Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (49 page)

After six grueling weeks of this sort of testimony came a ruling that, for the first time, established that incarcerated youth had a constitutional right to rehabilitation.
Morales v. Turman
has since been heralded for establishing the first clear standards for the nation's juvenile justice apparatus. But forty years later, incarcerated youth and their advocates are still fighting not only for an atmosphere that fosters rehabilitation but for one that merely offers some modicum of protection from chronic and vicious abuse.

In June 2012, officials hoping to curb rising violence in Texas state
juvenile lockups opened the twenty-four-bed Phoenix Program inside a state facility near Waco.
The idea was to isolate and contain those youths seen as the “ringleaders” and simultaneously to heal them, via a low staff-to-youth ratio and intensive therapeutic services.
Early coverage praised Phoenix for offering “the kind of treatment that all 1,200 youth offenders in state facilities need.”

The
Texas Observer
identified
“what this program was really doing well: making it feel safer in [Texas Juvenile Justice Department] lockups. . . . There was more support here, more case managers and counselors looking out for you; and fewer distractions, a smaller chance you'd have to fight 30 or 40 people, or get jumped on your way across the room.”

Youths at Phoenix went through a mandatory ten-week Aggression Replacement Training based on the premise that “aggression is a learned behavior.” Posters outlining the “Anger-Control Cycle” stood as a constant reminder of where aggression might otherwise lead.
“Structure and personal attention are the priorities,” the
New York Times
reported admiringly. “Nearly every moment of the day is filled with counseling, school time, meals or recreation.”

The problem, it later emerged, came during those intervals, however rare, when youths were
not
engaged in some sort of salubrious activity. This was when guards found time to line up the program's participants, slam them to the ground, and beat them with closed fists.

A report from the Independent Ombudsman for the Texas Juvenile Justice Department offers a window into what seems more like methodical torture than what, again, was classified as “horseplay” when initially reported to a state hotline.

There were three staff and multiple youth visible on camera. One male staff would take youth one by one and pick them up, slam them to the floor, and lay on them, pinning them to the floor. The youth could be seen flailing his legs and arms. The staff would complete the “pinning” and then move on to another youth, repeating the act. At no time did the other staff attempt to stop the act; they only watched. During the course of 15 minutes there were 6 youth who were slammed to the floor and pinned by the staff for an extended period of time.

A grand jury declined to recommend criminal charges against the guards, but three did lose their jobs as a result of the videotape, and four were transferred to other positions. The Texas Juvenile Justice Department reiterated its “zero-tolerance” policy toward this sort of behavior as well as its intention to “continue cleaning house,” and two legislative committees pledged to investigate further.

And so it goes: another group of young people left to wrestle with trauma that may never fade, another round of regret, more committees and promises of reform.

The history of Dozier, or Louisiana, or Texas—of more states, and state institutions, than it is possible to list—raises a central question: is
reforming
juvenile prisons and the larger system that operates them adequate to improving the lives and prospects of the children in their care, or even to keeping those young people safe from their keepers? Or is that system, and the various state institutions that form its foundation, itself beyond redemption? Given the long history of children being beaten, raped, and killed behind the walls of juvenile prisons, and given that these institutions remain seemingly impervious to reform, might it be time to dub the juvenile prison
itself
a “super-predator” and—in the name of public safety and the safety of our children—shut it down for good?

The myriad atrocities that take place inside juvenile prisons are not resolved simply because they happen to be revealed. The “scandals” that emerge from them have become so ubiquitous as no longer to merit the term. The cycle of revelation, reform, and recidivism has been repeated so many times over, in so many places, that we can no longer indulge in the luxury of being scandalized, of professing ourselves horrified and rushing to institute well-intentioned reforms that, with numbing regularity, erode over time, ignored or forgotten until the next “scandal” emerges, reawakening dormant outrage and setting in motion a repeat of the same cycle.

The abuse of children has become so entrenched in our nation's juvenile prisons that we are no longer justified in asserting that it betrays the values of our culture. Instead, it has come to reflect those values in their ugliest incarnation—most clearly, our belief in the myth of “other people's children” so profoundly different that somehow, when we prick them, they do not bleed or at least do not suffer the same way that “ours” would, children so devalued as to be expendable.

No scandal, revelation, ceremony, or reform can stanch the violence and violation that are, for far too many young people, part and parcel of paying their debt to society. Despite countless investigations, commissions, regulations, and reports, the abuses continue, in Florida and all across the nation.

Dozier may be closed now, but it is more than an empty building. It is an open wound.

15

AGAINST REFORM

Beyond the Juvenile Prison

If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year
.

“Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

“That they could get it clear?”

“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,

And shed a bitter tear
.

—Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

A
MERICANS ARE PERENNIAL REFORMERS
. No sooner do we devise a new institution or program than we start picking it apart, looking for flaws and convening all manner of bodies charged with repairing it. The task force, committee, blue ribbon commission, and a near-constant flow of litigation—all are expressions of our nation's persistent optimism.

A great strength of our democracy, our reformist nature is also a critical weakness, blinding us to those occasions when a long-standing institution has a fundamental, conceptual flaw—the kind that demands not a wrench but a wrecking ball. If a reform proves inadequate, we simply try again. Another task force is assembled to supplant a now-defunct commission; new committees are assigned to exhume the wreckage of the old. Sometimes, these efforts pay off, and progress—our national religion—is attained. But there are also occasions when our reformist zeal leaves us patching the roof of a building that lacks a foundation.

