Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (37 page)

“I heard it was a prison,” said Kent, who had braced himself accordingly. His fears were allayed when he learned that only the security unit operated on a twenty-three-hour lockdown, not the whole facility. Nonetheless, Kent did end up in the security unit “a few times” during his first year at Red Wing. “I was a lot different,” he explained. “I was hard-headed. It took me nine months to realize it wasn't working and I needed to change.”

Another conundrum: Red Wing was the very model of a modern institution—a therapeutic milieu staffed by trauma-informed personnel. Its use of solitary confinement may well have been more judicious, the conditions therein more humane, than at many facilities. But both Kent and Riley had spent time on the security unit early in their stay, sometimes for a week at a stretch. Anything over fifteen hours in solitary is considered torture under international standards, even for adults, and the United Nations has declared using it with adolescents for any duration at all to be torture. Yet here at Red Wing—the loveliest facility I had yet to visit—it was part of the program, along with therapeutic interventions, upbeat slogans, and all the other trappings of a rehabilitative model.

There are, of course, many notions about what is therapeutic, multiple theories as to what helps children heal. Trust, however, is central to all of
them. At Red Wing, boys were being asked to trust adults who were permitted, under certain circumstances, to subject them to a practice that most of the world agrees is torture.

The standard rationale for the use of isolation—that isolating dangerous individuals is sometimes necessary to maintain institutional safety—had not reached my interlocutors. “They are showing us it can get harder if we decide not to follow the rules,” Kent explained instead.

Solitary confinement is merely the extreme end of a spectrum of correctional practices that continue to infuse even those institutions that have been most successful in integrating treatment models. At Red Wing, for example, I saw lines of young people walking from one place to another in the same “chicken walk” posture (arms folded across the chest, hands tucked into armpits) I had seen at more traditional facilities. The explanation I was given—free hands can become fists at the drop of a hat—seemed reasonable enough inside the gates. But as I thought about it later, the contradictions loomed. You can't reach out with your hands in your armpits, much less open up. And what did a boy forced to walk like a chicken—past the high-minded slogans and grandly named dormitories—learn from the posture about how he was perceived and who he might become?

On the other hand, Red Wing had been highly successful at engaging the local community—a crucial step toward changing public perceptions of those held there, and those who would return from Red Wing and other juvenile facilities. Sometimes, I was told, there were so many eager to help that each cottage had its own volunteer grandma who baked during school hours so the boys could come back to fresh-baked cookies and milk.

“It's
privileges
,” Riley made a point of clarifying, stretching out the word as if answering a familiar challenge. “We can get this taken away from us, so basically we're working for it. It's not just
handed
to us. Everything, you got to work for.”

The biggest concern Riley and Kent seemed to have about Red Wing was that, sooner or later, they would have to leave. No matter how much they had changed during their stay at Red Wing, the impoverished high-crime neighborhoods they had come from had not, and if they returned to those same neighborhoods—as most young prisoners do—they wouldn't have a chance, both told me.

“It's impossible,” Kent insisted, to “return to your same environment
and not be involved in the streets. So the only chance you got is if you move to a different environment.”

Kent stopped to talk to a passing staffer for a moment, and Riley hung back as if to speak with me in private. “I'm not going to say this is Disney World because it's not,” he began. “It takes a lot of work to get out of here. People have got to keep on moving. We don't stop. We move on all day. We keep pushing ourselves through all our struggles. Even though he had a brother that got shot [while he was] here.” Riley lowered his voice and gestured toward Kent.

“How can you deal with that in here and you can't do nothing about it?” Riley asked rhetorically. Then he answered his own question.

When Kent learned over the phone that his sixteen-year-old brother had been shot and killed, said Riley, the first thing he did was “come to the group”—the boys on his unit who had been working together in a therapeutic group and were by then accustomed to talking with one another about things that mattered.

Riley, who had known Kent since seventh grade, went out of his way to help his friend. “Somebody to talk to, encouragement, tell him to keep on moving. I prayed for him, you know—tell him everything is going to be okay. When he needed to talk, I talked to him, tried to give him the best answers I could when he had a question.”

“We don't give each other the easy way out,” Riley said, his tone a poignant mixture of machismo and tenderness as he described his role in helping his friend through a terrible time. “It's sad, but he's okay now. He's safe,” Riley added in a tone of reassurance.

Kent said later that his first instinct upon getting the call about his brother had been to seek vengeance. Quelling that impulse “took a lot for me,” he said. “With the help of this program, what they taught me and everything, I was kind of able to control my anger and think things through before I reacted. That's one of the good things about this program. I use some of the skills and they really work. . . . I wanted revenge and everything, but I couldn't do it, because it was only going to lead to more problems.”

“They teach about thinking ahead—what could happen?” Riley elaborated. “What if this? What if that?”

“I was a person who would minimize a lot,” Kent added earnestly.

I mentioned that I had just seen that very word written on the board in a classroom we passed through. “These are stated beliefs,” Kent nodded. “I mean, you've got minimizing, assuming the worst, blaming others, glorifying—all that.”

Kent had reached Level Four when I visited, which meant he was starting the process that would bring him home. Initially, he would be released on a series of temporary furloughs. If all went well, he would go home for good, rejoining his family in a new home in the suburbs, where they had relocated shortly after Kent's brother was shot. Riley will return to a new environment also—a smaller town where his girlfriend and son are living.

“It feels good,” Kent said of his imminent departure. “I am happy to see my family. But I am kind of nervous.”

Kent's anxiety was not unwarranted. The court had placed both him and Riley on what Minnesota calls Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction. That meant they started out with time at Red Wing, but if they faltered post-release their juvenile status could be revoked.
Both had adult sentences hanging over their heads.

