Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (44 page)

Incarceration, Will explained, functions far better as a means of defining “undesirable” people than as a means of limiting unwanted acts. It works as the “default model,” he believes, only when “we identify people with the mistake that they made. It's not that you might be a good person who happened to commit a crime; you
are
your crime. You are a bad person, and we're going to remake you.”

The wholesale identification of an individual with a decontextualized
act may be the central pillar of an incarceration-based model of juvenile justice. If the problem is not just what you did but who you are—if you yourself are bad—your very person, it follows, must be shut away.

“But that's not a solution,” Will came to understand. “ ‘We have to
put
him somewhere. We have to give him this amount of
time
.' Really, that suggests nothing.”

Questions that might prove more relevant to the goals of rehabilitation and enhancing public safety—such as “What was he missing, and how can we provide that?”—go unasked and unanswered because they do not fit the default model of paying for one's crimes in the carceral currency of time. “You do something wrong, something bad is supposed to happen to you.” The institution is that bad thing, a contemporary version of an eye for an eye, albeit out of balance: a kid steals a car stereo and loses not only his freedom but often his very future.

A system that allows us to avoid crucial questions about what children need and why so many do not have it is one that allows us to maintain the status quo, with all of its inequities, while still holding fast to the myth of equal opportunity. It is a system that—however much we may rely on the notion of “accountability” to justify harsh sentences—functions to hold none of us accountable to each other, on either side of the wall. In fact, the more I spoke with Will and others who had “done” time, the more tenuous the relationship between incapacitation and accountability came to appear.

Accountability demands both insight (a shift in the thinking that led to one's breach of the law) and action (a means of repairing the harm one has caused). Young people develop insight in the context of relationship, a commodity that incarceration radically restricts. The same goes for action: young people are hard-pressed to make better choices in an environment where they are not permitted to make choices at all.

As Jared was one of several to observe, the imperative to change while incapacitated is intrinsically contradictory. Even if one makes the internal
decision
to change, prison offers little room to practice that resolve when every movement is regimented, often down to the minute. By barring almost all self-directed action, and strictly rationing interaction with the outside world, incarceration actively
prohibits
the prisoner from acting to heal or repair any harm he has caused.

This is a lesson that crime victims who are promised “closure” through another's loss of freedom often learn the hard way. Time—the currency in which we demand payment for offenses of all varieties, from taking a pack of gum to taking a human life—turns out to have no value, except to those who lose it.

13

CONNECTION IN ACTION

Transforming Juvenile Justice

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured
.

—Kurt Vonnegut

When we were in Eastern Europe we wanted a lot of things, but what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit
.

—Václav Havel

A
LONG WITH A MOUNTAIN
of research exposing the wholesale failure of the juvenile prison, we have also amassed evidence about the reverse: what
does
improve the life prospects of juvenile offenders and foster public safety at the same time. This research is entirely consistent with what young people say makes the greatest difference in their lives.

Pathways to Desistance is a large, multidisciplinary study that followed 1,354 serious juvenile offenders aged fourteen to eighteen for seven years after they were convicted. A key conclusion is that even among youths who commit felony-level offenses, most simply grow out of delinquency. Sending them to prison did not make a difference on this front. What
did
make a difference was what young people said they most needed: support and connection. Those who received probation supplemented by support
from the community were significantly less likely to re-offend than those who were sentenced to a juvenile facility.

The bottom line, according to the researchers: “Incarceration may not be the most appropriate or effective option, even for many of the most serious adolescent offenders.” These are not the conclusions of renegade researchers or single-minded advocates. The Pathways to Desistance research was conducted under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Justice. That makes the findings all the more striking. Nothing in the study results suggests that anything can or should be done to improve juvenile facilities. Institutional reform, in fact, is never mentioned.

At the same time, a large body of research now makes clear which interventions work better than incarceration, and which work best of all. Out of the many reform efforts around the country, a handful of models have emerged that are both evidence based (they have been studied extensively and found to work well) and intuition based (they align perfectly with what young people across the country say they need or say has worked for them). What these models have in common is that they rely on relationships—with an emphasis on supporting existing relationships, particularly with family—rather than isolation, and they offer support in the context of young people's homes and communities. These programs not only produce results far better than does incarceration; they also save vast amounts of money. Yet only a tiny proportion of young people who need and could benefit from these programs have access to them.

The models that have been studied most closely with the most positive results are Multisystemic Therapy (MST), Functional Family Therapy (FFT), and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC). Beyond their alphabet-soup acronyms, these programs share a single, simple premise: young people need a web of relationships to thrive—adults who will surround and support both them
and
their families in the transition from a difficult or delinquent adolescence to a stable adulthood. None of these models involves incarceration, and all have shown impressive results with young people who would otherwise often be locked up.

