Kids in Adult Lockups Get a Voice: Their Lives Portrayed

MSNBC has done a documentary, “Young Kids, Hard Time” on young offenders who are doing time in adult jail. Young people caught up in the adult  criminal justice system have so few advocates in the face of such a huge, punishing monster and so few people have any real concept of what life in these facilities is like for them that something like this documentary can only  help to erode some of America’s hardheartedness and ignorance.

A Picture is Worth Thousands: Some Hard Graphics on Incarceration

Prison Culture is one of the best sites around on criminal justice. It combines the public side of incarceration with the personal, i.e. the effects of the system on all our lives. Recently Prison Culture posted a graphic representation of facts about the US criminal justice system. Laid out so clearly and simply it’s hard to ignore the impact of our broken system of justice on us as a country. It’s worth taking a look at.

Lessons From Solitary Confinement

I had just finished reading “Safety and Security,” a chapter from my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, at a recent book event. It describes a morning I spent proctoring a state exam for a student who was locked up in solitary confinement at the county jail where I taught high school for ten years.

Each time I read that chapter the horrors of that morning come back to me: the emergency response team dragging in an inmate, struggling, crying, screaming that he couldn’t breathe, that he was dying, couldn’t anybody please help him, until the glass and metal door of his cell slammed shut on his pleas. That morning I knew that I had seen something that no civilian was meant to witness. And I knew, as well, that every man on that block, locked in his own cage of silence, had had a similar story of despair to tell.

After I finished reading the chapter that evening, my listeners sat in stunned silence, caught in the nightmare of solitary confinement. Then, tentatively a hand went up.

“I was married to a man who was in solitary for several years,” a woman in her 60s said. “When I asked him how he made it through, he told me that he practiced walking meditation, and that he got to know, really know, every concrete block in his cell. He said he learned a lot.”

I didn’t doubt her husband’s experience—or her perception of it. Yet I sensed in what she said an attitude I’d heard before from people trying to make sense of this brutal practice. It is an attitude, I suspect, that offers people comfort: solitary confinement as the monk’s cave, as the scholar’s study, as the New Age guru’s retreat; a time for meditation, yoga, reading; self-discovery.

It’s a romantic image—the lone prisoner triumphing over his keeper—that’s been around for awhile and has made its way into the general consciousness. Burt Lancaster in The Birdman of Alcatraz as Robert Stroud serving a life sentence in solitary surrounded by his books and birds. Or Denzil Washington in The Hurricane as Rubin Carter studying his way to personal liberation from his isolation.

Nothing could be further from the truth for the majority of men and women in prisons across the country buried in isolation cells, some for years.

As often as I could I visited my students—some as young as 15—who were locked up in solitary. (Luckily, state education law mandated that an incarcerated high school student must receive some kind of education even in solitary confinement.)

Contrary to that romantic image, the men—young and old—I saw on my escorted walk down the block’s hallway had triumphed over nothing.  “The cage,” as my students called it, reeked of unwashed, long neglected bodies. The walls were scuffed and gouged where shackled inmates writhed and kicked as they were dragged in. The cell door windows were smeared as prisoners jammed their faces at odd angles against the glass, desperate to see anyone, anything, hungry for visual stimulation. If the men weren’t sleeping (and many slept for 15, 16 hours a day, barely waking for meals) they were screeching, howling through the walls, trying to make contact with each other, with another human being, even if those shouts were indecipherable and incomprehensible.

That evening, listening to the woman’s comment, I couldn’t help thinking about those inmates I saw. Few of them, for whatever reasons, had any of her husband’s resources, especially the young men—children really—that I taught whose lives were fractured, some seemingly beyond repair, and whose identities were too fragile to withstand the assault of solitary.

Put in isolation, for behavior the department of corrections deemed dangerous and uncontrollable, a threat to “safety and security”—behavior considered less than human— those individuals were made to live in subhuman conditions in order to learn how to act human. But the only lesson learned is one that most locked up people have known all their lives: There is no end to how cruel we can be to each other; and how easily we are able to justify that cruelty.

