Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (43 page)

“I can't do this,” Gabrielle remembers telling the district attorney back when she first saw that crushing piece of paper. “I can't be there forever.” She was out of prison and on the road to recovery, she said, when she was accused of trying to pass a bad check (she wasn't, she added, but her word did not mean much in the face of her record). Now she was looking at life behind bars.

“I don't know why not,” the DA answered, impassive.
Habitual criminal. Menace to society
. Her file, it seemed, told him all he cared to know.

“If only you knew why,” Gabrielle told him.

“There is no reason why you could be this way,” she remembers him responding. “There can be no ‘why' for the things that you have done.”

Gabrielle was a familiar face to the judge. “I am tired of seeing you in my courtroom,” he told her sternly. “I saw you in juvenile all the way up to here. . . . I have seen you come in and out of here all these years. . . . What would make you stop coming back?”

“I don't know,” she answered, “but I've got to find it.”

To her astonishment, the judge voided the strike, giving Gabrielle one more chance to prove herself—quite likely her last.

Gabrielle held on to that act of grace like the last board in a shipwreck as she struggled once again to make her way to shore. Once she had made it there—settled into her new job and been stable long enough to trust in her new life—she sent the judge a letter. She was doing well, she told him, and also doing good; she had not squandered that single stroke of mercy.

I am doing it
, she wrote.
And I am not coming back
.

Whether or not the young people I interviewed were familiar with what researchers term “resilience”—the constellation of qualities that allows some children to overcome traumas that would topple others—most were able to articulate what fostered their own strength as well as what drained it. Together, they made clear to me both why the loss of key relationships so often precedes or precipitates crime and how a connection with a caring adult (or adults) can change a life's direction.

Curtis, the “million-dollar kid” who was locked up at age ten—who had
been kidnapped by his father only to be returned to a household marked by addiction, domestic violence, and unremitting chaos—remembers a childhood marked by rage and silence.

“Nobody really gave me the attention I needed,” Curtis said. “Nobody sat down with me and tried to understand what I was going through or feeling, or tried to help me get through my struggles and my problems.”

“Attention,” he added, “was my number one goal.”

At sixteen, Curtis spoke with a deliberateness that made him sound much older. As he described the defensive posture he developed growing up—the process of becoming “totally desensitized” to others' feelings and eventually his own—it was not hard to see the hurt and angry child beneath the solemn, earnest teen.

“Really, I was just a little child that was misguided, that needed some help and some direction,” Curtis said of his younger self—the boy of ten who was shipped off to juvenile prison before he was old enough to use a razor.

“Fragmented” is how Curtis described his mental state during much of his incarceration. “I felt like I was cut into pieces.” This sense of fragmentation worsened when, at twelve, Curtis was consigned to an isolation cell for fighting. It would be a full year before Curtis emerged and reentered the general population. He knew he could not withstand another stint in solitary but could not see a way to break free of the cycle of insult, reaction, violence, and punishment in which he was entangled.

He began paying attention to a group of wards whom he had not noticed before. Older than Curtis, they also seemed more focused. They carried books wherever they went. Several, he discovered, were college students, working toward their degrees via correspondence courses. When these boys were faced with the sort of challenges or insults that Curtis had grown used to answering with violence, they talked their way through them, and often around them.

Curtis admired these young men, but he didn't know how to approach them. Then someone told him about the Mentoring Center's Transitions program, and he went to his first meeting. Several of the young men he had noticed were there. So was Mentoring Center founder Martin Jacks.

After the class ended, Jacks approached Curtis and, to the teenager's
lasting astonishment, embraced him. “Brother, you have potential,” the older man told him. “ ‘You have the potential to be great and do great things.' I was like, ‘I do? That's not what the staff on the hall is telling me. That's not what the captain and the superintendent are telling me. They're telling me I'm going to be locked up for the rest of my life!' ”

“Just that hug right there—knowing that somebody cared—that sparked the good in me,” Curtis believes. “Somebody was reaching out, extending themselves to me. Showing love. I was like, ‘Man, I'm going to come back here.' ”

Curtis marks this moment as the beginning of his long recovery from insanity, defined in a way that resonated for many young people I met: the compulsion to repeat the same actions over and over, each time expecting a different result.

“I didn't want to keep getting locked up,” Curtis elaborated. “I didn't want to keep getting slammed on the ground by the staff, getting Maced, getting pepper sprayed, getting handcuffs put on me. I didn't want that life, but at the same time, I kept doing things that got those results. So I was insane in that aspect.”

Turning that insight into action remained beyond Curtis for some time. He went through several cycles of the Transitions program—reading more books, according to the staff, than anyone in the program's history—but continued to fight and to suffer the consequences.

“It don't matter how much knowledge you have in your mind, but if you don't deal with your emotions . . .” Curtis's voice trailed off, then picked up again. “It's like that child in me still needed to be healed from the wounds of the past.”

Eventually, Curtis began speaking about these things with a sympathetic guard. He was also seeing a psychologist twice a week and began to open himself up to the benefits of formal therapy. He describes the psychologist as “a really good man who was trying to help me. He felt for me, I believe—to a certain extent.”

That caveat stems from the betrayal Curtis felt when he discovered that the sessions were not confidential. Other staff would reflect the therapist's analysis back to Curtis—“He wants to put you on meds because he feels like you can't cope”; “He says you've got a chemical imbalance.”

