Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (46 page)

I visited several Missouri facilities, from an alternative school for kids returning from custody (or struggling with behavior at mainstream schools) to a locked institution. I entered a bit skeptical—could values of caring and youth development truly infuse an entire state system, rather than merely individual institutions with highly committed leaders? But it did not take long for my skepticism to fade.

The facilities in Missouri do not look like prisons—in fact, their homey simplicity makes one realize how much effort it takes, in designing and maintaining a traditional juvenile prison, to drain out every element of comfort and care. More important than the lack of hardware and the comfortable atmosphere was what young people in the Missouri system told me again and again: “Here, they care about you.”

I left Missouri with no doubt that
the so-called dangerous few—young people who genuinely need to be removed for a time from home and society and physically contained—would benefit immensely if they were sent to Missouri-like facilities rather than large-scale, punishment-oriented juvenile prisons.

Missouri closed its old-style training schools in the 1980s, after a series of ugly scandals similar to those that have triggered less-sweeping and shorter-lived reforms in other states. In the years since, the state has developed a regional system based on a continuum of programs, from day treatments to nonsecure group homes to moderate-secure facilities (some of which are located in state parks or on college campuses) to secure-care facilities. The largest hold no more than fifty, and the secure facilities house no more than thirty-six.

Programming is not an afterthought in Missouri. It infuses every aspect of the system.
“Throughout their stays in DYS [Division of Youth Services] facilities, youth are challenged to discuss their feelings, gain insights into their behaviors, and build their capacity to express their thoughts and emotions clearly, calmly and respectfully—even when they are upset or angry,” Richard Mendel wrote in an article in
American Educator
.

Staff participate in each activity, rather than standing posted as symbols of supervision. Perhaps as a result of these close interactions, Decker told me, there is almost no use of solitary confinement, no handcuffs or pepper spray, and very few incidents of physical restraint. Safety lies not in restraints but in relationships.

Division of Youth Services staff work closely with families and assign each youth a case manager who works with him from entry through reentry. Across the board, staff take a trauma-informed approach, focusing not only on “What did you do?” but “Why did you do it?” as well as “What happened to you?” This, I was told, helped make the forms of physical containment used elsewhere unnecessary.

One thing that stood out particularly about the Missouri Model was the emphasis on supportive peer relationships. Caring staff are central to the work in Missouri, but I also witnessed a quality of respect and compassion in the interactions among the young people that is very rarely fostered by a traditional prison environment. Like everything else in Missouri, this is the result of conscious effort. Residents are divided into “teams” of ten or fewer, and any one of them can “call a circle” at any time if something comes up he feels needs to be addressed, or if he simply needs extra support. One of the most remarkable things I saw was a group of girls demonstrating what they do when one of their peers gets agitated enough to pose a physical risk. Staff stood back while the girls themselves formed a “trust circle” around the one playing the part of the out-of-control youth, talking to her gently, trying to help her calm herself. Only when she could not be calmed by other means did they—still collectively, and still gently—bring her to the floor until she could calm down. This was Missouri's alternative to the kind of “prone restraint” that was getting kids hurt and killed in other states.

Will had the opportunity to visit Missouri with a group of youth advocates several years ago. The experience, he said, was incredible. “A lot of times,” he observed, “they just change the name, right? From ‘incarceration' to ‘rehabilitation.' . . . But [the reality] stays the same.” Inside Missouri's youth facilities, however, Will saw something genuinely new.

“The biggest thing was the staff,” he said. “Staff in California, even if they're good staff, it's obvious that they're there for a paycheck and they go home and that's it. In Missouri, they were involved. It felt like the paycheck was an afterthought. They were really there because they believed in the kids.” If Will was skeptical when he arrived, that skepticism faded when he saw that young people had not been pre-selected as guides to impress the visitors. An administrator asked a nearby group for volunteers, and those who raised their hands were the ones who led the show. “They're not hiding anything,” that showed Will. “They
have
nothing to hide.”

The gap between the Missouri Model and the traditional prison is so vast that when young people in Missouri asked me about my book and my reporting, they simply could not believe what I told them about what I'd seen and heard in other states—not only the stories of violence and abuse, but the simple fact that teenagers like themselves would be held in places
that resembled adult prisons. Their disbelief and horror was one of the strongest condemnations of the status quo I had come across.

“The institutional environment itself is a challenging place to create positive culture and opportunities for kids,” Tim Decker said at one point, as we drove between one regional facility and another, “so they're really working against a lot. They're swimming upstream every day.” Intended as a compliment to his staff, his words struck me as a caution as well. If the “institutional environment,” no matter how well thought out, poses intrinsic challenges to meeting the goals that Decker implied were those of his system (“positive culture and opportunities for kids”), then tremendous vigilance is needed when it comes to deciding which youths require commitment to even a very good institution.

Replicating Missouri's small, therapeutic institutions could make a tremendous difference across the country, but those benefits would be maximized if strict filters were in place to ensure that only those who truly required institutional care were institutionalized. Even in Missouri, it is not clear that this is happening. The Division of Youth Services has limited control over whom it serves; initial decisions about commitment are made by the court.
Just over half the youth committed to the Missouri Department of Youth Services in 2007 had been adjudicated for felonies (51 percent), while the rest had been charged with misdemeanors or what the state calls “juvenile offenses.” (In fairness, some of these
lower-level offenders—12 percent of the total population—were in day treatment or other nonresidential programs, and a smaller number were in one of the seven group homes across the state, each of which accommodates ten to twelve youths.)

