Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (50 page)

The frequency with which young prisoners turn to animal imagery to describe how it feels to be inside one of our youth prisons underscores the profound denial of humanity that these institutions perpetuate. Given what we know takes place behind the walls of our youth prisons—and we do
know
, despite our ability to profess ourselves shocked again and again—it is imperative that we see those contained there as somehow less
than human. Because if they
are
fully human, as rich with possibility and sensitive to suffering as any other children, and we continue to countenance their chronic mistreatment inside public institutions—if that is so, then what are we?

We cannot address juvenile delinquency without considering the question of individual responsibility. Young people who are involved in delinquent acts, it goes without saying, need to make better choices. But the odds of their doing so will be vastly increased if we make some effort to ensure that they
have
better choices. Even as we ask young people to take responsibility for their actions, we must consider our own collective responsibility for the deep inequities that leave some children with many choices (and a very low risk of incarceration, despite the universal adolescent inclination to test, and to cross, the line of the law) and others with so few choices and so very much risk.

There is no single program that can achieve this goal—to bring to life the two-dimensional fantasy we hire muralists to paint on the walls of decimated neighborhoods. It's a world where parents can make a living wage and where children can play in parks that are safe and clean, attend schools as well resourced and expectation-rich as those across town, and visit the pediatrician rather than the emergency room when they get sick.

A pipe dream? Hold on. The resources are there.

Remember Curtis, the million-dollar kid? What if we spent each dollar we would otherwise spend to incarcerate Curtis
on
Curtis, without waiting for him to trigger the investment by violating the law? What if we spent the money earmarked for his incarceration
earlier
—investing it in his impoverished community, in supporting his fragmenting family, so that
they
would have the resources they needed to help Curtis grow?

At the Open Society Institute, Eric Cadora and Susan Tucker elucidated a concept they call “justice reinvestment,” which centers on just such a realignment of resources. As they have written,
“The goal of justice reinvestment is to redirect some portion of the $54 billion America now spends on prisons to rebuilding the human resources and physical infrastructure—the schools, healthcare facilities, parks, and public spaces—of neighborhoods devastated by high levels of incarceration. Justice reinvestment is, however, more than simply rethinking and redirecting public funds. It is also about devolving accountability and responsibility to the local level.
Justice reinvestment seeks community level solutions to community level problems.”

When Oregon tested the concept with kids in Deschutes County, the results were remarkable. The state simply gave the county the roughly $50,000 per kid it would otherwise cost to incarcerate Deschutes' portion of state juvenile prisoners—with a catch. For each kid who did land in state custody, the county would now have to pay the bill itself. Beyond this, the county could spend the money with great flexibility. County leaders invested in prevention and neighborhood programs, with a strong emphasis on community service.
In just a year, the number of juveniles Deschutes County sent to state institutions dropped by 72 percent.

On the notion that came to be called reinvestment, Jerome Miller was prescient.
“The test for successful deinstitutionalization,” he wrote, “is this. Every dollar attached to an inmate should follow that inmate into the community for at least as long as he or she would have been institutionalized.”

Eliza also grasped the concept of justice reinvestment, whether or not she had heard it so named. “They could have sent me to Exeter for what they spent to lock me up,” she said ruefully one afternoon in the visiting room as she waited, seemingly endlessly, for the state to come up with a suitable “placement” for her.

She was speaking hypothetically, but in fact we had tried it. While Eliza was wasting away in juvenile hall for lack of this “placement,” my colleagues and I begged for permission to let her take the entrance exams that might open the doors to a boarding school. Eliza was brilliant; her scores, we believed, would have been off the charts. As for fitting in, who knows what might have happened, but she certainly did not feel she “fit” where she was. “I
want
to be preppy!” she cried out at one point (boarding school had been her idea).

All this, I was told, was irrelevant. Even if her scores put her in genius territory and she were accepted by every boarding school in the nation, the funds that were allocated to “place” her in a group home—or to keep her in juvenile hall—were not fungible. Nor, it was strongly implied, was Eliza herself. Kids like her did not go to Horace Mann.

There it was, the heart of our resistance to more than surface change: our impoverished imagination when it comes to the young people who fill our juvenile prisons.

Our treatment of the many thousands of young people who pass through our nation's juvenile prisons will not change fundamentally until our understanding of who these youth are, and who they
can
be, also changes—until and unless we hear their voices, see their faces, and accept their claim for a place at the table. Theirs is the age-old civil rights cry—the cry for equality, and with it the assertion of their humanity in the face of a system that depends on denying it.

One reason we remain so invested in practices that have long been discredited is exactly that: so many people have so much
invested
in them, financially as well as ideologically. Juvenile prisons provide jobs, and many are sited in rural regions whose economies rely on them. If the kids go home, the jobs go, too—not just the guards' but also a wide array of service positions associated with keeping captive youth alive.

In an essay published by New America Media, Will draws a troubling analogy between the kid on the corner peddling toxic palliatives and legislators who perpetuate the youth prison despite
its
proven harms.
“The [guards union] is the most powerful lobby in California,” Will writes. “Essentially, the Assembly is sacrificing what's right in order to please the people who are keeping money in their pockets, which to me is no different from the guy on the corner selling drugs.”