“I Hear Bad Things Happen in Prisons.”

Book signings are great for stories, as every author knows. Everybody has one they want to tell you.

I’ve had my share as I’ve done readings for “I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup.” There was the teenaged woman who lived on the streets, but finally got a job and a room for “me and my baby.” The grandmother who lost a son and daughter to crime. The Viet Nam vet who did lots of drugs until Jesus found him.

At one recent reading, I couldn’t help noticing the woman, last in line, staring down, clutching my book. When she got to me I wasn’t sure she’d give it up to be signed.

“I’m almost afraid to read your book,” she winced. “I have two boys locked up. I hear bad things happen in prison.”

That’s all she said. Then she asked me to sign her book, took it back and left.

Seeing the stunned look in her eyes, I knew I hadn’t eased her mind. I’d read the chapter about Dario, a young student of mine who was in solitary confinement in the county jail where I taught. A hard chapter to write. A hard chapter to read aloud. A hard chapter to listen to thinking about your locked up sons.

She was right, bad things do happen in prison. Especially if you’re young. Department of Justice statistics—on sexual assault and physical abuse (done by staff as well as other inmates); on medical treatment denied; on arbitrary harsh discipline—bear out her fears out.

That evening, leaving the bookstore, I wish she hadn’t bolted like an animal in pain. Because, if I had had time to think, I would have offered her a few fragments of hope. Strange words, I know, coming from a guy who for ten years taught minors jailed with adults and has chronicled prison’s brutal culture.

Still, I would have told her that as bad as it was, there were a few good people who work in jails, who in their own small ways tried to make things better for inmates with their hardheaded compassion.

Like Correctional Officer Huston. He was a strong advocate for kids. Tough as he was on administration for their mistreatment of minors (he was always in trouble with corrections for his outspokenness), he was equally tough on the kids he worked with. He held them accountable for their crimes; didn’t let them blame “the man.” Still they listened to him because he didn’t hide behind his badge. “I was trouble,” he told them. Cut school. Stole cars. Did drugs. Saw buddies locked up. “But I got out, off the streets. If I could, so can you.” And they began to think maybe they could. For once somebody had faith in them.

Rev. Wilkins was another one of those glimmers of humanity. A scruffy-dressed chaplain, he was everywhere: in a hallway with an inmate after an upsetting family visit; in a corner of a chaotic cellblock sitting with a boy whose mother recently died from AIDS; in bible study trying to answer some knotty question posed by a troubled believer. Inmates were drawn to him, especially my students, because most of them never had a father. They knew he loved them—yes, loved—and would do anything for them in jail and out—jobs, clothes for an interview; a place to stay.

And then there was Fabiola who was hired by corrections to develop a young offenders program. She designed a model block that gave jailed minors unprecedented supports with the aim of keeping them out of jail once released. Like past projects, corrections poured resources into it. New prison reforms made great public relations: newspaper articles; TV broadcasts; tours by state politicians. But then inevitably (I’d seen it happen before,) perversely, administration started sabotaging its own program. But that didn’t stop Fabiola. She had spent 20 years helping troubled kids and didn’t give up. She continued to fight mightily against corrections’ inertia.

There were other good people in the county jail where I worked. The kitchen manager who made sure guys with no money for commissary had night time snacks; the social worker who helped a kid get his long withheld psych medication; or the inmates who shared whatever cookies, soups, and beef jerky they had to celebrate a new jack’s birthday.

None of those good people made the bad go away. If anything their caring highlighted how cruel and bankrupt our criminal justice system is. But prison life would be even bleaker, more intolerable without them. I wish that mother had stuck around. I would have told her.

Jail’s Racism Gets Worse: But Who Really Cares?

