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

design a less effective response to a child’s exposure to violence than to lock him or her up in overcrowded, loud, brightly lit, depressing, frightening conditions with a large group of other children with similar problems, little or no privacy and no sense of personal safety, and then fail to provide a decent education or an opportunity to build skills; neglect to address the mental health, substance abuse, trauma and family issues that contributed to the delinquent behavior; and then release him or her to the streets with little hope for a future of promise or possibility. This is not a recipe for success.
    As they cycle ever deeper into the juvenile and criminal justice systems, many young people lose any faith they may have had that they are expected, or even permitted, to succeed. Success comes to seem the purview of others, reserved for the denizens of Caucasian Acres.
    Behind bars, many receive the message that they are destined for failurein explicit terms. “When you’re locked up, you’re treated like you’re nobody. You’re constantly reminded that you’re nothing, that you’re a criminal, that you’re never gonna be this, that you’re too stupid to do that,” recalled sixteen-year-old Birdy, whose father had deposited her at juvenile hall after she ran away for a few days. “They tell you, ‘We can go home. You can’t, because you broke the law. Only criminals are here. Can’t you see? Take a look around.’ ”
    â€œThe probation officers think it’s good to be in there—it teaches you a lesson,” she said. “It don’t teach you a lesson. It makes you worse, because you start believing what they’re telling you. I felt like I was a criminal. Once you get put in the system, you consider yourself a criminal. So when you get out, you think, ‘Oh well, I’ve been through it before. Why not again?’ I started believing I wasn’t gonna be nobody.”
    â€œThat’s a nice way to start building your record,” Miranda remembers the booking officer sneering as she took the seventeen-year-old’s fingerprints after she was arrested for fighting at school. For young people who are most profoundly alone, violence can become its own sort of language, a desperate effort to communicate their pain by passing it on. But no one asked Miranda what had so enraged her, asked her anything, for that matter, that would have helped them to see her as an individual. If they had, they would have learned that Miranda’s combatant had insulted her mother, who had been locked up since Miranda was twelve; that police had picked her mother up for check kiting while Miranda was at school, leaving Miranda to pack a bag and fend for herself, alone and itinerant throughout her adolescence.
    â€œThey look at you like you’re just gonna keep spiraling down,” Miranda said of that arrest, “when maybe you’re just an angry teenager. Maybe I just needed to talk to somebody. But nobody cares. Nobody cares.”
    That children who wind up in juvenile facilities have at some previous point “fallen through the cracks” is a popular metaphor but a spurious analysis. It implies that most children who grow up in impoverished, high-incarceration neighborhoods—who face violence on the streets, in their schools, and sometimes in their homes—have access to functional public systems and community networks, and that those who wind up in trouble simply missed or were missed by these otherwise adequate safety nets.
    Spend some time talking with young prisoners and the fallacy quickly becomes clear. The children one meets in juvenile prisons have not fallen through cracks; they have tumbled into chasms. Wandered through deserts. There may not exist a metaphor adequate to the trauma that many have survived.
    And then we lock them up, in barren, violent, abuse-filled institutions that are virtually guaranteed