Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (12 page)

Six foot something, dark skinned and almond eyed, Lamont drew
attention everywhere he went. He had learned to expect that much of it would be fearful, but that doesn't mean he had come to accept it. Charming, funny, and exceptionally perceptive, Lamont spent a great amount of energy reassuring people that he wasn't going to hurt them. For a young black man coming of age at the apex of the super-predator era, it was no easy task.

As crack cocaine hit the cities and private gun ownership became more widespread, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw an increase in juvenile violent crime. More influential than the trend lines were the individual horror stories, local tragedies that quickly entered the national folklore.

Meanwhile, high-profile researchers crossed crime stats with demographic projections to stir up fears of a coming wave of “super-predators” unlike any seen before—
“more savage than salvageable,” according to Princeton political science professor John DiIulio, who made his name by playing up the (supposedly) coming menace.

On October 19, 1996, a book called
Body Count
—co-authored by DiIulio, drug czar William J. Bennett, and think-tank director John P. Walters—hit the shelves, and America was formally introduced to our new worst nightmare: our children.

Well, somebody's children, anyway. The “super-predators” portrayed in the book, “kids from 13 to 16 who apparently feel nothing as they kill, rob or rape,” were painted as so utterly and incomprehensibly
other
that it is hard to imagine anyone seeing a hint of their own kids in the horrifying image. But that was just the point. The book fabricated a new
breed
of adolescent, not only different by virtue of race or background, but so fundamentally alien as to defy comprehension, much less offer the prospect of redemption. The newly hatched “super-predators” were so “radically self-regarding” and “morally impoverished,” according to this line of reasoning, that talk of rehabilitating them was dangerously naive.

“A new generation of street criminals is upon us,” DiIulio warned, “the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.”

He and his co-authors painted with a broad brush, portraying all “inner-city children” as potential predators, tainted from earliest childhood by the depravity of their clan—“teenagers and adults who are themselves deviant, delinquent or criminal.” Given demographic projections, the authors warned, violence would reach unheard-of levels by the year 2000.

The political hysteria of the moment found its perfect spokesmodel in the chubby-cheeked, baby-faced, Ivy League–certified DiIulio, who claimed he had simply been crunching the numbers when evidence of this looming mob emerged on his screen. In fact, the fearmongering of the era was in keeping with a long tradition. As Barry Krisberg of the University of California, Berkeley's Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy has pointed out,
“Juvenile justice policies have historically been built on a foundation of myths. From the ‘dangerous classes' of the 19th century to the super-predators of the late 20th century, government responses to juvenile crime have been dominated by fear of the young, anxiety about immigrants or racial minorities, and hatred of the poor.”

Mass-circulation news magazines upped the ante by illustrating stories on the
super-predator “phenomenon” with images of glowering black teenagers. Politicians hopped on the bandwagon, passing legislation that increased penalties in juvenile court or that allowed or demanded that growing numbers of youth be transferred to adult court, where longer sentences and harsher penalties were readily dispensed. The public ate it up, and what would later be revealed as myth quickly became a movement—one that has resulted in an amping up of our response to juvenile crime that spans the spectrum from
kindergartners hauled off in handcuffs for school yard scraps to twelve-year-olds sentenced to spend their lives in prison.

The fear on the faces of strangers was not the only thing that let youth of color like Lamont know that they were public enemy number one. All around them, the media were screaming the same message. The super-predators were coming—a generation of young people more ruthless, more vicious, and less amenable to change than any who'd come before. With the adolescent population slated to increase in coming years, these teenage terrorists would arrive in hordes.

Despite the glaring lack of evidence to support the notion that more kids meant more crime, the media latched on to the notion that, as writer Robin Templeton put it,
“demography is destiny” with a fervor not seen since the turn-of-the-century heyday of yellow journalism, when William Randolph Hearst's
San Francisco Examiner
tried to outdo Joseph Pulitzer's hyperbolic
New York World
by devoting a full fourth of its column inches to stories about crime.

A century after Hearst found fame and fortune by pioneering “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, a
Time
magazine headline warned of an imminent
“Teenage Time Bomb.” The ticking tots were “just four, five and six years old now, but already they are making criminologists nervous,” the writers intoned in a widely cited cover story.

“America is being threatened by a growing cadre of cold-blooded teens called ‘super-predators,' ” the
Christian Science Monitor
echoed. News of their imminent arrival even made its way across the Atlantic, where the London
Times
warned of “The Invasion of the Super-predators”—a generation of American children whose default mode was “remorseless brutality.”

By 1996, according to research by the Berkeley Media Studies Group,
more than half of all local news stories about youth focused on violence, despite the fact that adults were committing 80 percent of the nation's crime.

The racialized nature of these warnings was impossible to miss. Black teenagers growing up in the midst of this cacophony knew that when Americans heard the word “super-predator,” theirs was the face superimposed on the nightmare, and that “inner city” had become a euphemism for wherever “they” might congregate.

Criminologists not only advanced the super-predator rhetoric; they made explicit its racial subtext. In a report to the U.S. attorney general, Northeastern University's James Alan Fox called particular attention to projected growth in the black teenage population—which he estimated would increase 26 percent by 2005—to underscore his warning that “our nation faces a future juvenile violence problem that may make today's epidemic pale in comparison.”

