility into a therapeutic environment stumbles again and again on the question of coerced transformation. Changing policy is one thing, changing people quite another. Can individuals realistically be expected to change as radically, and as quickly, as the kind of culture change now taking place demands, to drop not only ingrained habits but long-held belief systems?

I am not talking, for the moment, about the youth. On or off the record, those working to institute culture change inside juvenile facilities described staff resistance as their biggest obstacle.

New York's Gladys Carrión was one of the few willing to speak on the record about this challenge. When I met with Carrión, I was touring her revamped juvenile system. My itinerary included both community-based programs and locked facilities that were transitioning to a therapeutic model.

Since Carrión took the job as commissioner of New York's Office of Children and Family Services in 2007, she has focused on closing those
facilities she described as most clearly driven by “power and control and managing behavior through the use of force.”

“These facilities were very much correctional in nature, in that there was a punitive environment,” she elaborated. “This wasn't necessarily about looking at how you make sure that kids come out with a GED or a high school diploma or college credits. This wasn't about looking at what their clinical needs are. This wasn't about engaging families. This wasn't about creating skill sets in kids. It wasn't about trauma-informed work and understanding behavior and what the root causes were. It wasn't about any of that.”

Today, Carrión said, the New York system is “the first in the country where the entire system has been trained on trauma-informed work. It's at different levels of development in each facility, but everybody has been trained.” The Sanctuary Model, which New York has chosen to implement, is a well-regarded, trauma-informed therapeutic program that has shown strong outcomes elsewhere.

Nevertheless, according to the Albany
Times Union
, violence has increased fivefold over the past five years in New York's state juvenile facilities.
State officials attribute some or all of this uptick to better reporting. Some of Carrión's staff, however, think she has gone too far, placing their own safety at risk by cracking down on the forcible restraints that were once commonplace. Still others implied that Carrión was being set up—that, as Jerry Miller described experiencing when he tried to reform Massachusetts's locked facilities, staff were allowing things to get out of hand, or even instigating conflict, in order to make the commissioner look bad and force her to roll back the changes.

In the pre-reform days, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, facility staff “routinely” resorted to “uncontrolled, unsafe applications of force.” Post-reform, investigators wrote, “staff informed us that . . . their ‘hands are tied' and they are forced to just step aside when youth are defiant.” Investigators found this attitude “clearly problematic,” given that staff were, in fact, being trained in alternative ways of dealing with this kind of behavior.

A clinician who works with several New York state facilities offered his perspective on the roots of staff resistance. Many who work inside the system, he said, “associate the Sanctuary Model with hug-a-thug
programs. They feel that Sanctuary is taking away the structure, taking away the rules, taking away authority, which is not actually what it means. Trauma-informed models of care promote consistency, fairness, shared decision making, a commitment to nonviolence, open communication.”

“All [these] things fall apart,” he added, when “systems are under chronic stress.”

Security camera footage taken at Brookwood and Goshen Secure Centers, released in 2011 by a former employee, reveal what does indeed seem to be a system under stress. As the Albany
Times Union
describes the sometimes blurry images of mayhem,
“teenage detainees gang up on a much larger staff member and pound him to the ground. In other videos, youthful prisoners attack each other with similar viciousness. Blood spills and tables are overturned. In some recordings, staff members and young residents lay unconscious from the blows.”

“Now we have to wait until they take a swing at us to use a restraint, rather than nipping the behavior in the bud,” a Brookwood employee told the
Times Union
. “I went to work with a constant feeling I was going to be assaulted.” According to the same article, the percentage of staff out on workers' compensation claims for on-the-job injuries went from 29 percent in 2007 to 59 percent in 2010.

This high rate of absence creates stress for those still on the job, one youth aide told me. “Being mandated [to work overtime] is like breathing around here,” he said, due to the precipitous rise in workers' comp claims and absences.

“You gotta suck it up,” he said. “Anyway, it stacks retirement.” Meaning, the more overtime you work, the more retirement you get.

In Brooklyn, I spoke with two young men who were transitioning from institutions where, they said, the Sanctuary Model had been in place. A sixteen-year-old who was on his way home after seven months at the Highland Residential Center found the program there “corny—it didn't work.”

“If you're mad, you're not going to look at your safety plan and try to do any of that,” he said, referring to laminated cards young people wear around their necks with personalized suggestions for calming their anger. “You not paying that no mind. It's not going to work. It's just nothing . . .”

“Get mad, look down at the safety plan that says read a book, and
actually go read a book or something . . .” he mocked, his tone laced with obvious skepticism.

Despite his scorn for the safety plan, he acknowledged that his time away had changed him. “I used to get mad and fight all the time, but now I don't fight no more,” he said.

His explanation for the transformation? “It's just growing up.”

A seventeen-year-old who had participated in the Sanctuary program had a different take. When he arrived, he said, he had recently lost his brother and was overwhelmed by grief. “A few times in there I got real angry and just shut down,” he said, but a staff member he described as his social worker helped him get through it—whether or not he was “programming” well.

“It took a little while,” this young man acknowledged. “Once I sat down with him, [at first] I wasn't really talking. I'd just sit there.” Unlike the boys at O.H. Close, however, he was permitted to open up at his own pace.