It was one of those rare afternoons in my jailhouse classroom. Twelve or so teenaged boys dotted around the room, their heads, some shaved bald, others wild and wooly with neglect, bend over their desks doing something. Reading a book; writing an essay—or a love letter to a shorty.  Whatever they were doing, they were quiet. It didn’t happen often over the ten years I taught high school at a New York County jail, years that I chronicle in my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. Usually, chaos rules in jail.

But that day Ms. Polland, the classroom correctional officer, and I were standing at the front of the room looking over the sea of orange jump-suited, brown-faced students, enjoying the peace.

Then, “Do you really think the criminal justice system is racist?” she quietly asked.

I don’t know where that came from, but when I didn’t answer, she pressed the point.

“I mean, really. Do you think it’s racist?”

I didn’t know what to say

You get pretty tight with your classroom officer. The COs who work the school are the ones who like helping kids, and in a strange way become your ally.

Ms. Polland was one of the best. She liked the guys and loved to participate in class. She often jumped into discussions, sometimes shouting out an answer to a question even before the guys had a chance.

They didn’t mind. Less for them to do.

Besides, Ms. Polland was hot—short, slim but busty; almond-colored skin and short soft curls. She was one of the few female COs who used make-up, and the guys loved make-up.

But they also recognized her interest and appreciated her willingness to share her own journey: Single teenage mom. High school dropout. GED graduate. Now she was going to community college on track to become a social worker.

I hadn’t answered her question at first because I didn’t know what to say.

Weren’t we were standing in front of the same classroom, looking at the same black, brown and tawny faces? I know we both walked the same jail halls and passed the same coterie of correctional staff. Didn’t she notice that, although more and more front line COs were people of color (only after years of extreme civil rights pressure,) the prison elite—sergeants, captains, and wardens—were white?

I hadn’t answered her because I wasn’t sure what she saw when she looked out at the class. Ms. Polland was a bright woman. I knew she must have heard or read the doleful figures on incarceration rates for African American males. Who in the US hadn’t?

It seems every day some new report or some news story lays out the worsening racial tilt in our criminal justice system—the PEW Charitable Trust report, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” noting that 1 in 30 whites between the ages of 20 and 34 were incarcerated while the number for blacks was 1 in 9; or the California based Burns Institute findings that black youth nationally were five times more likely to be locked up than their white peers. The county jail where I taught pretty much confirmed those numbers, even more so. African Americans made up only 14% of the county population while the jail was well over 80% black.

Even the US Congress has raised the alarm about this continued inequality. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Reauthorization Act of 2009 which is slowly making its way through the legislature allocates funds to states who aggressively address this racial imbalance.

Nevertheless, when pushed to explain this racial disparity, most people take comfort in the popular myth of American justice—that only the guilty get arrested, charged, and incarcerated. It’s obvious: more blacks than whites are arrested and put in jail because they commit more crimes.  Americans can’t conceive of it any other way because racism is the issue we refuse to acknowledge.

“I mean, if black kids didn’t get into trouble they wouldn’t be here. Right?” Ms. Polland said, impatient with my silence.

I don’t remember what I finally answered. I certainly didn’t deny what I knew and what my eyes saw, and told her so with as much honesty as my respect for her allowed.

But I do remember leaving the jail that day baffled and discouraged, wondering how things would ever change when even well-meaning people like Ms Polland—a person of color herself— continued to believe that justice in America is and always has been colorblind.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

Violence Prevention: A Daring Approach

“I won’t do it. I got a right to speak up when something is bullshit.”

Sunny didn’t have a problem firing those words across the principal’s desk when he demanded that she “come back and behave” after he had kicked her out of school (again). And it didn’t bother her that her father was sitting right there.

Sunny hated school. She always had. She felt dumb and out of place. Wise ass, a fighter from the beginning, she didn’t take anybody’s crap and was always in trouble.

So nobody who knew her from those days would be surprised to hear that she ended up in the San Francisco county lock up; that she’d been there for 20 years, and was still there.

But she didn’t get there the way you’d think.

She did it her way, the way she did everything.

