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

flophouse. But he was not makingexcuses, much less looking for pity. He was trying, with words, to bridge two realities.
    Tough-on-crime hard-liners like to speak in terms of “choices”—good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, lock ’em up. Jared was offering a more nuanced perspective: children make choices from among the options they have—choices that are rational, under the circumstances, yet reprehensible to the denizens of Caucasian Acres.
    â€œBut society,” he elaborated, “says, ‘Throw them away. They’re corrupt. They don’t have the mind-set of a child.’ ”
    Several years ago, I set out to explore the daily lives of homeless youth in California. Aided by a crew of about forty currently or formerly homeless peer researchers, I heard from kids who’d spent the previous night alone behind a Chevron station, camped along the banks of the Sacramento River, or simply on the street. Despite childhood histories horrific enough to raise the antennae of any sentient social servant, the only adults earning a taxpayer-funded salary who’d ever shown an interest in them had come wearing a badge, shining a flashlight in a kid’s face, interrupting scant sleep, gloved hands shaking down precious possessions, handing out tickets the young recipients obviously couldn’t pay—tickets that, piled high enough, morphed into bench warrants, landing them finally in juvenile hall. All this for the original sin of being parentless and having the temerity to try to survive anyway.
    I’d thought I’d been on the margins before, but hearing from children who slept in public bathrooms when they did not sleep in cells, hearing that there was no system for them but one that criminalized their extreme vulnerability, I was beginning to feel I had stepped out past the limits of my comprehension. “Dirtbag,” “fuckup,” “lazy,” “worthless,” “lower than the low,” these children had answered when we asked them how others perceived them. Could it be, I wondered, that we had turned on the children? Had we nothing to offer the most vulnerable among them but the cold hand of the law?
    â€œWhat do they want us to do?” one teenager asked bitterly, referring to the officers who wrote him tickets for loitering when he could walk the streets no longer, then placed him in handcuffs when those tickets went unpaid. “Just crawl off somewhere and die?”
    How many of the children Jared had grown up with—hungry, lonely,and just about invisible, until the will to survive ran up against the law—had considered that same question in the back of a police car, bound for the one institution that, as I heard over and over, “had a bed waiting for me”? How many understood that the system’s meager promise—three hots and a cot—came with a condition: that they slip back into the invisibility that allows the rest of us to enjoy untroubled sleep?
    In testimony before the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence, Annie E. Casey Foundation president Patrick McCarthy underscored the failures of the system that is often the only one to take notice of children like Jared. “Whether we call them training schools, reform schools, juvenile correctional facilities or youth prisons,” McCarthy testified, juvenile institutions
    too often have become places of poor treatment and abuse rather than rehabilitation and hope. Recidivism rates are dismal, suggesting that these institutions fail to protect public safety. Abuse and poor treatment are rampant. . . . The sad irony is that as many as three-fourths of the young people incarcerated in these often brutal facilities have themselves been victims of trauma and violence. . . . And following their incarceration, they are more likely rather than less likely to commit violent acts. You would be hard-pressed if you tried to