In fact, the similarities are frightening. The kid on the corner ignores the long-term pain he plays a part in by fostering addiction because he needs money to survive right now. The assembly member ignores the pain his vote will cause children because he needs a job that's in jeopardy if the union doesn't get what it wants. Both want the quick dollar, so they overlook the consequences of their actions.

“The hardest thing to do in corrections is to take an existing system and try to reform it,” said Dan Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It's much easier to start from the bottom up and build. Because once you've got an established system, you've got a constituency that is right there ready to defend it because . . . people's livelihoods are at stake. Then you have the traditions that have grown up around that institutional system—the practices, the routines that everybody has bought into. That creates a political force that keeps it in place, and that is why these systems change so little after decades and decades of evidence piling up about their ineffectiveness. It comes to a point where that [evidence]
really doesn't matter, because so many people are depending on keeping it in place.”

“Institutional systems are quite resilient,” Macallair warned. “Even if there is a temporary fix, they tend to grow back. Their old practices and policies tend to reemerge after a very short period of time. So, sadly, I despair of the idea that you can reform these institutions to any great degree. The experience is that you can't. You have to tear down and start again.”

Will made the same point, albeit more succinctly: “You can't build something effective on top of something rotten.”

Many have tried, over the years, to do exactly that, and the early results have sometimes appeared promising. In the longer term, however, there may be no recidivist so persistent as the juvenile jailer. How many states, or counties, or individual institutions, have undertaken wholesale efforts to “clean house” in the wake of a lawsuit, scandal, or federal investigation? How many of those same places find themselves embroiled in similar “scandals” down the line?

Jerome Miller, now legendary for shutting down Massachusetts's reform schools in the 1970s, started out as a reformer. “I didn't go to Massachusetts to close the institutions. I went to make them decent,” he has said. But the intractable resistance he faced, not only from politicians but also from his own staff, led him to abandon the notion of reform. Instead, very quickly, Miller released twelve hundred young people from state institutions and placed them under community supervision (or, less often, in other forms of residential care).

As Miller came to understand it,

The unintended by-product of the keeper-captive coupling is a bureaucracy which is by law unaccountable to those it holds and, somewhat oddly, purports to serve. That would be an unhealthy situation for even the most effective manager.

If Phillips Exeter Academy, Andover, Choate, or similar respected prep schools were filled
only
with captive students ordered there by courts and forbidden to leave under penalty of longer imprisonment, the standards of even the best of faculty and administrators would shortly go downhill. Though altruism might salvage things
for a while, it makes a notoriously undependable base for long-term policy.

I thought I could get over this contradiction. We would respond sensitively to each individual youngster while recognizing our public responsibility. In the abstract, these goals aren't contradictory, but in the political arena which defines corrections, they quickly become so. Control slides toward punishment, treatment turns to threats, and decency is eaten away. Society wants its pound of flesh even as it offers sympathy. The captive client must be cooperative while suffering our ministrations. If our help fails the fault is the inmate's.

“Anything, including nothing,” Miller ultimately concluded, “was better than the institutions.”

As Barry Krisberg has pointed out, widespread reform has been attempted before. After Miller closed down Massachusetts's reform schools, according to Krisberg, forty other states began to follow suit. Many moved quickly, “closing facilities and moving kids to the community. Then came the moral panic of the super-predator years. The political process reversed, and they started packing places full of kids.”

Without a change more profound than reform—without a genuine transformation in the way we
see
young people—there is every likelihood that this cycle will repeat itself; that the political and economic tide will turn once again, and beds that have been emptied will be filled once more. The fact that
the recent decline in juvenile incarceration has brought the number confined almost exactly back to where it stood in the mid-1980s—before the super-predator scare and the years of backlash that followed—is a caution in itself. “Juvenile justice reform” has been on the table almost as long as has juvenile justice itself. It's time to get over reforming a system that isn't reforming a group of kids who need something altogether different. Providing what they need in order to grow, and what the community needs in order to be safe, demands not reform but wholesale transformation, both in how we perceive the young people we currently incarcerate and in how we respond when they step outside the law.

We need not start from scratch in enacting this transformation. Community-based interventions that eschew isolation and rely on connection have been proven many times over to protect public safety while
enhancing young lives. The challenge before us is to take these “alternatives” and make them the norm across the country, or else to give up on another generation—a risk and a waste we cannot afford.

The first step toward deeper transformation is to take the time to listen to the young people who have passed through our juvenile prisons or remain there today. Airlifted out of their homes and communities, hidden away behind bars and high fences, young prisoners experience what sociologists call social death—“the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society.” Addressing
this
crime—the social execution of thousands of young people at exactly the moment when finding their place in that wider society is their developmental imperative—is a necessary first step. Only once we can see those we incarcerate as fully human—not “delinquents,” not “wards,” not “other people's children”—can we begin to understand their needs and motivations, much less answer the challenge so many have posed:
Why should I give a fuck? No one gives a fuck about me
.

Understanding the nihilism that can set in so early allows us to imagine responses to delinquency more profound than reform and deeper than simply less-strict sanctions, responses that get to the heart of motive itself. What might change in a young person's life if he were given cause to believe he
did
have a shot at a future, that he mattered enough to deserve attention that was not solely punitive?