Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (27 page)

When Roland was thirteen, a cousin introduced him to marijuana. The warm, pungent smoke seemed to appease the demon. It left Roland “numb, feeling nothing,” relief enough that soon he was smoking regularly. “I was feeling empty, I was feeling hurt, and I wanted to substitute that with something else.”

As with any palliative, the drug's powers weakened the more Roland used it. “After a while, smoking so much weed, it becomes nothing to you,” he explained. “Your thoughts keep coming back like it's normal.” And “normal” as Roland knew it had become intolerable.

A talented student, he started skipping school and hanging out in the park, talking to girls, smoking, or wandering aimlessly. Sometimes he would walk the streets all day. Before long, he connected with a gang.

A handsome Latino with buzz-cut dark hair and a diamond in each ear, Roland walked, a decade later, with the residual hint of a swagger, offset by a quick and disarming smile. “I wanted to belong and feel like I am powerful,” he said of his teenage self. “Having a gang behind me, knowing I was protected—that made me feel like I belonged.”

For the first time, said Roland, “I started feeling good. Belonging to a crowd, I didn't feel different anymore. I felt like, ‘Man, they are just like me.' They showed me the love my father doesn't show me.”

Being in a clique also gave Roland the opportunity to fight—an activity that provided more relief than getting high had. “I wanted to feel different. I wanted to release everything I felt inside, and what was the best outlet? Adrenaline. The adrenaline released everything.”

He and his cohorts would walk the streets, Sometimes twenty strong, in search of trouble. When they found a group that they thought they could take, they would taunt, shove, and otherwise provoke them until words
turned to blows and a full-scale fight ensued. “The norm, I guess, with most teens,” Roland added.

“Everybody has their own reason why they do it,” he said of the street brawls that soon became a habit. “Some of them do it because they are bored of their simple lives, or they wanna be cool. Some want respect. . . . I did it because I was hurting inside and I wanted the outlet. Fighting, being aggressive, not caring—that became my outlet. All my anger was being released right here.”

The more deeply Roland got involved in gang life and the violence that accompanied it, the more he believed he was “where I belonged.” As he made the transition from victim to perpetrator, he picked up the
I don't give a fuck
mentality. Comfortable, concealing, a shield from unwanted emotions, the attitude fit him like a well-worn sweater.

Roland was out with his eighteen-year-old brother when Someone ran up on the older boy with a baseball bat. The first blow missed, and Roland was on him, throwing the kid to the ground and beating him with his own bat. “It was self-defense in a way,” he says now, “but I know I used too much aggression. We could have run. I didn't have to grab the bat and hit him.”

“When you recognize from the bench a lifetime of trauma in the delinquent acts of a teenager, you have become part of the solution,” Attorney General Eric Holder, a former judge, has said. Few young people I met recalled a judge or anyone else in power even hinting at this kind of recognition. As the juvenile court has increasingly come to resemble its adult counterpart, “What happened to you?” has become increasingly unlikely to enter the equation. Fifteen-year-old Hispanic male. Assault and battery. Off Roland went to juvenile hall, and then to a county-run camp in California's Lancaster County.

“It stopped me for about a month or two,” Roland said of that first incarceration, which lasted six months, “but then I got comfortable. I got used to it again. I was like, fuck it.”

“Fuck it” meant robbery, more fighting, knives. It meant harder drugs—crystal meth, crack cocaine. It meant going to school only on test days, just scraping by, despite the fact that, secretly, Roland liked to learn.

“Deep inside I kept telling myself, what am I doing? What am I doing? Why can't I just go to school and do what I gotta do?” He would promise
his counselor, as well as himself, that this time he meant it; he was turning things around. “Then I would meet up with my friends, and I'd do the same thing.”

Roland was “frozen”—a common condition among poly-victimized children, for whom trauma is not a single event but a chronic condition. “What is wrong with you?” Roland's probation-assigned counselor kept asking. She saw the bright underachiever sitting in front of her—the diffident teenager wasting his potential—but didn't ask the questions that might have revealed the hurt child hovering beneath the tough-guy facade, the eight-year-old who lay beside his battered mother, her warm blood and hot tears mingling with his own.

Anger, antisocial feelings, lack of self-control. Lack of affection or weak supervision from parents. Lack of role models. Poor academic skills.
These are the risk factors for juvenile delinquency. They are also
signs and symptoms of childhood trauma.

“In order to recover from the blows which social life inflicts upon them, human beings need a haven of peace, which is normally provided in the family,” the Austrian psychoanalyst August Aichhorn explained in a 1922 lecture on juvenile delinquency. “When the individual has such a haven, his instinctual life is able to manifest itself within socially acceptable limits. But if he lacks this refuge, his mental equilibrium . . . becomes more easily disturbed, and, given the appropriate disposition, delinquency results.”

When the family not only fails to provide a safe haven but is itself the place of greatest danger, the trouble that follows should come as no surprise. But like Gabrielle and so many others, Roland made the transit from victim to perpetrator without anyone making the connection, anyone asking, “What happened to you?”

“You're a great kid,” his probation counselor told him often. “You're smart. What are you doing?”

“I don't know what to tell you,” Roland answered. “This is who I am. This is what I do.”

Like Gabrielle and Roland, Luis was victimized for years, coming to the attention of the authorities only when he caught a court charge himself.

Luis grew up in a rural county with immigrant parents. At home, he
said, “there was plenty of abusive behavior inflicted towards me, in every possible way a human can receive such negativity. It was also done to my mother, and also my brothers, but for some reason I, being the oldest, witnessed and experienced the most.”

“With these traumas I experienced,” he went on, “I felt different. I felt I couldn't cope and that there was just something wrong with me.”

