Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (15 page)

Roland—whose initiation to a California state facility involved guards offering explicit instructions on how to fight, along with a graphic inventory of the injuries he would sustain—went through a similar evolution.

“At first,” he explained, “regardless of anything, I had emotions. I had feelings.” But in an environment where, he said, guards entertained themselves by unlocking rivals' cells at night and watching them fight, or dragged youth out of sight of the security cameras before laying into them, emotion soon came to feel like a weakness too costly to maintain.

Before his arrest, Roland said, he had been living a double life: one foot headed for college, the other still cemented to the street. When some homies bent on retaliation offered him a ride home, he was ambivalent even as he got into the car. His instinct was right: he ended up charged along with them in a drive-by shooting.

Once he was behind bars, the fork in the road became all the more distinct: he had to make a choice about how he would do his time. Behind bars, without sunlight or water, the side of him that aspired to something better soon withered, while the streetwise survivor had all that it needed to grow.

“It's hard to explain,” Roland began hesitantly, “and people probably will never understand, but it's all mind manipulation in there. If you could use your mind, then you pretty much got it made.”

“Every time somebody new comes, you play with them,” Roland elaborated, describing mind games that revolved around power and fear. The most common was a basic protection racket. Roland would take a new
arrival aside while one of his friends circled, mean mugging the newcomer. Roland would play good cop, showing the new kid the ropes and pointing out danger spots.

“He's not by himself,” he'd warn, casting a quick glance at his menacing co-conspirator. “He's got about six homies that will jump up and get you. . . . I could look out for you, but it's going to cost.”

“It is what it is in here,” Roland would sigh, world-weary, before cutting to the chase: $10 a week. “We shake hands, and it's a done deal.”

The problem comes when this kind of skill is learned too well. A young person carries back into the outside world whatever he has learned inside. Empathy, for instance, is too often quashed, replaced by a capacity for disconnection that may be useful in a context of institutional abuse but runs directly counter to the goal of rehabilitation.

Will doesn't play much basketball these days. A dean's list student with a prestigious scholarship that will take him through a PhD, a loving father, and a devoted son who helps care for his much younger brother, he doesn't have much time. But during his six-year incarceration, basketball helped him keep it together. He was a good player, always had been, and the intensity of the competition helped him release the tension he built up in his efforts to be a model inmate.

Will played hard but carefully, watchful to keep his aggression just clear of the foul line. But he did play all out, leaving the court dripping with sweat. That, he assumes, was why the pain was so overpowering when the guards came at him with what they called “chemical restraints”: his pores were wide open, allowing the caustic, Mace-like liquid to penetrate more deeply.

It was a particularly fierce game, and Will had gotten into it with a rival player. Words were exchanged, followed by blows. Will swung first.

A watchful young man, Will knew the institution had recently started using a new kind of chemical restraint. It worked as a fogger, emitting a powerful spray intended to clear a room, he recalls, and the label warned against using it at close range. That didn't stop the guards from spraying it directly into both boys' faces, aiming for their eyes, Will said.

According to the complaint in
Farrell v. Harper
, a sweeping lawsuit that successfully challenged practices throughout the California Youth
Authority, this kind of abuse, and more, was commonplace. Per the complaint:

It is common practice within the CYA for staff and/or guards to slam a ward down, pull his arms behind his back, force a knee into his back, and use excessive amounts of Mace or other chemical agents even after the ward is restrained. Wards also have their heads slammed against walls and rails and are beaten and burned by tear gas canisters and Maced without provocation. For example, a ward was repeatedly sprayed with chemical agents for declining to undergo a strip search after being placed in a holding room. In another example, a ward was knocked unconscious when shot directly in the head with a “foam baton” gun. In a third example, CYA officers placed a handcuffed ward face down on a bed and repeatedly struck his head.

Will had witnessed similar attacks before and heard others scream as the chemical hit the sensitive membranes of their eyes. Still, it was worse than he anticipated. The pain as the caustic substance penetrated his open pores was compounded by the twenty-four hours he was forced to go without medical treatment or even a chance to clean off, the chemical seeping ever deeper as he sat locked in a cell.

“I wanted to see so bad,” he recalls of that period. “But whenever I opened my eyes, it just hurt more.”

The chemical onslaught was followed by a monthlong stint in solitary: “twenty-three hours a day in a cell by myself. The hour I didn't spend in my cell, I showered and sat in a cage by myself with nothing to do but stare into space. This is what they called recreation. When my mother came to see me, I was put in a fluorescent orange jumpsuit and wore handcuffs accompanied by shackles. The ‘peace officers' used to joke and call it jailhouse jewelry.”

Outside sources corroborate Will's account, as they do much of what I heard from young people who suffered abuse inside juvenile institutions.
California law permits the use of chemical weapons “only to restrain wards, and not for punishment or retaliation.” Nevertheless, according to investigators,
272 youths were sprayed with chemical weapons by correctional officers in the course of just one month at a single facility—an
average of about ten youths per day at that site alone. The
Farrell
lawsuit also documents young people being put in restraint chairs or, as Will was, isolation or suicide watch cells
“for extended periods of time without legitimate justification.”

Years later, Will still suffers from the attack. No matter how much lotion he applies, the skin beneath his eyebrows regularly peels: a constant physical reminder of those agonizing hours he spent without treatment or relief.

