Juvenile Justice: A Creative Way of Getting the Message Out about Kids in Adult Lockup

Check out these great videos from the New York Center for Juvenile Justice about raising the age at which a minor can be tried as an adult in New York State. It is now at an appalling  16 years old. For some designated crimes children as young as 13 can be tried in adult court in New York. Those ages certainly give you pause.

This is how the Center puts their mission:

“Through advocacy, education, and implementation, the Center is spearheading an effort to transform the way children under 18 years of age are judged and treated in New York courts, including consideration of a fair and reasonable standard (age) of criminal responsibility. The center has developed and intends to implement strategies that will require children under 18 tried in New York’s courts to be judged as children.”

This summer a group of law students interned at the Center in New York City where they explored the topic thoroughly. One of the end products–along with some heavy duty legal policy explorations–was to make videos that conveyed the  absurdity of  laws that allow teenagers to be tried and sentenced as adults but won’t  allow those same teens to see certain movies without their parents’ permission, for example. These videos show how much can be put across in under 60 seconds.

How Being Locked Up in Juvenile Detention Centers Shapes Kids’ Lives

What is it really like for kids to locked up in some kind of juvenile detention center, or worse yet a prison? What effect does it have on their emotional, psychological and spiritual lives? How does it shape their personalities, not only in obvious ways but in ways that have a lasting impact?

It seems to me that little thought is given to this concern by the people who clamber for tougher consequences for “trouble-making kids” and by the pundits who make the laws to answer the public’s demands. I’ve actually heard  people I thought would have at least given the question some consideration, at least a pause, state, “They deserve to be locked up!”  Fear is a powerful force in shaping our juvenile justice policy. “Those kids” frighten us, threaten us so put them away.

I know that locking kids up in places that can do real life harm is not the answer. And a place to begin to understand why that is is to listen to the voices of young people who have been in those places. One such voice, elegant and powerful, is Andrew Petterman’s piece “Learning to Be Tough in Juvenile Detention” posted on Reclaiming Futures. It is worth the read. You can also hear an interview with Andrew Petterman at the same link.

Juvenile Crime: Translating the Language of Rage

I’ve done a number of interviews since publishing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, and I find, like many authors, that I’m often asked the same questions. “I can answer them in my sleep,” I heard one author grumble. I felt the same way until I started to really listen to the questions and give them deeper thought. After all they raised good points, and interviewers repeated them because they got to the core of both the book and the issue.

Why I wrote the book was one of those questions. Initially, I answered the same way because it was true. I wanted to put a face to the statistics that abound in juvenile justice circles. Although they are just numbers—on any given day there are 7000+ kids in US adult jails; African American youth are 5x more likely to be locked up than their white peers—they are powerful in their consequences, and I wanted to show just who we are talking about before important decisions and polices are made based on those numbers.

But I began to wonder if making those numbers real was my only reason for telling the stories of kids like Darquel with his life long scars from sexual abuse, or Ray who lived most of his life in group homes, juvenile centers, or homeless shelters.

Digging a bit more, I realized that I also was drawn to the idea of giving voice to the voiceless. Many young people are inarticulate. The teens I taught in the county jail, however, were at a greater disadvantage. They didn’t have the tools other teens have to express themselves nor the opportunities to do so. Besides, of all the lessons life posed for them the one they really got was that no one listened, so why bother.

But then I saw that I was wrong: They weren’t voiceless. They merely spoke a different language, the language of rage. They didn’t speak about their lives through words but through the things they did. Those acts of rage committed against society were their only way of accusing the world of the injustices they had lived with since childhood—violent, decaying neighborhoods; failing schools; families (when they had families) destroyed by poverty, disease and racism. But those acts of rage were also against themselves because on some level they knew that they would be caught and punished not only for the crimes they committed but for being the very failures we as a society have consigned them to.

Jason is a good example. At 17 he was addicted to every drug there was. He rarely went to school. He hung out on the streets. If there was a fight he was in the middle of it. He robbed the corner bodega; sold drugs; smashed car windows for the hell of it, and hung out with the neighborhood hookers. He loved provoking the cops and enjoyed the ensuing chase. Not surprisingly, he’d been in and out of jails where he was caught making hooch, smoking black market cigarettes, trading in girlie magazines, and starting fights even with guys he knew could beat the crap out of him.