“So I carry that with me,” he said.

A slim, delicate-featured twenty-year-old Latino in a crisp button-down shirt and jeans, Luis detailed with precision the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father.

“Physically, he bombed on me since I was three or four. Open hands, sometimes he'd throw a fist in there, and he used his legs a lot. When he hit me, he used what felt like the steel part of the belt, and he would sit there whacking for hours.”

You just spilled that barbecue sauce. You are a fucking idiot.
Each time Luis's father laid into his son, he made sure to communicate that the child himself was to blame.

“That shit fucked me up,” Luis said—a crisp summary of the link between childhood victimization and subsequent delinquency. “Obviously, I hate my dad's guts. He fucking abused me my whole life. It's a good thing he didn't rape me, or I'd be a serial killer.”

Luis and his brothers were, in his words, “welfare babies,” growing up in a household where not even groceries could be taken for granted. But because they lived in “the poor section of the rich part of town, I grew up around, predominately, a lot of white people. And I say ‘white' in the White Wonder Bread culture sense. People who go and have careers, success, financial wealth, and material things, and doing some type of appropriate activities. I grew up with those types of folks around me.”

Living on the outskirts of what looked to him like paradise, reminded every day of his own exclusion, Luis reached a conclusion.

“My life was bullshit,” he determined before his thirteenth birthday. “I needed to make myself feel like [my better-off neighbors], because that would be happiness.”

Luis was too young to cross the tracks on his own. But if he couldn't change his reality, he could change how he experienced it. He “found a
different way to get there—to get to happiness—which was smoking bud and drinking.”

At twelve years old, he got high for the first time, mixing Bacardi and Jack Daniel's with marijuana a friend skimmed from his dad's stash. “And that began my journey,” Luis said—a trajectory he likens to “a big mother fucking snowball going downhill.”

Luis started skipping school and acquired a new group of friends who were doing the same. When these friends started talking about breaking into the home of a neighborhood bully, the snowball just kept rolling.

The break-in attempt was a wholesale fiasco. One kid tried to pry open a window. Luis took a couple of steps into the backyard, then, uncertain, retreated. Somebody managed to get into the garage. Then they heard sirens.

Luis got away but wandered back to the neighborhood a few hours later, hoping to pick up a video game from a friend. He arrived at his friend's house to find the police there. When they turned their attention to Luis, he answered their questions without hesitation. “I had at that time what I call a square mind-set,” he explained. “I was not entrenched in negative gang culture or whatever you want to call it. I was just a pothead skater kid. And so I told the cops, I did this, X, Y, and Z.”

“I really didn't give a fuck,” he offered by way of explanation.

Listen for that phrase—what others describe as the
I don't give a fuck
attitude—for you'll hear it referenced over and over by young people whose lives have given them little reason to feel otherwise. Its simplicity is deceptive, its meaning multilayered.

I don't give a fuck about me—no one else does, so why should I?

I don't give a fuck about you—how can I, when I can't even care about myself?

I don't give a fuck what happens to me—could it get any worse than it already is?

Go ahead, lock me up. Bring it on.

Over and over, young people described to me the onset and lingering effect of the
I don't give a fuck
mentality. In a no-win paradox, some said it propelled their criminal acts and led to incarceration, while others said it was inspired
by
imprisonment.

The more I heard it described, the more it seemed this nihilism functioned as an anesthetic, self-administered by young people whose circumstances hurt too much to face with an open heart. Young people who live in the tightly restricted world of prison—stripped of control over their environment and actions—often learn to control the only thing they can: their emotional response. If they can get to that place of
I don't give a fuck
, can convince themselves that nothing really matters (an exercise made easier when life has shown them repeatedly how little
they
matter), they've tapped the source of an existential opiate, a palliative the price of which they may learn too late. The more skilled they become at constructing defenses, the harder it is to drop them, to regain even a glimmer of the openness of spirit that makes adolescence such a vivid, transformative time among the free.

Understanding the nihilism that can afflict traumatized children opens the door to imagining alternatives—responses that address “What happened to you?” along with “What did you do?” How might it change a young person's actions if, from his earliest contact with adult authority, he got the message that, yes, he
did
matter? If we helped her imagine a future that was bright enough to make freedom worth the fight? If kids are wreaking havoc because they don't give a fuck, what possibilities might open if they
did
—if we addressed their trauma rather than exacerbating it, and set our minds to helping them find reasons to care?

Barry Krisberg of the University of California, Berkeley's Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy has been considering questions like these over decades spent talking with and advocating for incarcerated youth. “When I asked kids [inside state facilities] questions like, ‘Did staff physically or verbally abuse you?' ” Krisberg observed, “They'd ask, ‘Worse than my parents, the foster homes, county juvenile hall?' By the time they are here, they figure this is what happens to them.”

“What if we really did intervene at young ages, find the kids who are being abused?” Krisberg continued. “Our general response to kids is to throw them away, not engage and work with them.”

“If you don't address what gets them to that place where they're twenty years old in shackles,” he said bluntly, “then you're having a conversation about trash removal—what's the cheapest waste-removal strategy?”

“More important from a moral and political point of view is to describe
who kids are, what they have confronted, their hopes and dreams for the future, and what we can do to help.”

The night the murder happened (that is how Roland talks about it, using a passive construction), Roland was standing at a fork in the road—or maybe, in retrospect, at the edge of a cliff. A childhood filled with abuse and domestic violence—the protracted, futile effort to protect his mother from his drunken father's blows—had set him on what he had come to accept as his “path,” toward drugs, delinquency, and a bone-deep hopelessness. But now, with the help of a supportive counselor, he was starting to feel that internal compass shifting, pointing, however tentatively, toward a different path.