Sunny Schwartz became a lawyer, and after doing a notable job working with inmates in the San Francisco Prisoner Legal Service Unit she was asked to head all prisoner programs in the San Francisco county jails. As top administrator, she would revamp a pretty moribund institution, change how things were done, and start new programs.

Dreams from the Monster Factory, Sunny’s book about her prison experiences, describes the successes and the (amazingly few) failures of that transformation and her own personal and professional journey.

Sunny hit one of those rare times in a penal system when a few administrators, in this case two men, are able to acknowledge the system’s breakdowns, and have a vision of how to fix and make it better.

It was a pretty heart-thumping vision at that, especially for those of us who have worked in jails: Change, any change there, is glacial. Nothing gets done, no matter who says they want it done. And even those officials who make modifications end up, in some perverse logic of corrections, sabotaging their own efforts.

But the vision was there in San Francisco in 1990 along with the will and determination to see it through.

“Pull the jail culture down…so it might actually help prisoners,” was the way the prison director put it to Sunny.

“We need someone with your courage to do this,” another corrections official said.

It was a daunting job, but they knew they had her. Only somebody as feisty as that teenager who spit those words across the principal’s desk would take on a challenge like that.

Sunny had always been an advocate for the underdog. But that didn’t make her an easy mark. Dreams From the Monster Factory is filled with stories of Sunny going toe to toe with the toughest thugs—thieves, wife beaters, gangbangers, murders; what she describes as the “scrap heap;” and what, in the jail where I worked, a warden called “human garbage.”

She confronted their behavior and demanded—that’s right, demanded—that they change, that they look at their actions, then take responsibility for them. And they did, because she gave them the message that they were capable of changing.

For some of these men, mean, hard-bitten and cynical, it was the first time anyone had shown that kind of faith in them. The jail culture didn’t believe that they could be any different. Society certainly didn’t. Their families and friends had long given up expecting anything good from them, if they ever had.

But Sunny and the rest of her staff didn’t just set out their demands. They gave inmates the tools they needed to meet them. During the day the TV was turned off (perhaps her most courageous act, considering that TV is the one drug inmates could still get—legitimately), and everybody was required to be in some sort of educational, vocational or therapeutic program. Over time jail life for both inmates and correctional staff improved.

But Sunny wasn’t satisfied. While she recognized that the men’s in-jail behavior had gotten better, she was disturbed by the violence of the inmates’ crimes. It was a violence that tore apart not only their victims’ lives, but also their own lives as well as the lives of the people they loved and the communities in which they lived.

In response to the vast net of suffering she saw, Sunny came up with her boldest plan of all: Put the most violent men in one dorm and start a violence prevention program. RSVP (Resolve to Stop the Violence Program) would be based on the tenets of restorative justice. Through a variety of groups, it would teach the men to forgive themselves for their crimes; to forgive others for the harm done to them (Sunny found that most of the men in RSVP had been victims of childhood trauma); and to seek forgiveness.

Dreams from the Monster Factory tells the heartbreaking, yet heartwarming struggles many of the men went through in RSVP.

One of the most affecting transformations was Ben, a tough, recalcitrant white supremacist/Neo-Nazi. He refused to participate in the program, to examine his hateful and violent behavior. Until finally, through the slow water-on-rock patience of the staff, the other inmates, and RSVP itself, he began to crack open and amend his ways. His final act of reconciliation, and it is a very moving one, came when he volunteered to speak about himself and the program to a synagogue congregation, some of whose members are Holocaust survivors.

What makes Dreams from the Monster Factory so engrossing, however, isn’t just watching a spirited reformer take on the criminal justice system. We are captivated by Sunny’s honesty. She doesn’t shy away from her own process of reconciliation and transformation. She’s right in there with the worst of the worst, grappling with her own monsters—inner and outer—as she learns to forgive herself and others. This combination of personal and public struggle is what gives this book its the strength and beauty.

Early in the book, teenaged Sunny warned that she didn’t put up with anybody’s bullshit—her own, the system’s or society’s. Dreams from the Monster Factory shows her true to her word.