The juvenile prison is a glaring example of such an edifice—flawed from the inception, failed by every measure, subject to one renovation after another, yet impervious (to date) to the genuine transformation its faulty premise and abysmal performance demand.

The past decade has seen rapid change on the juvenile justice front, especially in terms of our use of large state facilities. The number of youths in these institutions has dropped by a remarkable 40 percent. Across the country, forward-thinking officials can be found working to improve those facilities that remain, introducing therapeutic models and training staff to be trauma informed. Reform on this level has not been seen for decades, if ever.

That we are incarcerating fewer children is, without question, cause for optimism—but not yet celebration. Across the country, many thousands of young people remain behind bars in juvenile prisons—most of them convicted of minor, nonviolent offenses—despite the fact that these places are ostensibly reserved for serious offenders who pose a clear danger to those around them. Even in those states that have gone furthest in terms of reform, nearly 42 percent of confined youth are still locked up for offenses that pose no threat to public safety: breaking school rules, running away from home, missing a parole hearing, and the like. This remains so despite the fact that
large-scale juvenile incarceration has been proven many times over to do absolutely nothing to reduce juvenile offending or to keep the public safer, and very often makes these problems worse. We should not break out the champagne, in other words, for doing less of a terrible thing.

Even in those states being lauded for reform, incarcerated youths continue to be abused physically, sexually, and psychologically at appalling rates. This abuse has gone on for so long, despite countless efforts to curtail it, that one must conclude it is endemic to the juvenile prison. The extreme power differentials, isolation, and coercion that characterize a locked facility are so ideal a breeding ground for abuse of all kinds that no amount of regulation, policy, or scrutiny can keep children safe behind prison walls.

Beyond that, incarceration is
intrinsically
traumatizing, all the more so during the developmental crucible that is adolescence. The years teenagers spend locked away in juvenile prisons are exactly those in which a
young person's sense of himself and the world might otherwise crystallize, with tremendous implications for who he will become as an adult. Isolating girls and boys during a time when their malleable brains are still very much in flux flies in the face of everything we know about human development.

Nowhere in my travels did I find a way around this central conundrum—a “best practice” for keeping children away from home and community and in the care of strangers, no matter how trauma informed those strangers might be. I saw excellent programs, carefully planned and adequately funded, staffed by wise and warmhearted people. But even in the best of these, I never felt I'd stumbled upon the secret blueprint: the facility that, if replicated, could elevate our nation's juvenile justice system to meet, or even approach, its stated goals.

Children, it turns out, will never thrive in storage. We can safely stash away unwanted objects, but children are meant to be held close, not banished. I came to this conclusion as, over and over, through both words and actions, young people let me know what they needed in order to change—to rehabilitate, when that was the task at hand, and, before and beyond that, simply to grow.

Over and over, in one way or another, they conveyed the same message: rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship. It is a conclusion that runs in direct contradiction to the means of correction we have chosen as the norm: isolation. Rather than building on young people's existing relationships, rather than helping them forge positive new ones, we've chosen an intervention that flies in the face of all the evidence researchers can offer, everything young people tell us, and all that we know already—as parents, as people—from basic common sense.

This is where things begin to get confounding. We know what works, we know what doesn't, and we know that
persisting
with what doesn't wastes millions of dollars and destroys thousands of lives. We are clearly not getting what we say we are seeking: improved public safety and better outcomes for children. Instead, we are inflicting untold harm on the thousands of young people who pass through our juvenile prisons each year. Yet we persevere, through cycle after cycle of scandal, reform, relapse, and repetition.

How, knowing what we know, can we do what we do? How can we continue to deprive so many young people of what we understand as essential to their growth, if not their survival, with no evidence of any public benefit?

The facilities to which we entrust our nation's most vulnerable, most traumatized, and sometimes most dangerous children—the institutions intended to redeem, rehabilitate, and hold them accountable—do not recognize these children's fundamental humanity. How else to understand the cruelties inflicted in the name of justice, the intractable indifference that allows brutality toward captive children to perpetuate itself for decade upon decade, than to acknowledge that we see the children we consign to this failed system not only as “other people's children” but as another
breed
of children entirely, different in their very nature from those we call our own?

The mass criminalization of teenagers, taking place over decades of demographic transformation that have given us the most diverse generation this country has known, has cleared the way for the legal and literal segregation of a group of young people—the overwhelmingly poor black and brown children with whom we fill our juvenile prisons—who are indelibly marked as “other” by the experience: their names exchanged for prison ID numbers, their clothing replaced by uniforms marking them property of the state, their résumés forever tarnished by their records, every aspect of their futures constrained by the errors of their youth.

The more time I spent behind the walls of our nation's juvenile prisons, and in conversation with those who had come through them, the better I came to understand the role these institutions play both in perpetuating the exclusion of “other people's children” and in allowing us to deny that such a caste exists; in concealing behind coils of barbed wire and veils of confidentiality both the most wounded among America's children and the further injuries we inflict upon them in the name of “justice.”