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Université de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Etudes Britanniques,
Nord-Américaines et Postcoloniales
Master 1 Etudes Internationales Civilisation américaine
Mass Incarceration of African American in the United
States:
The Specific Case of Male Juvenile
Delinquents
Madani Bah
Sous la direction de Madame Hélène Le
Dantec-Lowry (Septembre 2016)
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................3
I - Mass Incarceration
a) A Brief
History....................................................................8
b) An Entire Racial Biased Justice
System......................................9
II - What Happens in Juvenile Detention and
Jail?
a)
InhumaneTreatment...........................................................19
b) The
Hole...........................................................................24
c) Sexual
Abuse.....................................................................27
III - Once They Are Released...
a) The Prison Label: A
Burden..................................................29
b) Struggle and Trauma After
Prison..........................................32
c) Reform of the Justice System: Some Signs of
Hope?...........................34
Conclusion................................................................................37
Appendices................................................................................41
List of
References........................................................................59
Introduction
When looking at incarceration rates, what should be
noted is that the US population represents only 5% of the world inhabitants and
yet, it has 25% of the world's prisoners1(*). Moreover, many of those prisoners are from
ethno-racial minority groups, especially from the African American community.
The US also has a high rate of young people incarcerated. To try to understand
what is currently happening, we need to look back at how African Americans have
been treated by White people in the United States ever since they won their
independence over the British. From Slavery and the Jim Crow era to the Mass
Incarceration of nowadays, it seems that African Americans have been stuck in a
system that has been oppressing them for several centuries now.
The problem of mass incarceration in the United States, which
is mainly due to the War on Drugs - as I will develop later - I will give a few
numbers first as they tell much about the story of black incarceration: there
are 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and out of those 2.2
million, 1 million are Black. One in four black men born since the late 1970s
has spent time in prison.2(*)It is also estimated that three out of four young black
men will spend time in jail at some point in Washington, D.C. and other black
communities in the USA.3(*)
To see what these numbers represent, we need to compare them with other
countries and that is when we see how astonishing they are: The USA has the
highest rate of incarceration in the world; even countries such as Russia,
China and Iran, where the justice system is known as particularly harsh, do not
have the same rate, which is 750 people in prison for every 100,000 adults and
children, while in Germany, it's 93.4(*)
When it comes to juvenile detention, the numbers are
staggering as well: 66,332 American youths were confined because of juvenile
detention according to Nell Bernstein in his book Burning Down the
House in 2014.5(*)
Police arrest nearly 2 million juveniles every year, and if this trend
continues, one in three American schoolchildren will be arrested by the time
they reach their twenty-third anniversary. In contrast, just like I did before,
we can compare the numbers with other countries: the USA incarcerates more of
their population than any other industrialized nation - seven times the rate of
Great Britain, and eighteen times that of France. The closest in term of
numbers, South Africa, incarcerates its children at one-fifth of the rate of
the USA.6(*) Nell Bernstein
noted that young people of color face a different reality. They account for 38
percent of the youth population, but 72 percent of incarcerated juveniles. This
reveal that they face a different treatment at every level of the juvenile
system: The legislation, the policing, the sentencing and the condition of the
facilities. They are held in secure facilities at rates as high as four and a
half times their percentage of the population; African Americans youths are
five times more likely than white youths to be incarcerated.7(*)
In both cases, for prison and juvenile detention, Michelle
Alexander and Nell Bernstein - the two authors of the two main books that I
have chosen to use for my paper - have highlighted how both juvenile
incarceration and mass incarceration show racial injustice and disparities.
Again here, we have a frightening number, which is the rate of black teenagers
that are locked up: It is five times the rate for the whites, when white kids
are as likely, if not more, to commit the same «crimes» than their
black counterparts.8(*)
Although all these numbers are scary, they are only the numbers of people
behind bars. As of 2016, the US justice system controls more than 7 million
people, with 3.8 million on Probation and 820,000 on Parole.9(*) People behind bars are actually
there for non-violent offenses, which is what makes Michelle Alexander say in
the title of her book that Mass Incarceration is The New Jim Crow.
