Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (6 page)

“The mail—some of them hold the mail for years. They throw out the letters,” Enrique said. Room searches provided yet another opportunity to insult those on the outside whom young people most love. “The pictures that you have of your family—nieces, girlfriend, grandma—everything is taken out, thrown around. Your letters, your papers? All wrinkled. Your schoolwork, your court letters, it's all mixed up.”

In the four years that Enrique was locked up, he went through this more times than he could count, he said. “Sometimes twice a week. Once a week. It happens a lot.”

Some young men on his unit registered their objection by tearing out the relevant section of the facility handbook (which calls for guards to leave belongings as they find them) and placing it in full view on top of their lockers. “What are you gonna do? You gonna write a grievance?” guards would mock in response. It was widely understood that grievances went nowhere.

Rochelle was fifteen and pregnant when she was locked up in New York State for fighting. “They treat you like dogs,” said Rochelle. “The worst thing about it is the search. When they surprise you out of nowhere, wake you up from your sleep and trash your room. They don't have no kind of respect there. You have to get naked and squat. It is just degrading.”

“I never thought I would be someplace like that,” said Rochelle, whose pregnancy made intrusions such as squatting naked before strangers
particularly humiliating. “It was horrible. I didn't like being away from family. I was trapped. I felt lonely. It was like I was in another world.”

Young prisoners learn in multiple ways that their bodies are no more their own than are the cells they maintain so carefully or the uniforms they wear. On top of strip searches and supervised showers (which may come with catcalls or disparaging remarks from guards), some institutions force young people to endure pat searches multiple times each day. At one Florida facility, according to a Department of Justice investigation, youth were subjected to frisk searches more than ten times a day, even when they were under constant supervision, “purportedly for recovery of contraband. During the six month period we reviewed, the most dangerous contraband recovered were pencils.”

“Many of the youths informed us that some [staff] were especially intrusive in conducting the searches,” federal investigators wrote. “We heard a number of reports of youth being groped by [staff] during the searches. One youth noted, ‘Some staff rub on your privates.' Another stated, staff ‘touch too much.' ”

Reading the results of this investigation, I thought of one of my first visits to a county juvenile hall, where I had gone to conduct a writing workshop for two units, boys and girls. Breaking a rule I had not been informed of, I failed to count all the pencils before we handed them out so they could be counted again before we left.

Because of my mistake, everyone who had joined the class was strip-searched. There was no evidence that a pencil had gone missing, nor that any of the young people subjected to the search had done anything wrong. The error was entirely mine, but no one suggested that I be penalized for it. While the girls and boys who had, moments ago, been my “students” were being stripped naked in front of their keepers, I was on the road, headed for home.

Prison dehumanizes, not as a side effect but as a central function. A child who is forcibly removed from home and society and placed inside a cage receives a powerful message about herself and her place in the world. Assigning a number in lieu of a name; taking away clothing and personal belongings and replacing them with uniforms and cold metal bunks; the
bare-bones environment with its spare furnishings, harsh lighting, and round-the-clock surveillance; the lining up and other militaristic affectations; and, above all, the stripping away of human connection—every aspect of institutional life conspires to diminish a young person's sense of herself as someone who matters, to wear down her sense of individuality. Because adolescents are at a stage of life where building a sense of self in relation to others is central to their development, this assault on identity strikes them with particular force.

“When you're in a place where you are segregated, ostracized—a physical environment that is corroding, that is black, that is dark, that is isolated—all these things do something to your brain, to your psyche, to your self-esteem,” Luis said. “It is something that your body internalizes, and it is obviously negative. A place that is dark and eerie? This is something that no human being
should
adapt to. We are not made to. You are supposed to be out in the sun, for God's sake!”

The notion of “prison culture” may have the ring of sociological jargon, but inside the gates its pull is undeniable. Each time I drive into a compound surrounded by razor wire, pull up at the guard station to verify my clearance, and leave my identification with the guard at the front desk, I feel as if I've just had my passport stamped at the border.

Young people acculturate, but at a cost.
Treated like an animal, I became an animal.
Over and over, as they described growing up in institutions governed by the law of the jungle—adapting to a culture of captivity and power where the worst thing you could be was somebody's bitch—this is the transformation young people described.

Many referred to the institutions where they spent their teenage years as “gladiator schools” or simply “schools for crime.” Their assessment is borne out by the research, which finds that spending time in a state juvenile facility
increases
the odds that a young person will advance in delinquency and that he will go on to be arrested as an adult.

“I saw more violence in those six years [locked up] than I've ever seen,” said Will, a rangy, long-limbed young man with wire-rimmed glasses and piercing brown eyes, “even on TV. If you can imagine it, then I've probably seen it.”

“The mind games,” he elaborated, were “the hardest part. ‘Oh, you're
new? Here goes a Ramen noodle. Yeah, I'll take care of you.' Then, like a week later: ‘Oh, you gotta go stab this dude.' ”

Mark was stocky, tattooed, and muscular, a veteran of more locked facilities than he cared to name. “As far as being aggressive and not trusting anybody, that's what the system did for me,” he said flatly. “The weak get run over. You gotta be strong and stick to your guns, and you can't trust anybody.”

