Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (40 page)

“Talk when you're ready,” the social worker told him. Sometimes they sat in silence for as long as half an hour. What finally cemented their relationship, this young man told me, was when the social worker told him that he, too, had lost a sibling recently: his sister had died at almost the same time his client's brother had.

The advice the worker offered—“stay on the bright side”; “things could be worse”—may have been simplistic, but that didn't seem to matter. What did matter was the fact that his young client felt a genuine connection. Today, this young man is planning to go to college—out of state, if he can swing it—and enroll in the navy.

One does not even have to be buzzed in the door of the Red Hook Residential Center in New York's picturesque Duchess County along the Hudson River to sense that this is a place marked by a strong personality. The expansive, tree-dotted grounds may evoke a sanatorium of years gone by, but even before one enters the building, a different sensibility reveals itself. Whimsical plastic figures—M&M icons and other commercial memorabilia—are arranged like flower beds outside the facility. Piles of stuffed animals complete the anachronistic decor.

Red Hook is full of these personal touches: director Eddie Figueroa's troll collection arrayed along a windowsill; a tree planted in memory of
Figueroa's father; a peaceful gazebo; and a central courtyard landscaped by residents, which Figueroa showed me with evident pride. The flower beds there—planted not with figurines but with living flowers—were bright and well tended.

It didn't take ten minutes with Figueroa, who had been at Red Hook for nearly three decades, to understand what Carrión meant when she spoke of the importance of institutional leadership. Figueroa embraced the Sanctuary Model and welcomed the consistency it offered but didn't expect it to bring radical changes at Red Hook. “We were doing Sanctuary before there was a Sanctuary!” he said gleefully.

As we toured the campus, Figueroa greeted each boy who passed, calling him by name, asking after a relative, or shouting out, “Hi, papi!”

“I was them a long time ago,” Figueroa said. “I lost my mom at eleven. Dad was never home. The only difference was I had sports to guide me, then the military.”

I found myself thinking about a casual remark one of his staff had made earlier in the day. Sports are an important part of the curriculum at Red Hook, and kids get hurt regularly on the court and the field, he told me. Juvenile facilities such as Red Wing hold more than their share of city kids from under-resourced schools—kids who may not have had a chance to belong to a sports team before.

Figueroa greets each new arrival with the same ritual: he brings the teenagers out to the basketball court and challenges them to a game of one-on-one. If they beat him, he promises, he'll buy them a soda.

Some of the guys take pity on the retirement-aged, round-bellied, short-statured director. Others play all out. Either way, Figueroa clobbers them. That opens the door to lesson number one: he may be short, plump, and old, but he
never gives up
. Success, he is showing them, is not just about the advantages you start with; it's about how hard you try.

Lesson number two: he buys them the soda anyway. When it comes to the affection Figueroa offers, he communicates via that gesture, there are no conditions.

Figueroa supports Carrión—“I'd rather deal with a person who is principled”—and has little patience for her critics, who, he indicated, “see them [the youth] as a cash cow.” The day we met, Figueroa was interviewing candidates for a youth division aide position at Red Hook. One
applicant worked at another institution but wanted to transfer in order to shorten his commute. When he inquired politely as to whether he could count on “job security” at Red Hook, I thought Figueroa might pick him up by his collar and deposit him out in the parking lot.

“These are God's children,” Figueroa told him sternly. “They are not here for you to make a living.” The rest of the interview, I suspected, was a formality.

Figueroa had little patience for the notion that by limiting the use of force, Carrión had left staff in a vulnerable position. “
Before
, it was dangerous,” he said. “Kids were getting abused. Kids
and
staff were getting hurt.”

“ ‘Safe' for them,” he scoffed, referring to Carrión's critics, means that if you ship a Brooklyn kid upstate, “you got one less juvenile delinquent in Brooklyn. But the consequence is the loss of family, friends, community.”

As I was heading out, he asked me to carry a message to Carrión: “Tell her I say, ‘Go, girl!' ” he said, smiling broadly.

It was a school day, and the kids were in their classrooms, but the atmosphere at Red Hook had the syrupy, slowed-down feel of the summer afternoon it was. In the vast, echoing gymnasium, a staff member was shooting baskets with a single resident. In a nearby classroom, fifteen young men, all black as far as a glance could tell, were learning CPR. Inside the classroom, I saw a cluster of young men in various stages of ennui—sitting, slumping, or flat-out sleeping. One rested his cheek on the cool of his desk. Another had his T-shirt pulled up over his head. Two older white men, seemingly oblivious to their students' lack of interest, blithely continued to run through their curriculum.

At the end of the day, when my family came to pick me up, a staffer let my eleven-year-old son into the gymnasium to shoot baskets. “Don't worry,” the man joked later, as he brought me to the gym to pick up my kid. “I haven't put a uniform on him.”

I was reminded of the last time I'd heard this kind of joke, years ago when I was visiting Eliza in juvenile hall. A little girl was scurrying playfully around the visiting room one weekend while her teenage mother visited with the child's grandmother. “You'd better settle down,” a guard with a heavy ring of keys at his belt told the little girl, “or I'll lock
you
up
too.” Terrified, the child dashed back to the table and hid her face in her grandmother's lap.

Despite the tremendous difference between the two institutions, it struck me that both jokes relied on the same premise: prisons are scary places, especially for children. No matter how well run or therapeutically oriented, even the best institutions I had visited—places like Red Hook—were struggling mightily to implement treatment modalities inside locked facilities. Can a young person establish a genuinely trusting and therapeutic relationship with someone who is also the keeper of the keys?