Angela Davis, an American politic activist and author said more or less the
same thing in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? when she argues that what
she calls US super incarceration is closer to a new age of slavery than a
system of criminal justice.10(*)
It's important to try to understand how many people are locked
up in the USA and the type of «crime» they have committed. The two
charts below are very telling of the current situation. They are from the
website Prison Policy: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html
With these charts, there is no denial of the issues the USA is
facing. A significant number of people are sent to juvenile detention or to
jail/prison for what are, in most cases, relatively minor offenses; and most of
the time these are related to drugs. It makes us wonder why there are so many
people behind bars for this reason in particular. We should go back about 2
decades before on order to do this: drugs became a «problem» for the
country in the Seventies when Nixon made drug abuse the public enemy of the
United States. But it wasn't until 1982 that the War on Drugs started under the
presidency of Reagan, allocating a significant budget to federal law
enforcement for the matter.11(*) More and more money was used for the War on Drugs:
in 1986, the House passed a law allowing $2 billion to the anti-drug crusade,
and harsher penalties were proposed, such as mandatory minimum incarceration
for the distribution of cocaine.12(*)Something should be stressed here: as Michelle
Alexander wrote, when the War on Drug was launched, illegal drug use was
actually declining in the USA.13(*)Moreover, it is clear that mass incarceration has also
not helped reduce crime rates.14(*)So what exactly is the point of incarcerating so many
people? One could say that it proves the point some activists make, which is
that the War on Drugs was a new way to «control» minorities,
especially African Americans. Moreover, another aspect of the problem of mass
incarceration needs to be considered, the fact that, nowadays, the
privatization of prisons, which appeared in the Eighties, has had a huge impact
on keeping things as they stand: private companies make billions of profits
with the help of the State, by incarcerating as many people as possible, most
of the time under dire circumstances for inmates.15(*)
Another interesting figure to take into account - one that
really puts things in perspective in relation with the history of the United
States, is what part of the country has the most prisoners. Although each state
has its own different criminal codes, there is a pattern in the states that put
the most people in prison: 8 out of the top ten are southern states:
Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and
Arkansas. The states of Delaware and Alaska are the only exceptions. All the
others are southern states.16(*) Southern states have always been very tough in terms
of punishment and incarceration compared to the rest of the country. This is
very much related to the history of slavery, the Civil War and the period of
Jim Crow and also to racial relations there as a white-dominated society there
made it possible to punish African Americans harshly and to take away from them
their legal and civil rights.
Another dimension must be taken in consideration, the effect
of incarceration on inmates. Nell Bernstein and Michelle Alexander have both
stated in the introduction to their book that, the impact on the level for
those behind bars, whether adults or juveniles, is absolutely horrific. The
conditions and the environment in which they live, the isolation, and the
sentiment of despair are life-changing for these people who might be scarred
for the rest of their lives.
In this paper research, I will focus on why mass incarceration
has become so problematic as a result of specific racial and political issues,
but most of all, I will try to see how much the people trapped in juvenile
facilities and/or prison go through emotionally, their perspective from the
inside, and whether they really think they can have a future in the United
States, considering what happened to them. I am going to mention several
interviews of former inmates, which will provide a glimpse of what it must be
like to be in a juvenile facility. I will also try to understand why the
criminal justice system is racially biased and deprives young African Americans
from a positive future and denies their basic rights from the time of their
arrests until the rest of their lives with this current system.
In the first part, I will see how mass incarceration came to
be and I will examine some of the laws that made it possible to target a part
of the US population in particular. I will also analyze how and why Blacks are
arrested so much and given such harsh sentences. In the second part, I will
focus much more on what happens behind the walls: the psychological torture,
the violence, the humiliation, all of this through the voices of these people
in interviews they have given. Last, I am going to focus on life after
incarceration and see whether a future a really possible after a person is
released from jail and has to adapt to a new world: one in which he is often
considered with a prison label and one in which he has to re-adapt to the US
society. I am going to demonstrate that young Blacks in particular are the
victims of this system which is still very much racially based in spite of the
major improvements in the life of African Americans since the 1960s, and that
it still has a regional component.