“The political demonization of young black males as morally impoverished ‘super-predators,' ” University of Minnesota Centennial Professor of Law Barry Feld wrote in 1999, “and the depiction of delinquents as responsible offenders have eroded the Progressives' social construction of ‘childhood' innocence and vulnerability.”

Feld was not talking about something as ephemeral as a stereotype here. As changing attitudes seeped into the cultural bedrock, the rehabilitative premise itself began to crumble. The very idea that minors ought to be treated differently from adults—the founding principle of the juvenile
court—was called into question. In an era when action was judged independent of circumstance, what reason was youth not to hold a criminal—much less a predator—“accountable” for his crimes? And holding kids accountable increasingly became synonymous simply with holding them. These were the boom years of the juvenile prison, with new ones springing up in job-hungry rural back posts all across the country.

The super-predator myth not only served to justify already abysmal conditions in America's juvenile prisons; it opened the door both to net widening (criminalizing a larger number of acts and locking up more kids) and to an arms race escalation in the sanctions administered, with each state scrambling to outdo the others in its efforts to “crack down” on kids by increasing penalties in juvenile court and—most significantly—
creating mechanisms to transfer many more youths to the adult system.

A number of states went so far as to revise their juvenile codes in order to make explicit their punitive intent. Texas, for instance, promised “to promote the concept of punishment for criminal acts” and Kansas committed to “hold juvenile offenders accountable.”
Other states made similar changes.
The result was that the number of cases heard each year in juvenile court rose 44 percent, from 1.2 million in 1989 to 1.8 million a decade later, despite a steep
drop
in juvenile violent crime.

What had previously been unspoken was now written into law. The fundamental rehabilitative mission of the juvenile justice system and, with it, our collective understanding that young people were different from adults—more vulnerable, more malleable, less able to make reasoned decisions and hence less responsible—buckled under the sustained attack that the super-predator movement represented. The result was unmistakable: not only did rates of incarceration in juvenile facilities increase; more minors were sentenced to adult prisons and jails.

“At the state level, the super-predator myth played an important role in 47 states amending their laws on juvenile crime to get tougher on youthful criminals,” Krisberg has written. “Legislators modified their state laws to permit younger children to be tried in adult criminal courts. . . . Legislators also weakened protection of the confidentiality of minors tried in juvenile courts, allowing some juvenile court convictions to be counted later in adult proceedings to enhance penalties.”

The bottom line? More young people were arrested—and punished
more harshly—for increasingly minor offenses. Even as crime dropped, juvenile incarceration continued to rise.

The super-predator turned out to be little more than the product of an overheated public imagination, but the tough-on-kids legislation this bogey-teen inspired would long outlive him. While the rhetoric may have cooled, the countless young people still sentenced under the harsh adult transfer laws passed in the name of the nonexistent monster suffer the consequence to this day.

While
Body Count
relies on demographic projections and other nods to quantitative research to give its inflammatory rhetoric a veneer of academic credibility, DiIulio tipped his hand in a lesser-known, more personal piece of chest pounding that was published in the
Weekly Standard.

“Since 1980,” DiIulio proclaimed,

I've studied prisons and jails all across the country—San Quentin, Leavenworth, Rikers Island. I've been on the scene at prison murders and riots (and once was almost killed inside a prison). Moreover, I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood and am built like an aging linebacker. I will still waltz backwards, notebook in hand and alone, into any adult maximum-security cellblock full of killers, rapists, and muggers.

But a few years ago, I forswore research inside juvenile lock-ups. The buzz of impulsive violence, the vacant stares and smiles, and the remorseless eyes were at once too frightening and too depressing (my God, these are children!) for me to pretend to “study” them.

This limitation did not stop DiIulio from expounding on the character and inner life of youth he found too frightening to speak with, even with the massive security infrastructure of a juvenile prison covering his back. Per the professor,

On the horizon . . . are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators. They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being in their path). They fear neither the stigma of
arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They live by the meanest code of the meanest streets, a code that reinforces rather than restrains their violent, hair-trigger mentality. In prison or out, the things that super-predators get by their criminal behavior—sex, drugs, money—are their own immediate rewards. Nothing else matters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes “naturally”: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.

What to do? DiIulio had an answer for that one, too.
“No one in academia,” he wrote, “is a bigger fan of incarceration than I am. Between 1985 and 1991 the number of juveniles in custody increased from 49,000 to nearly 58,000. By my estimate, we will probably need to incarcerate at least 150,000 juvenile criminals in the years just ahead. In deference to public safety, we will have little choice but to pursue genuine get-tough law-enforcement strategies against the super-predators.”

It is no coincidence that the man who could coolly propose a near tripling of the number of young people behind bars—who glibly called himself a “fan” of incarceration—was the same man who, when he encountered in person the young people whose fate his words might well determine, found them too unsettling even to approach. This aversion, which exacerbated the public's aversion, is key to understanding how we tolerate the destructive, abusive conditions in our nation's juvenile lockups.

A few years after
Body Count
hit the nation's bookstores, DiIulio started backpedaling.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have shouted for prevention of crimes,” he told the
New York Times
in 2001, not long after George Bush Jr. appointed him director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

DiIulio attributed this ideological shift to an epiphany he experienced while praying on Palm Sunday. In this moment, it was revealed to him that his high-voltage Rolodex had been entrusted to him by God and that he was charged with using it (and any other vestiges of his notoriety) to “bring caring, responsible adults to wrap their arms around these kids.”