Now and then during my visit to Missouri, the seams between the various institutions that comprise “the system” seemed to be showing. Relationships, I heard over and over, are at the heart of the Missouri Model. But sometimes this value seemed to run up against the more traditional mandates of the larger system.

At an alternative school run by the Missouri Division of Youth Services, for example, Megan said she enjoyed the small environment and “opportunities for support.”

“What I dislike about being in here is I don't get to be with my friends and stuff,” she added, “and I tend to think that I have to have friends.”

At first, I thought Megan was talking about missing old friends from the public school she used to attend. Then it was explained to me that students at the alternative school were encouraged to develop close relationships at school but were not allowed to “associate” outside of the school. The rule came from the court, not the school, and those caught breaking it were at risk of violating their probation.

The rationale for this, I was told, was that many of the students were on probation, and “history shows us if you are hanging out with somebody that is not making good choices, and you didn't make a good choice, chances are together, you're not going to make good choices.”

The administrator who explained this to me did so without much apparent conviction.

“At school, you make friends,” he acknowledged. “So when you're not at a public school, and you're here, of course, they make friends, and they break the rules. We know, but if they get caught, it's an extra charge, and they get in trouble.”

The gap between systems gaped most widely when I listened to Tracy McClard. Her son Jonathan had been involved in a tragic teenage melodrama: he was still pining for an ex-girlfriend when she called and told him she was carrying his baby but that her new boyfriend was going to force her to inject cocaine in order to kill the baby. She would kill herself, she told Jonathan, before she would let that happen. Believing only he could save these two lives—the girl he loved and his unborn child—Jonathan shot and injured the new boyfriend.

The young man Jonathan shot recovered fully. Jonathan himself was not so fortunate. Although representatives from the Division of Youth Services interviewed him and found him suitable for their programs, that determination was overruled by a local judge, who sentenced Jonathan to adult prison instead. During the time he had already spent in adult jails pending sentencing, Jonathan had been attacked, beaten, and thoroughly terrified. Not long after his sentencing hearing, he hanged himself in his cell.

For his mother, who has since left her job as a teacher to become an advocate, the idea that an alternative was right there and yet denied her son has been one of the most difficult things to accept. Since her son's death, she told me, every member of her immediate family except Tracy
has made a suicide attempt. The boy who was shot and the girl her son believed he was defending, she said, have also had their lives turned inside out by confusion and remorse over her son's death.

None of this decreased my respect for the Missouri Division of Youth Services. It did leave me convinced that no single system, no matter how beneficent, could undo centuries of oppressive attitudes and actions toward young people who break the law. To get to a place where no public entity traumatizes children, and all work together to improve their chances, will require changing our collective understanding of who young people are and what they might become. This will take more than the perfect model. It will take a movement.

14

THE REAL RECIDIVISM PROBLEM

One Hundred Years of Reform and Relapse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys

A
HUNDRED AND SOME
miles inland from Florida's Emerald Coast, out of sight of the beaches and amusement parks that draw tourists to the state, children's bones lie in unidentified graves behind the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. These undersized skeletons represent not only the extremity of violence behind the walls of juvenile prisons, but also its intransigence.

Dozier stands empty now, but before the state finally shut it down in 2011, the institution had been through more than a dozen investigations by organizations ranging from a local grand jury to the U.S. Senate. Again and again, the violence taking place behind its walls had been documented and decried. And still Dozier stood, for more than a century, churning out generations of walking wounded: men and boys who carried with them not only the trauma of their own experience but the memory of their dead friends as well.

The Boys of the Dark
is a collaboration between journalist Robin Gaby Fisher and two Dozier survivors, Robert W. Straley and Michael O'McCarthy, who have in common unshakable memories of childhoods desecrated behind Dozier's walls. It is the kind of book one has to put down frequently, so gruesome are its depictions of adults torturing children who were powerless to resist not only because they were younger and smaller than their assailants—some were as young as five—but also because they were prisoners, mandated by the courts into the custody of
their tormentors, often for offenses as minor as trespassing, smoking cigarettes, or running away from home.

In the following passage, the authors describe a night when the young O'McCarthy and his friend Woody were taken to an outbuilding known as the White House to be punished for trying to run away.

A houseman named Dixon was instructed to hold Michael down. Michael heard Hatton's [the school's director] boots pivot on the concrete floor, and the whip hit the ceiling, then the wall, before it bit into his back and his buttocks, spraying his blood on the walls. Every blow drove him deeper into the metal springs of the bloody mattress, and deeper into the grey hole of semi consciousness.

Even worse than being beaten himself, O'McCarthy recalls, was being forced to listen to his friend's cries through the door.

“No more!” Woody wailed. “Please. Oh please, God, no more!” Michael sank to his knees. He swore he heard Woody's blood splattering on the walls.

Twenty strikes. Thirty. He could hear the sounds of a scuffle breaking out. “Get him back on his stomach,” Michael heard the assistant superintendent shout. Forty strikes. Woody's screams had become one long unbroken wail. Fifty strikes. Fifty-five. The more Woody screamed, the more he was beaten.

Michael covered his ears and screamed for Woody, screamed until he could no longer hear his friend, begging for mercy.