I - Mass Incarceration
A) A Brief History
After decades of slavery, the abolition of slaves became
central to the political debate in the United States and led to the Civil War
(1861-1865), won by the North. The Thirteen Amendment abolishing slavery was
passed in 1864 and took effect a year later.17(*) White southern planters feared losing everything and
also the reaction of black men now that they were free. It resulted in black
codes and vagrancy laws which led the way to the Jim Crow system.18(*)
The birth of the Jim Crow Laws started with the Convict Lease
system, which enabled white companies (in mining for example) in the Southern
states to use black convicts as free laborers for the duration of their
sentence. This system was extremely harsh and was in many ways reminiscent of
slavery, sometimes even harder than slavery when we look at it. The death rates
were higher during that period than during slavery.19(*) Politically, The Populists in
the 18XX, represented an alliance between poor whites and African Americans in
the South.20(*)But as soon
as the elites saw that it became dangerous, white supremacy prevailed and it
was the beginning of the Jim Crow Laws and of segregation, accepted by the
Supreme Court through the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, which made
official the doctrine of separate and equal.21(*)
This unjust and racist system ended thanks to black
mobilization starting in the early decades of the 20th century and
up to the Civil Rights Movement. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision
played its part as it officially ended segregation as the Supreme Court of the
US decided that it was unconstitutional to have separate schools for white and
black students., The Jim Crow system was already facing resistance before this,
when African American veterans saw how they were treated in Europe during World
War II, which was radically different than their treatment at home.22(*) In spite of strong resistance
by southern Whites, African Americans were now legally allowed to vote (thanks
to the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and their children could play wherever they
wanted. The number of Interracial marriages climbed during that period as well.
Little by little equality in front of the law was put into effect. Despite the
fact that African Americans had a major breakthrough in the Fifties and
Sixties, a new way to discriminate black and brown people would find its place
with the birth of mass incarceration.
B) An Entire Racial Biased Justice System: The
Different Policies and Whom It Targets: The War on Drugs, Tough On Crime, And
The Super-Predators
Mass Incarceration came to be thanks to rhetoric such as
«law and order» and «tough on crimes», which were used in
the late 1950s as Michelle Alexander points out in the first chapter in her
book.23(*) When the crime
rates rose in the country for about ten years, white conservatives jumped on
the occasion to link this to the Civil Rights Movement and to migration. There
were also some riots in the summer of 1964, and a series of uprisings after
Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, all of which worsened the
situation.24(*) It's at
this time of uprising that the public debate shifted from segregation to crime.
But in both case, it was again a matter of White vs Black even though it became
a bit problematic to express race issues as openly as before due to the
improvements that the Civil Rights Movement brought. It was seen during Nixon's
presidential campaign: his aim was to get the votes of white conservatives who
feared Black people, and in order to do so, he created a particular polarized
political environment by using «subliminal appeal to anti-black
voter» as John Ehrlichman said of Nixon's strategy during the 1968's
campaign.25(*) Daniel
Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in 1965 also played its part
helping the argument that poverty was caused by black culture.26(*) The report, which focused on
the deep root of poverty, was met with criticism because of Moynihan's omission
of policy recommendation, his depiction of black women and in most cases single
mothers, as well as the fact that the report felt like it put the blame on the
victim, William Ryan a psychologist pointed out.27(*)By using the unrest after the
Civil Rights Movement and link this to a problem of «law and order»
in his speeches and ads, Nixon got into the Oval office by using the fear of
conservative voters.28(*)
This type of policy increased again, with much impact, in 1980
when Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, was elected President. During
the election campaign, he called for what would be the now famous «war on
drugs». As Michelle Alexander says, Reagan excelled in the excision of the
language of race from conservative public discourse.29(*)Indeed, Reagan used what is
called a «colorblind» rhetoric on crime, welfare etc., but one that
was actually not race-neutral at all. In October 1982 that Reagan launched the
War on Drugs, despite the fact that it was not a major preoccupation for many
Americans at the time.30(*)A major budget was given in order for this war to be
as effective as possible: the FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to
$95 million between 1980 and 1984. In 1991, the Department of Defense antidrug
allocations increased from $33 million the decade before to $1,042 million at
the time. Yet, somehow the budget for the agencies that could help drugs
problems - treatment, prevention and education - was reduced: from $274 million
to $57 million between 1981 and 1984 and the Department of Education saw a
budget a cut from $14 million to $3 million.31(*) One of the reasons why it was easy to
«target» this particular group of people, that it to say black men
and men from other minorities, is because of the unemployment that hit the poor
black and brown ghettos, and of the wide and easy availability of crack on the
streets, which had devastating outcomes for people.
