Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) by Nell Bernstein

then something happened.’ What if we could go backwards, and find out at what point in time an intervention—intensive family services, say—would have made a difference, and figure out what the problem was for that individual at that point in time?”
    No one forgets the withdrawal of home and family, the leaching away of hope. Some kids remember not a sudden breach but a gradual ebb, connections receding like a tide going out, until they wake up one morning to find themselves stranded. Others speak of something more abrupt: a grandmother’s death or a parent’s arrest, and a childhood swept away with the force of a riptide.
    By the time Jared was nine, he had lost everything. “My mom is totally gone on crack. We moved to our grandma’s house in the Fillmore. The family sold the house, everybody took their money and started using dope with it, so we didn’t have anything. So we ended up in the Tenderloin [District] selling dope.”
    He soon learned that he was not the only one. “By nine, all those other kids out there were in the same situation. However they got there, we were there on the street, and they became my friends.”
    Whatever safety these children had lay in sticking together. “If somebody messed with us, we’d jump them.” Otherwise, they kept a low profile.
    â€œIn kids’ minds?” he continued, referring to children like himself and his friends, back then. “It’s desperation. A lot of kids’ moms and dads aren’tthere, or they are there and on dope. Or the dad’s in jail and the mom’s on dope. So these kids have grown up having to fend for themselves—selling some weed or some ecstasy pills or even crack or heroin. That’s not bad , because they have to take care of themselves, and they’re doing what they gotta do. In their minds. But they’re still kids.”
    It wasn’t long before Jared was arrested. His tone was flat as he described the treatment he received in what would be a string of institutional placements.
    â€œThe absence of love plays a big factor. The group homes. These people don’t genuinely care. If I slam a bowl of food down in your face, slam it down on the table, you can feel it,” he said. “People forget, these are kids, they need love.”
    The trajectory Jared described was clear enough. From canned food to cornflakes to starving to stealing; from a bowl slammed on a table to a tray slipped through a cell door.
    â€œAnd then you got some that are hardened,” Jared mused, talking about the kids he grew up with. “For some, it’s normal to walk around with a pistol. But for society, that’s not normal.”
    â€œWhat are you doing with this .357 Magnum?” he continued, offering an imagined dialogue between “society” and the child.
    â€œI’m going to school.”
    â€œWhy do you need a gun?”
    â€œBecause these dudes from the other side of town go to school and I’m the only person from my neighborhood that goes there and I don’t want to get jumped. Or robbed. Or beat up every day.”
    â€œAnd so it’s normal for some kids,” he reiterated, leaning across the table as if to bridge the gap between the world he was describing and what Jared, who is black, dubbed “Caucasian Acres.” In this barely hypothetical subdivision, he explained, the actions seen as “normal” on the block where he grew up are met with incomprehension and then incarceration.
    Jared had no interest in portraying himself as a victim. He described the “normal” he knew as a child: “pulling runners” (eating quickly, without paying, then literally running) at the all-you-can-eat soup and salad bar at Sizzler to get a reprieve from the bottomless hunger, pooling the day’s take with four or five other kids until they had enough to pay an addict to get them the key to a hotel room in a