“In the system, I'd seen people break their trust against me over and
over,” Curtis explained. The therapist “helped me, but I could only go so far with him. He could only take me to that place where I could see what my problems were. He couldn't help me solve them. He could diagnose me, but he didn't have no cure to heal me.”

By the time I met Curtis, that healing was well under way. He described his present self as “whole, balanced, interconnected”—no longer fragmented and alone. He was growing, Curtis said, through his deepening relationship with God and its reflection in relationships with those God sent his way. When he began to list names, they were all Mentoring Center staff.

His own mentor “is like a brother, a father, a friend. He's a father because he will get on my case if I do something wrong. He's a friend because he's always there for me, no matter what. And he's a brother because there's a love there—a family bond.”

Not all kids will find this kind of friend or mentor, a connection that is solid and consistent enough to sustain them through the transition to adulthood. But it is in a child's nature, when someone extends a hand in kindness, to hold on for dear life. A drowning man clings tightly, even to a stranger.

In New York, Michelle spoke of clutching at straws, until finally a few spun into gold. Twenty years old, she had grown up in a series of “placements”—a familiar trajectory from foster homes to group homes to juvenile prisons.

“I didn't meet anybody in that whole experience that genuinely cared about me,” she said. “Even in the foster home that I liked, she was in it for the money. Jail, that was hard—
nobody
cared, at all.”

Eventually, Michelle made it to a drug treatment facility. It was the first place she felt even the prospect of affection.

While some staff, she said, just showed up to get a paycheck, “then there are those who really love what they do. They breathe off our success. That is what makes their day. That is what keeps them alive. There are a couple people like that in here. Not many. Enough.”

In Boston, Lucien underscored the importance of having an adult ally who has been in your shoes. “You've got to have people that have been in the situation and know the struggle, because they're going to vibe with you more,” he said,
describing something he had found post-incarceration
at Roca, a community organization that focuses on building reciprocity through what they call “transformational relationships” in which “both parties experience personal change as a result of the relationship and
are expected to
. . . . Transformation is ‘experienced with' someone.”

“You could have a dude that has a Benz that's telling me he can feel my pain. I'm not gonna believe it,” Lucien continued. “But if you got a dude that has a Toyota and three kids and he's like, ‘Whatever you done I been done did it and more, I used to be a stick-up kid,' or whatever—all right, then, that's when you flip it.”

When adults, such as those he encountered inside four different juvenile facilities, have
not
had this kind of personal experience, Lucien continued, “it's easier for them to lock everybody up and throw them in the system and they come out even worse. People that don't know what you've been through just look down on you, think you're fucking scum of the earth. You come out ungrateful, like life owes you, instead of you owing life.”

“
Here
,” he said of Roca, sounding almost astonished, “most of them actually care. They don't just do it 'cause it's their job. You end up bonding with them. They find ways to keep you pushing forward. They don't want you to [slip] back.”

“What I lost was empathy,” Jared said of the loveless years he spent behind bars. “It can be developed, but if somebody don't cultivate it, it's like not feeding a plant water or sunlight.”

“That's that love factor,” he repeated. “Being isolated takes that away. You become somebody else. You split off into a different personality. You have to, [when] all you know is ‘Will I survive this day?' ”

You do the crime, you do the time
.

It has an appealing symmetry, but as the foundation for a justice system it doesn't have much more going for it than that. How does sitting in a locked building help build accountability, foster rehabilitation, reduce re-offending, or assist with any other goal of the juvenile court? More to the point, given the mountain of evidence that it does none of these things and often achieves just the opposite, why do we remain wedded to this particular intervention?

Will, who did six years starting at age fifteen, pushed me to consider these questions. What role does enforced idleness play in righting the wide
range of wrongs for which we now invoke it? What is the relationship—
is
there a relationship?—between doing time and reducing crime?

More to the point, is that even the point? If confining juveniles in large state-run facilities fails to meet its ostensible goals—if it fails to reduce crime or enhance public safety; fails to rehabilitate those confined or improve their future prospects; fails, in fact, by every measure we've come up with, what, then,
does
it offer for the billions of dollars and millions of lives it winds up costing? Do we persist in relying on an intervention that has been demonstrated repeatedly to cause more harm than good because it offers us something psychologically, or ideologically, that we are loath to forfeit?

These are questions Will asked outright or inspired me to consider. He also helped to answer them. Our fiscal and emotional investment in juvenile incarceration, he suggested, is a manifestation of our abiding need for a population of “others.” By forcibly separating “juvenile offenders” from the rest of the population—assigning them numbers, dressing them in uniforms, and imposing an arcane labyrinth of rules and restrictions that bears no relationship to life on the outside—the juvenile prison offers a concrete manifestation of our shared understanding that juvenile delinquents are different, separate, other: that “they” and “we” are in no way implicated in each other's lives.

This belief is so fundamentally reassuring that we resist relinquishing the system that sustains it, no matter how high the mountain of evidence against large-scale juvenile incarceration grows. Without the physical manifestation of otherness that the juvenile prison and its rituals provide, the broader spectrum of injustice we tolerate—the racial, economic, and educational inequities that divide our nation's children into separate castes, belying the myth of America as a land of opportunity—would be much harder to ignore or deny.