When I met him he was in the county lockup waiting to go to state prison to do some serious time. But that didn’t bother Jason. He’d been there before. It was one more act of rage to endure, one that he would meet with his own acts of rage.

As painful as it was listening to Jason talk about his life, I found it hard to like him. His swagger, his defiance, his seeming indifference to everything most of us hold dear didn’t help. Until I remembered that standing in front of me was a 17 year old, a boy whose 15 year old mother had used crack, smack and booze while she carried him, and that his own addictions were all she left him when she disappeared; that the aunt he lived with, the only family he had, died of a heart attack on the living room floor because the ambulance never came; that he had seen friends and cousins, some younger than he, killed in the streets. Rage is a hard thing to be around. But it’s even harder to live with, and that, I saw, was what Jason’s life was all about. His life was one long, frustrated cry of rage and outrage.

Thinking about the many Jasons I had taught over my ten years in an adult county jail, I finally understood the deeper reason why I wrote I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine. I saw that my job was to translate this language of rage with the hope that people will hear and comprehend just what society’s young throw-aways have been trying to tell us all along.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

Juvenile Justice Reform: A Law Congress Needs to Pass

When you go to jail you feel like everybody’s in your business but nobody cares. You get cuffed, shoved into the back of a squad car. The police blotter broadcasts to the world what you did. You get booked, fingerprinted, photographed, everything about you fed into “The Man’s” hungry computer. You’re watched—by correctional officers, wardens, nurses, other inmates; even the kitchen workers warily scope you out. Bars instead of doors.

At least that is how you feel if you’re a kid doing time in an adult county prison like the teenagers I taught for ten years.

Like many adolescent perceptions of the world, they’re right and they’re wrong. Everybody is in your business, watching, overseeing, suspicious of everything you do, telling you to do this, don’t do that. You’re always under somebody’s eye, electronic or otherwise, yet you feel alone, isolated, convinced nobody cares.

But I want to tell the kids I taught, and every other kid locked away, that there are people who, although they may seem to be “in your business,” want to help out, and do care.

A few of those locked up teens might have heard about the Supreme Court’s recent decision outlawing life without parole for non-homicidal crimes by juveniles. But I doubt they’ve heard about the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA).  Not many people have, it seems, considering that the bill, first enacted in 1974, is woefully, embarrassingly three years overdue for Congressional reauthorization. Finally, it is making its way slowly through the Congress.

The bill calls for reforms to the juvenile justice system that are simple yet vital for the well-being of young people entangled in the system. It provides federal funds to states who comply with the following conditions when dealing with young offenders.

Participating states are encouraged to get minors out of adult jails and prisons. If they cannot for some reason, they must insure that kids in these facilities are out of “sight and sound” of adults. Unfortunately it’s a restriction that doesn’t work. In the county adult lockup where I worked, many young adolescents were housed on a minor’s block. Nevertheless, they had ongoing contact with adults at rec, clinics, the law library and in the hallways. Likewise, housing teens on a separate block didn’t protect them from the harmful effects of the adult jail culture—violent, predatory, paranoid, assaultive to all the senses—which permeated the place. States must be urged to remove youths from adult contact all together.

The bill also requires states to address what Congress calls “disproportionate minority contact.” Some of us would call it racial profiling. Some, racism.  Others, the new Jim Crow. The kids I taught would call it, “locking up the brothers.” It’s a lifeless, bloodless, meaningless term for a devastating reality—the increased incarceration of young people of color. It’s hard to believe that in 2010 the states must have money dangled in front of them to get them to work on this blatant, escalating racial disparity.

Another condition is that states must stop jailing kids who are guilty of status offences such as truancy; running away; alcohol or tobacco possession; and breaking curfew. I worked with youngsters, some living in group homes, others at home, who were doing time in an adult facility for truancy or for breaking curfew because the adults responsible for them wanted “to teach them a lesson.” I can assure you, it did.

And finally, states would be required to improve conditions wherever juveniles are detained by ending such dangerous practices as pepper spray, hog-tying and prolonged isolation; and by insuring proper mental health and medical services. Too many young inmates are in desperate need of both. Yet often these needs are overlooked or outright neglected for the unstated reason of saving money. I have seen, and written about minors slipping into depression or the chaos of psychosis because prescribed medications were denied them.