As a teenager inside a California youth prison, Mark was forced to participate in what became known as
“Friday Night Fights.”
Guards would place known gang rivals together in a locked room and stand idly by, watching while captive youth beat each other bloody, intervening only when they'd seen enough, using pepper spray or riot guns to break up the staged battles.

“I know where my anger stems from,” said Mark, who struggled with what he called “blackout rages” well into adulthood, “and my inability to trust. If you tell me this is a cup of coffee, I'll turn it over and over and over till I find out what it is.”

“Which I'm trying to work out,” he added, glancing at his girlfriend—who, he acknowledged, had sometimes been the target of those rages—and seeming to deflate as the anger left his voice and a rueful tone replaced it. “It doesn't happen overnight.”

On top of the violence, chaos, fear, and degradation, the defining aspect of life behind bars is isolation. A young person who spends part or all of her adolescent years in a locked facility, away from friends and family, her every action subject to the dictates of strangers,
misses many if not most of the central developmental tasks of adolescence: learning to navigate intimate relationships; forming the capacity to make independent decisions; taking on increased responsibility; discovering and expressing one's personal identity. None of these goals can be met in isolation. All require relationship, human connection. That is what prison, by definition, takes away.

Walk a straight line.

Don't be a bitch.

Don't ask questions.

Talk is dead.

Machine down.

These are the lessons young people who are locked up learn instead: to close off their emotions, shut down their intellect, quell their individuality, avoid forming connections, and view all interactions through the prism of Power.

Gladys Carríon, the iconoclastic head of new York state's office of Children and family services—which runs that state's juvenile facilities—makes no bones about the impact of severing relationships during the crucial passage that is adolescence (not coincidentally, she is also rapidly shutting down the juvenile prisons under her jurisdiction). “Kids are punished when they're removed from their home,” she said bluntly. “We don't have to put them on the chain gang. They're removed. That is punishment. I keep reminding my staff,
that is the punishment
: removing the kid from their family, from their school, and from their community. I don't think you could do anything worse in the formative years of a child, of a young person, than to remove them from their community. We are interrupting their developmental process. We don't need to punish them any further.”

Luis offered a related analysis of the impact of incarceration on a young mind and spirit. “Prison makes you hate yourself,” he said flatly, as if stating something that was widely understood. “The way prison is developed is to keep you oppressed, and in a state where you cannot believe in yourself. Everyone looks down on you, instead of looking down
at
you and helping you up.”

“The way that you are treated, the way that you are stigmatized, the way that you are labeled . . .” Luis trailed off in frustration but quickly recovered his train of thought.

“If society wants to see a decline in victimization, then you need to
help
the person who is hurting,” he insisted, “because otherwise, he'll end up turning on himself, and you. That is just our nature.”

Jared turned to metaphor to describe the emotional impact of incarceration. Not long after his release, he told me, he went down to the san Francisco Bay and swam out into the open water, just because he could. Intoxicated by the freedom, solitude, and motion, he swam too far and panicked, nearly drowning before he recovered enough to make it back to shore. The sensation of near drowning—the struggle for air, the terror of
the depths, and the fear of slipping past the point of no return—was the best analogy Jared could find for the pressure he felt on the worst days behind bars. These were the days when he felt his lungs might implode as confinement sucked the very air out of his spirit.

“That feeling, almost drowning,” said Jared, “is the only thing I've ever experienced that even came close to being locked up.”

2

BIRTH OF AN ABOMINATION

The Juvenile Prison in the Nineteenth Century

You have to be ever-vigilant every time you deprive someone of their liberty. It should never be done easily or cavalierly—always as a last resort. If history has taught us anything, it's taught us that.

—New York City probation commissioner Vincent Schiraldi

T
HE STORY OF JUVENILE
justice in the united states begins, as does every epic tragedy, as a tale of good intentions.

The story of the juvenile prison begins near the founding of the country, when a group of merchants and civic leaders came together under the banner of the newly formed society for the Prevention of Pauperism, later renamed the Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency.

Intending to rescue children from the degradations of the adult prison, Progressive-era reformers wound up with a junior version, which they dubbed, optimistically, the “House of Refuge.” in New York, home to the first House of Refuge, the state legislature gave this new institution a mandate as noble as its name.
Its managers, according to the law that authorized the New York House of Refuge, were to provide wayward youth—whether delinquent or merely destitute—with education and employment “as in their judgment will be most for the reformation and . . . future benefit and advantage of such children.”

By way of these institutions—which soon spread across the nation—the
“child savers” diverted countless children from adult institutions. They also gradually gained a power that had heretofore been reserved for the individual patriarch, no matter his means: control over the children.

The Houses of Refuge, author Kenneth Wooden writes, were
“a historical milestone in the American family culture. For the first time family centered discipline was replaced by institutional discipline administered by city, county or state governments. Parents, grandparents, older sisters and brothers were replaced by guards and superintendents.”

The House of Refuge, in other words—like every manifestation of the juvenile prison to follow—came to function as a mechanism for gaining control over the children of the poor, depriving them of their liberty in the name of their own best interest while skirting the burdensome requirements of due process. The civic leaders who comprised the society had little compunction about placing the cart ahead of the horse, granting themselves control over any child they deemed at risk of delinquency well before the law gave them license to do so.

On January 1, 1825, the New York House of Refuge—the nation's first known juvenile reformatory—opened its doors, with a society board member holding the post of superintendent and a total of nine youngsters under his supervision.