Reagan succeeded because he launched a media campaign to make
sure that the War on Drugs was promoted and well received. In magazines, on the
news, etc., Americans could see black crack whores on the street and crack
babies. In 1986, the crack «epidemics» was declared the biggest story
since the Vietnam War and Watergate.32(*) It is very telling of the impact it has had moving
forward. It also gave the opportunity for the Conservatives to «attack the
enemy»: it was no longer possible to «attack» black people as it
had been before, but now, because knowing that the enemies were
«technically colorblind» drug dealers and addicts, the drug issue
became of way to criticize the black community without attacking it openly.
As was said in the introduction, all of this resulted in
harsher policies and bigger funding for the antidrug crusade: $2 billion were
allocated in an effort to support the War on Drugs in September 1986. The death
penalty could be sentenced for drug-related crimes, and illegally obtained
evidence was admissible in trials.33(*)The focus on crack was so great that the rest of the
issues, such as unemployment, lack of good schools, police harassment, etc.
were barely mentioned. In 1988, harsher policies were introduced: the new
Anti-Drug Abuse Act gave the possibility to public housing authorities to evict
any tenant who allowed any form of drug-related criminal activity, with also
new imposed mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of cocaine; even
against first-time offenders. Of course, all of this targeted poor communities,
which would happen to be overwhelmingly black. When President Bush Sr. was
elected after Reagan's two mandates, he used the same tactics as his
predecessor: racial appeals that would help to get him into the White
House.34(*) There was a
similar pattern again: just like the Populists gave up under the political
pressure of the Redeemers to put black people aside during the period of
Reconstruction, the allies of African Americans, the poor and white middle
class, were appealed by the government. That is why we have witnessed the
prison population exploded during the 1980s and the 1990s, doubling the rates
of incarceration of the 1970s.35(*) During the 1990s, with the Sentencing Project, one
quarter of young African American men were under the control of the criminal
justice system.36(*)
One would think that a democrat presidential candidate would
be more inclined to back down on those issues, but 1992 candidate Bill Clinton
actually worsened the situation because he wanted to appear as tough as any
republican.37(*)In these
conditions, he went to Arkansas to witness the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a
mentally impaired black man who was completely out of touch with reality; he
asked for his last dessert to be saved until the morning. Bill Clinton said
afterwards that «no one [could] say that [he was] soft on
crime.»38(*)When he
was elected, he went farther than anyone else with his «three strikes and
you're out» law in 1994, a law which was passed first in several States,
including California. The bill generated new federal capital crimes, mandated
life sentences for three-time offenders and authorized more than $16 billion
for state prison grants and expansion of state and local polices. The Justice
Policy Institute has said of the Clinton Administration that its tough on crime
policies «resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison
inmates of any president in American history.39(*)In 1996, the public housing budget suffered a $17
billion cut, and corrections fund went up to 171%, which made it easier to
build prisons.40(*)Thanks
to this, the Clinton administration made it much easier toexclude anyone with a
criminal history from public housing. As if this was not already enough,
President Clinton implemented the «One Strike and You're Out» rule,
which would basically leave many people homeless with that policy.Thus, mass
incarceration policies were implemented with the huge impact of the War on
Drugs, and it reflects on people who are in prison because of drug offenses:
Ninety percent are black or Latino in this «colorblind» era as
Michelle Alexander said.41(*)
It will be interesting here to focus on the case of the
juveniles as well. The increase in juvenile violent crime can be linked to the
period when crack hit the cities in the 1980s and the early 1990s.42(*)During this era of unrest with
the war on drugs and youth violence, some used this particular context to add
more fear and that is how John DiIulio, a political science professor talked
about a new generation of «super predators»; «A new generation
of street criminals, the youngest, biggest, baddest generation any society has
ever known»43(*)He
also co-wrote a book in 1996 with William J. Bennett Body Count: Moral
Poverty ... and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, where
they depict America's most recent nightmare: the children. They are portrayed
as» kids from 13 to 16, mostly from inner-cities, who feel nothing as they