I asked him how he got through both the protracted pain and the subsequent month in solitary. “That's where hope comes in,” he told me—“the idea of the future. You can't deal with the resentment at the time because it's so much, and the situation is still so bad. The only way I was able to deal with it was to think about when I would get out. Hope. Some people use religion. Whatever vehicle, it's about taking your brain out of that moment in time. So I thought about the first time I'd see my mom when I was free. Even something as simple as reading a book is taking my mind off jail. It depends on the person and what you are interested in, but the core value is, you take yourself out of your situation. You can't do it physically, but mentally you can. I'd think about the first meal I would eat when I get out, or wonder what my mom is doing right now.”

When a captive speaks of hope, he's talking of a strategy as much as an emotion: a technique to stay human in an environment designed to dehumanize him. If he could conjure the taste of a meal consumed in freedom, or picture his mother going about her day, perhaps he could hold on to a piece of himself.

That prison dehumanizes those held there is a well-known phenomenon; in fact, it's not hard to conclude that this is the institution's purpose. But the more I heard stories such as Darren's and Will's, or watched security-camera videos of guards setting dogs on unresisting boys, the more I wondered about those who went home at the end of each shift. Surely they were not all sadists who had chosen a career in corrections in order to hurt children. Did working inside a prison somehow undermine the human instinct to nurture and protect the young? Was prison life as dehumanizing to the keepers as it was to the kept?

How else to explain the fact that in facilities all across the country, adults who have accepted responsibility for supervising young people turn
instead to harming them? Why would the same guards who had always considered Will a “model prisoner” spray a toxic chemical directly into his eyes? And—even more incomprehensibly—how could they allow him to soak in the poison through the night and the following day, then leave him in solitary confinement for a full month after that?

What did they say when they got home and a spouse asked how their day went? What went through their minds as they looked at their own children?

“You tell me we're there to be rehabilitated,” Will said when I raised this question, speaking to a hypothetical guard. “You can't teach us that if you're not even connected to us. There's a vast disconnect between the people who are supposed to teach us the right way and us.”

In Will's analysis, connection, or relationship, is not only what young people need to rehabilitate themselves; it is also what the juvenile justice system and those who run it—from the front lines up through the administrators and legislators who call the shots—need if they are ever to succeed in meeting their stated goals. But many guards—especially the veterans, including those in positions of leadership—have spent more of their lives inside prisons than have their young charges. As a result, as Darren put it, “They are as institutionalized as we are.”

Like any other shift worker, Will observed, prison guards are just trying to get through the day with minimum hassle. “If I were working at this coffee shop, and the coffee filters starting acting crazy, I'd be pissed,” he offered when I asked him to help me understand how some of the pleasant, thoughtful officers of the law I had met were capable of the brutality that he and many others described.

“The reason could be, ‘You are making my shift harder.' it's not a system set up to care. It's an assembly-line mentality. It's not like we have souls or anything. It's more like we're a product.
This is my occupation and when the machines aren't working right, I have a hard day. It's not like I'm dealing with humans
. I see that everywhere:
Let my shift run smooth, don't act up, I hope all the stirrers are there, I hope the sugar is plentiful in my coffee shop, and if not—there goes my day. My shift is messed up
.

“
My
day,” Will repeated, with the emphasis on the “my.” “It's very egocentric. Rehabilitation isn't possible. There's not even an avenue for
rehabilitation when the people who are supposed to help you are only thinking about themselves.”

Vincent Schiraldi, now head of probation for New York City, is the kind of leader who is frequently described as “outspoken” or “controversial”—words that don't quite do justice to his strikingly direct manner. A former watchdog and advocate who jumped the fence to run the institutions he had spent decades challenging, Schiraldi has managed to hold on to a consistent ethos regardless of his role or title: that young people do better in the community than they do behind bars. He has also maintained a distinct indifference to the mores of his new position, continuing to communicate in a straightforward and occasionally profane manner without even a hint of bureaucratese.

Prior to taking the job in New York, Schiraldi ran the District of Columbia's juvenile system.
His signal achievement there was closing down the District's Oak Hill Youth Center, “one of the most disastrous and abusive juvenile correctional facilities in the nation,” and replacing it with the
$46 million New Beginnings Youth Development Center, a light-filled compound that resembles a university campus more closely than it does a traditional institution. He also radically reduced the number of young people in confinement, moving many into community placements or supervision at home.

The D.C. system was in a state of chaos when Schiraldi was sworn in—reportedly the twentieth director in the nineteen years the District had been fighting the
Jerry M. vs. the District of Columbia
lawsuit, which challenged conditions at the crumbling Oak Hill facility. By the time he arrived, Schiraldi said, there were twenty-two court orders in place—as the new boss, he found himself operating under orders A through Q—a testimony both to the optimism of the advocates and the intransigence of the institution.

The first thing Schiraldi did to prepare for his new job was to read through the transcripts of the
Jerry M.
suit. He read of “kids taking their shirts off and stuffing them in the toilet bowl to prevent rats and roaches from crawling up on them and biting them at night.” From a report by the inspector general, he learned that “it was easier to score [drugs] in that
facility than it was on the streets of the District of Columbia.” He spoke of “kids sleeping on cots in dayrooms,” or in quarters so hot that those with asthma could not safely remain there.

“Staff malaise and depression” were pervasive, Schiraldi said. “The place reeked of apathy.”

The apathy was not limited to Oak Hill. That facility, he observed in a tone that made clear that decades in the field had not quelled his capacity for outrage, “was twenty miles from the nation's capital. Twenty miles from the National Prison Project. Twenty miles from the Justice Department. And this had gone on for decades . . . under the noses of the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world.”