“I feel like I got what I needed,” Kent asserted, as if giving himself a pep talk. “It is up to me to use it.”

“Going back will be stressful,” mused Riley.

Would I call Red Wing a prison? I still hadn't answered their question. But I was going to walk out the gate within a matter of hours. I was more interested to know how these young men perceived it.

“If we're not free to leave?” Riley repeated, momentarily stymied, when I handed his question back to him.

“Me, personally,” Kent interjected, “I call it a treatment program.”

A loud, collective cheer came from a nearby classroom, where young men in hairnets were packing up rice to send to Haiti and Somalia as part of a community service project.

“That means they met their goal,” Riley explained.

“They're saving a lot of lives,” Kent added with evident pride. “Starvation. The people in Haiti that are suffering from the earthquake.”

“Starvation,” Riley repeated, staring into the distance for a moment as if trying to imagine the people of Haiti, rescued by rice that had passed through his hands.

“We feel very good,” said Kent, completing, as he often did, his friend's half-spoken thought.

Kent and Riley felt safe inside Red Wing. They were doing things that gave them a sense pride, even of purpose. Did they feel free? Did it matter?
Were
they in prison, by their own accounting?

“Yes,” Kent answered finally, recoiling a bit, as if he had surprised himself with his own answer.

“No,” insisted Riley. “I mean, you can take elderly people to an elderly home and they can't go home. Would you call that a prison?”

“It's all about how you think of it,” Riley said finally, changing his mind even as he spoke. “If it's got a gate around it, then basically, yes, it's a prison.”

“I
do
feel incarcerated,” Kent repeated, with a solemnity befitting a hard-won conclusion. “I do. I'm not able to make my own decisions. I'm getting told when to use the bathroom, when to shower, when I can eat. So I do feel incarcerated.”

Riley remained on the fence. He felt incarcerated “in a way,” he ventured, still puzzling through the question he had been the first to ask. “Incarcerated because I can't make my own decisions, but there's freedom here when you start doing what you got to do.”

“Time to move on,” he said finally. The all clear had sounded and we were free to continue on our way.

The O.H. Close Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton, California, was in a state of flux. As part of the settlement of a long-running lawsuit against the California Youth Authority, the state had brought in experts from the University of Cincinnati to train staff in an Integrated Behavioral Treatment Model—the latest in what one staffer half-jokingly called “two or three thousand policy changes” that had come down from the top in the years since the lawsuit was settled and the long road toward compliance began. In the most sweeping change of all, the state has shuttered all but three state juvenile facilities over the past decade and
brought the population down from ten thousand to fewer than a thousand.

The physical plant at O.H. Close—a razor-wire-enclosed campus with dormitory-style units, a football field, a gymnasium, and a chapel—still
had the appearance of a textbook reform school. The population when I visited was 220 young men, down from a peak of about six hundred. In the dayroom, a couple of kids were half watching something about alligators on the Discovery Channel while others played dominoes or chess. Several young men were sprawled across their chairs, dozing or staring at the wall. They all wore a uniform of khaki pants and green polos, sometimes over a white T-shirt.

Boys lived on units with names like Fir, Rivers, and El Dorado, as if the place were a suburban subdivision trying to evoke a gold rush past. Each unit of thirty-six to thirty-eight boys traveled together, marching from one destination to the next in rows of three or four across.

The staff were at work transitioning to the Integrated Behavioral Treatment Model—the approach the state had selected to transform its poorly regarded facilities into therapeutic zones.

“Change is hard,” various staff members told me at O.H. Close. “Change is hard on the self.”

For years, one staff member explained, “the culture was, ‘We are here to provide security and the youth are here to follow our instructions.' ”

Now, he explained, “We're working together. So we are a part of the team just as much as the youth are a part of the team, just as much as their families are a part of the team.”

The hardest part of this change in ethos, another staffer offered, was following instructions for years, only to have a new protocol come along, complete with people “telling you how wrong you've been.”

“When you put your heart and soul into something, and then you have people coming in and telling you, ‘Well you're all wrong,' that's hard,” she continued plaintively. “We were doing things for years that we honestly thought were helpful.”

What sort of things? “Focusing on the offense. Breaking down the denial. Doing all of that—it came from an honest place. So, you know, it's not [like we are] bad, horrible people. It's more of, ‘Okay, we've got to recognize that came from an honest place, now we know better, so let's work together to do even better.' ”

Staff, it struck me, were facing demands that paralleled those that had long been placed on incarcerated youth: to make profound changes to the
way they had always done things, and to do so both quickly and under duress.

Their anxieties about this new approach were not unfounded. A meta-analysis that compared the impact of community-based interventions and those undertaken inside juvenile facilities found that even when successful models were used, their efficacy was lower inside prison walls.
Placing young people in juvenile facilities in order to offer them treatment, researchers found, “dampen[s] the positive effects of appropriate service while augmenting the negative impact of inappropriate service.”

Some wards who had been in the system for years by the time the changes hit were also finding the new therapeutic regime a big adjustment. In the recent past, for example, minor infractions—“refusing to follow staff instruction; disruptive behavior”—would get a kid a write-up, which, if repeated, could lead to loss of privileges. Now, instead of taking the write-up and sucking up the consequences, a kid might have to write
himself
up, coming up with answers to difficult questions:
What were you thinking? What was the triggering event? What was going on for you?
It did not surprise me to learn that some kids would rather take their consequence and be done with it than engage in this sort of forced introspection after years of learning to shut down and keep quiet.