Dan Edwards is president of Evidence-Based Associates, which works with public agencies to implement these models. All three, he said, “focus
on meeting kids in their natural ecology, where they live, in the real world,” rather than shipping them out to the countryside and then bringing them back to an unchanged environment. All three also rely on a case manager who gets to know a young client as an individual and also develops a relationship with the client's family, strengthening the one support system most likely to be around long after programs and case managers have moved on.

“It is very easy to sit back and blame the families, but at the same time, they're most likely the ones that are going to have the solution,” Edwards said. Staff at all three programs are trained to work intensively with even the most vulnerable families—families that the court might otherwise write off when assessing a young person's support system. They will also, when needed, search far and wide to identify and strengthen young people's natural support network even when it does not resemble traditional notions of the nuclear family.

“If you look really hard,” Edwards elaborated, “a lot of the kids that [people] would have said in the past don't have a family—they've got somebody out there that cares about them.” Sometimes working with a kid's family, in other words, involves tracking that family down, or helping to reconstruct it—whatever it takes to make sure each young person, including those who previously may have been on their own, has that fundamental support.

While all very similar in their guiding philosophies, each program takes a slightly different approach to the same end.

       
•
   
Multisystemic Therapy (MST)
is an intensive three- to five-month process designed for serious juvenile offenders and their families. Specially trained therapists meet their clients where they are—at home, at school, and elsewhere in the community. The thinking behind this is to help young people navigate the world in which they live, rather than removing them from it. Because MST therapists carry small caseloads, they make themselves available to families twenty-four hours a day and tackle those issues that have been shown to have a correlation with delinquency and its cessation: connecting youth with recreational activities that encourage positive friendships, supporting their efforts in school or at work,
strengthening the family's ability to communicate, and helping youths and their families develop a support network that may include friends, neighbors, extended family, and others. A range of studies has found that
MST reduces subsequent arrests between 25 and 70 percent.

       
•
   
Functional Family Therapy (FFT)
is similar in principle to MST. The main difference is that FFT therapists work with young people and their family members in their own offices rather than clients' homes and neighborhoods. Both programs share the aim of stabilizing a young person within, and along with, her family, and a strong focus on communication and conflict management. Key to both approaches is the priority placed on strengthening
existing
relationships over building new ones with helping professionals who, however caring, will eventually be gone.

       
•
   
Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC)
places youths with specially trained foster families rather than in group homes or juvenile prisons. Youths stay in these homes for six to nine months and receive support similar to that offered by MST. Meanwhile, their families also receive intensive support and counseling, with the goal of reuniting the family after the treatment period. Even after families are reunited, the support does not end. Rather, youths and their families maintain contact with counselors until the home and family are deemed stable enough that they no longer need this intensive support.

As researcher Richard Mendel points out, “the most favorable real-world outcomes have occurred when MST and FFT are employed as an alternative to incarceration or other residential placements.” In Florida,
the Redirection Program does exactly this: provides evidence-based family treatment (primarily MST or FFT) as an alternative to incarceration or other out-of-home placement. A 2010 report from Florida's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found that youth in the Redirection Program did better on all fronts. Most striking was the way the benefits seemed to
increase
as time went on. Participants were 9 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime, for example, but 35 percent less likely to end up in adult prison. The Redirection Program
saved taxpayers an estimated $41.6 million over the course of four years in lowered recidivism rates and less money spent on costly residential placements.

These evidence-based interventions cost between $3,000 and $9,500 total per each youth served, and all last under a year—often well under.
Juvenile incarceration, on the other hand, runs an average of $88,000 per youth, per
year
, and can last for many years. A complex cost-benefit analysis conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy determined that—accounting for the difference between the cost of FFT and the cost of incarceration, and for the savings generated by reduced recidivism—each placement in FFT resulted in a total savings to taxpayers of almost $50,000. MTFC, the most expensive of the three, generated the greatest savings—
an estimated $88,953 per participant.

In all three modalities, according to Dan Edwards, the therapist's job is to “figure out what's getting in the way of the family being successful and how do we address that, whether it's substance abuse or failure at school.” For example, he said, there is often a disconnect between a child's school and his family, each blaming the other for perceived behavior problems. Over time, each side builds a wall against the other until communication becomes impossible. “It's the therapist's job to take that wall down somehow.” (Interestingly, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy identified high school graduation as an important protective factor against recidivism, reducing it by more than 21 percent.)

Another key element of all three interventions is that they are time limited. Again, Edwards said, it is a matter of looking at what works. “We have a notion in this country that therapy takes years, but there is no evidence that sitting a kid on the couch or in a chair week after week for years really [makes a difference].” There is evidence, on the other hand, that high-intensity, carefully targeted interventions such as MST and FFT do work. A therapist may meet with a family involved in one of the evidence-based programs every day, if needed, but there is always an end point in sight. The rationale, per Edwards, is “I'm not going to stay with those kids forever, but hopefully, I'm going to be there at the point in these families' lives when they turn the corner. I'm going to help them turn the corner, and four months later, we have a graduation party, we celebrate the success, and I get out of the way.”