kill, rob or rape.» The authors predicted (and they were wrong) a new
crime wave driven by these kids would lead America to chaos.44(*)In the same way that Ronald
Reagan was able to use the media to promote the War on Drugs and link the
«issue» to black and brown people, the authors of this book succeeded
in making American believe their narrative: at the time, there were painting
stories in magazines on the super-predator phenomenon with images of black
teenagers. The politicians jumped on the bandwagon and passed legislation that
increased penalties in juvenile court or allowed the growing numbers of youth
to be transferred to adult court, where they could receive harsher
sentences.45(*) The media
role had basically the same impact than it did during the years where the War
on Drugs was the number one focus of the media in the country. As a result, in
1996, more than half of all local news stories about youth focused on violence
in spite of the fact that adults committed 80% of USA's crime according to the
Berkeley media Studies Group.46(*)To say that the warnings of super-predators were
racialized is an understatement. In a report to the U.S. attorney general,
James Alan Fox, who is a professor at Northeastern University, warned about the
projected growth of black teenage population when he warned that the nation
faced a future juvenile violence problem that may make today's epidemic pale in
comparison.47(*)The U.S
assisted at shift toward how to treat youth: it seemed okay now to treat youth
as adults if they were «criminals». The myth of the super-predator
opened the door to worse policies: more sanctions given; more kids transferred
into adult prisons; a number of states revised their juvenile codes in order to
make explicit their punitive intent, especially in Texas and Kansas, but they
were not the only ones. It resulted in a rise of the number of cases heard each
year in juvenile court: the number went up by 44%, from 1.2 million in 1989 to
1.8 million in 1999, despite a drop in juvenile violent crime.48(*) Indeed, this era coincided
ironically with an historic drop of juvenile crime: juvenile crime arrest
peaked in 1994 with 500 juveniles per 100,000 but began to drop significantly
to fewer than 300 per 100,000.49(*)Not only was there an increase in jail population,
there was as well much tougher laws and sentences for their children, some of
whom could be judged in adult criminal courts.50(*)More kids were arrested for minor offenses. Even when
crime figures dropped, juvenile incarceration continued to grow, much like what
happened for their adult counterparts. As said in Burning Down The House:
The End Of Juvenile Detention, the super-predator ended up being a myth,
but it still had an enormous impact on the youth who were treated as harshly as
adults were, and are still suffering the consequences now. Juvenile centers,
which at first were meant to rehabilitate the youth, were now places as bad as
adult prison, a place that destroyed individuals and gave them no hope for
better days ahead.
The criminal justice system played a major part in this
change, especially concerning how they arrest most people. Since the beginning,
drug-related offenses are one of the main reasons why so many people
incarcerated as of today. Drug arrests have tripled since 1981, and as a result
more than 31 million people have been arrested since the War on Drugs
began.51(*) That is how
more than 7 million Americans are behind bars, on probation, or on
parole.52(*) Ever since
the War on Drugs started, the Supreme Court has made it easy to facilitate this
crusade by not respecting the Fourth Amendment - which gives protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures by the police - anymore.53(*) The way police would proceed
during this war on drug was easy: the common tactic was that if you
«suspected» someone, you «arrested» them first and you
questioned them later. Except that, most of the time, this someone was a young
person of color. What most of the people who were on the receiving end of this
did not know was that they could say «no» to a police officer if he
asked to search of their posessions. Again, the role of the Supreme Court in
the War on Drugs should not be undermined. In the Florida v. Bostick
case, Bostick was arrested in a bus when police officers searched his bag and
found cocaine. He complied but the officers knew that virtually nobody would
say «no» to an officer and that they had no reasonable reason to
suspect that man. On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Bostick's case
that the police officer's conduct violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition
of unreasonable searches and seizures. The court also slammed the «bus
sweeps» in the drug war comparing the methods to totalitarian
regimes.54(*)The Supreme
Court then reversed itself; saying that the young man volunteered and that a
reasonable person would have felt free to tell the officer: «No, you can't
search my bag». The reality is that most people would definitely not say
«no» to a police officer, even if they have not done anything wrong.