JJDPA is a good bill and there are lots of good people behind it. It has over 16 congressional sponsors, and is endorsed by 9 international groups including Human Rights Watch; 90+ national groups; 259 state and local organizations; and the Department of Justice.

That’s the news I’d like to share with the nation’s locked up kids: indeed, people are “in your business,” and because of those people you’re not alone. It might be a tough sell, though. When you’re 15, sitting in a cramped, dirty, smelly cell, cut off from anyone and anything that has any meaning for you, you get mighty skeptical and feel abandoned. I just hope the 111^th Congress doesn’t let these kids down. It’s happened far too many times in their lives already.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

A Broken Juvenile Justice System: One State’s Shame

“We are either going to spend the money now and provide the services that our children require or we are going to pay a big price at a later date when these children are part of the adult criminal justice system.”

That’s how Judge Edwina Richardson Mendelson, a New York family court judge, put it to NBC New York, commenting on a story about the need to help kids mired in the juvenile justice system.

Certainly other experts would agree. The lack of damage control for harm already done to these children along with the damage the juvenile justice system inflicts on them can only make things worse for our society as time goes on.

But as sound as that reasoning is both from an economic point of view as well as a humane one, treatment and care for troubled young people doesn’t happen much in this country. We spend more money locking kids up, punishing them– in many cases for the failures of their fathers and their mothers, their neighborhoods and their communities, their churches and their schools–than getting them the help they need to pull themselves up out of the sinkhole of the streets.

A report just released by New York Governor Paterson’s administration (reported on in the New York Times) on that state’s juvenile justice system notes that New York spends roughly $210,000 a year on each child locked up in institutions, institutions that this investigative report claims should be shut down, while at the same time three-quarters of those released from detention are arrested again within three years.

Obviously, something’s not working.

But there is even worse news.

This chilling document confirms what so many of us who work with at-risk youth knew on some level: Kids, sent to juvenile detention centers sometimes for actions as minor as truancy, theft or trespass, and many of whom have drug or alcohol addictions, mental illness, or developmental disabilities, receive no services for their many problems.

Likewise, they are routinely exposed to harsh discipline and treated with excessive force. Sometimes that force results in injuries “as severe as broken bones and shattered teeth” for infractions as negligible as sneaking an extra cookie. (Food is everything for locked away kids. In my years teaching high school in an adult county jail I’ve seen them barter, beg, steal, improvise, improve whatever morsel of jailhouse grub they can get. Food is pretty much all they have left in a life stripped of warmth, nurturing and understanding. It even trumps contraband girlie magazines. So I can easily understand that smuggled cookie.)

But the report confirms something else, something that many young people already felt, that many of the jailed kids I worked with talked about openly and with startling insight: that the war on street crime is really a war against youth, minority youth at that.

And they’re not far off the mark. The report pointed out that 80% of the kids locked up in New York State juvenile facilities were African American or Latino, although those groups make up less than half the state’s total youth population, a fact I saw reflected in my own jail experience.

Living on the street, hanging out, surviving, if they can; in and out of the very institutions that supposedly are there to take care of them, they don’t need 100+ pages to tell them where this ill treatment leads. They know all too well the lifelong bitterness and rage that such harsh, miserable and miserly treatment inflicts. They see it in themselves, their friends, their families, their neighborhoods.

We Americans are caught in compulsive hand-wringing over the economy. Everything costs too much. Someone’s always got more than I have. Someone’s always getting more than I’m getting. These anxieties are real. The complaints, heartfelt. However, the long term investments we need to make in people, not institutions, are essential, yet terribly neglected.

The thirteen year old boy hanging out at the bodega, taking swigs out of a bottle of Old English malt liquor because somebody noticed that he was there and offered it to him, will eventually turn around and bite society in the ass just as much as a failed auto industry might do. The more alarming difference, though, is that a failed industry is not a threat to the basic security and safety of our homes, our families, our streets, and ultimately our integrity as a country. If we don’t help that young boy now we’ll be strapped, as Judge Richardson Mendelson pointed out, with taking care of his kids, and his kids’ kids while we pay for his food and shelter and ever costly health care for decades to come as he sits behind bars, the bruised and battered offspring of a very broken juvenile justice system.