Red Hook was lovely, and Eddie Figueroa would give Red Wing's Otis Zanders a run for his money for Warden of the Year. If a kid had committed a crime serious enough to require that he be locked up for the sake of public safety, it seemed to me, he'd be hard-pressed to do better than Red Hook.

But the kids at Red Hook, as well as many at far harsher institutions, were
not
there because they posed a threat to public safety. Across the country, the more serious juvenile offenders are often not in the juvenile system at all; instead they have been transferred to adult court.
In New York—one of only two states that charge all sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds as adults (the other is North Carolina)—this is especially likely.

In December 2009, New York governor David Paterson's Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice released
Charting a New Course: A Blueprint for Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State
. According to that report, more than half the youth who enter state institutional placements (at a cost of more than $200,000 per child per year) have a misdemeanor as their most serious offense.
“This investment,” the task force concluded, “does little to protect public safety or help youth become productive, law-abiding citizens. In fact, many have concluded that it may even be making things worse.”

When we met in 2012, Carrión told me that two-thirds of the kids in her system were what New York calls “step-ups”—low-level kids who started out being placed in the care of a voluntary agency and were later “modified” into state custody. Smoking marijuana, skipping school, stealing a cell phone: these were the examples Carrión offered when I asked what sorts of things could get a kid modified. At Red Hook, she told me before
I visited, “the vast majority you're going to find are going to be [there for] misdemeanors and low-level felonies.” I might meet a kid who had been involved in an assault, she said, or a robbery, but “you're not going to have murderers there. You're not going to have rapists there.”

In fact,
64 percent of youth at low-level facilities like Red Hook statewide are there for misdemeanors. New York classifies these facilities as “nonsecure,” a somewhat confusing term that means, per Carrión, that “it's locked and kids can't run away,” but it has an open-feeling campus with no intimidating perimeter fence. The state's “limited-secure” facilities are different. According to the 2009 report from the governor's task force, several “look and feel exactly like secure facilities, with surrounding barbed wire.” Despite this intimidating facade, however,
the majority of kids in these places—56 percent—also have been convicted of nothing more serious than misdemeanor charges.

No matter how lovely the landscaping at a place like Red Hook might appear, how sincere its director and well trained its staff, there is no getting around the question of why kids are sent there to begin with. Does lighting a joint or skipping out on school justify the trauma inherent in incarceration; the separation from family, school, and community; the high odds of recidivism and reduced life chances?

Most kids, to be clear, can get away with missing a few days of school, getting high occasionally, or even both at once without winding up locked up. Poor youth of color, however, are granted far less leeway for “youthful indiscretions.” In New York City, a stunning 93.5 percent of youth placed in state custody are children of color. Had the “high bar” Carrión spoke of been met for most of these kids? Carrión's conversation with the judges about who they were sending her way clearly had an impact, but the fundamental quandary has yet to be resolved. The state is still taking away young people's liberty—a grave act, as Carrión herself is the first to point out, and one that affects youth of color more than anyone—for acts that pose little or no threat to public safety, acts that better-off white kids commit on a regular basis, often with no governmental intervention at all, much less the theoretically last-ditch intervention of incarceration.

The Supreme Court itself has waffled on the question of whether placing a child in a locked building as treatment for his problems, not as punishment
for his actions, constitutes imprisonment, and so demands due-process protections.

In its decision in
In re Gault
, the Supreme Court challenged the notion that benign intent could supersede the fact of the fence. Juveniles facing delinquency proceedings, the Court concluded in its 1967 ruling, had a right to counsel under the Fourteenth Amendment specifically because they faced
“the awesome prospect of incarceration in a state institution.”

“Commitment is a deprivation of liberty,” the Court wrote in declaring that juveniles could invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, because “it is incarceration against one's will, whether it is called ‘criminal' or ‘civil.' ”

Four years later, the Court changed its tune. In
McKeiver v. Pennsylvania
, the justices refused to extend further constitutional protections (most notably, trial by jury) on the grounds that confinement, when it is imposed by the juvenile court, “is aimed at rehabilitation, not at . . . imposing pains and penalties” and is therefore fundamentally different from the incarceration of adults. In this case, according to the Court, the intent of the jurist trumped the experience of the judged.

The top court's inconsistency left lower courts flummoxed when faced with similar due-process challenges on behalf of juveniles.
“Sometimes punishment is treatment,” the Washington Supreme Court offered in one particularly obscure ruling.

These conundrums continue to emerge to this day, as staff and administrators at juvenile facilities struggle to respond to new mandates to “treat” their captive charges. Researcher Richard Mendel, who has studied state juvenile facilities extensively, uses the term “toxic treatment environment” to describe the challenges that come with implementing even a good program in a juvenile prison. “Even if juvenile corrections facilities provide high quality education, mental health, and substance abuse treatment services,” Mendel writes, “youth are unlikely to benefit when the overall environment of the facility is permeated with fear, violence, or maltreatment.”

University of California, Berkeley's Barry Krisberg put it more concisely: “You can't give a motivational interview with a tear gas canister on your belt.”

Having visited several therapeutic prisons, I am left ambivalent. The
best of them are better—some far so—than the standard institution. If the goal is the lesser evil, then the therapeutic prison may well fit the bill. But if we hold ourselves to a higher standard—if our goal is to protect both children's rights and public safety, as well as to help traumatized children to heal—then doors that lock from the outside will always run counter to these aims.

12

ONLY CONNECT

Rehabilitation Happens in the Context of Relationship