This case was not the only case. The Supreme Court actually participated in
these kinds of arrests a lot of time.
Another way that police officers search for drugs without any
real evidence is on the road by using minor traffic violations. So just like
consent searches, pretext stops are one of the main ways to operate in the War
on Drugs. In these cases, again, the Supreme Court made it simple for the law
enforcement to have virtually no boundaries.55(*) Michelle Alexander's book provides a telling example:
Whren and Brown, two African American men, were stopped by plainclothes
officers in a vehicle in June 1993. The police admitted to stopping them
because they wanted to investigate them for imagined drug crimes, even though
they did not have reasonable suspicion. Because they lacked any real evidence,
the officers decided to stop them by using a traffic violation. It was reported
that the driver failed to use his turn signal and accelerated abruptly from a
stop sign. With their «hunch» the officers searched the car and found
a bag of cocaine. On appeal, Whren and Brown challenged their convictions that
pretextual stops violate the Fourth Amendment. Allowing the police to use minor
traffic violations as a pretext to search for drugs would permit them to single
out anyone for a drug investigation without any evidence of illegal drug
activity. The Supreme Court rejected their argument saying it does not matter
why the police are stopping motorists as long as long as traffic violation
gives them an excuse to do so. They can search even if there is no evidence of
illegal drug activity.56(*)The same thing happened a few months later but with
the Ohio v. Robinette case: a police officer pulled over Robert Robinette,
allegedly for speeding. After issuing a warning, the officer ordered Robinette
out of the vehicle and turned on a camera in his car. He then asked for
«consent» to search the vehicle for drugs. Robinette agreed. The
officer found marijuana and a pill of methamphetamine. The Ohio Supreme Court
was uncomfortable with this obvious fishing for drugs expedition. To offer some
protections for motorists: at the very least, the justices said that they
should know they have the right to refuse consent and to leave, if they choose
to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court said this was
«unrealistic».57(*) It sent a clear message to the lower courts: The
Fourth Amendment was insignificant when it came to the War on Drugs.This
Amendment that was made to protect the American people from the English
practice of arbitrary searches before the American Revolution was now «put
on hold» for the war on drugs, and would target, of course, people of
color in this new «colorblind» era. The War on Drugs slowly became an
actual war, given the fact that SWAT teams and the military also got involved
in this war.58(*)A high
number of their raids have resulted in death or have traumatized the people
whose home has been destroyed. Indeed, there have been many incidents with
people that ended up being killed but there has never been any conviction for
the matter. Reagan triggered much of this with the Military Cooperation with
Law Enforcement Act in 1981.59(*)The government gave military weapons to federal and
local and state police. Bush and Clinton went further than this, and, as
already mentioned, it resulted in the skyrocketing of drug arrests.
Numbers will highlight how much racial bias there is in the
U.S. criminal justice system: despite the fact that the majority of illegal
drug users and dealers on a national scale are white, three-fourths of all
people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.60(*) Several surveys suggest that
white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of
color: In 2000, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white
students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, crack cocaine
at eight times the rates of black students, and heroin at seven times the rate
of black students. Another survey, from 2000, by the National Household Survey
on Drug Abuse reported that white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more
likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.61(*)Now, focusing on young black
men, some statistics are truly shocking: one in 9 black men between the ages of
twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006.62(*)As Michelle Alexander writes in her book, violent
crime is far from explaining mass incarceration; as homicide offenders account
for 0.4 percent of the past decade's growth in federal prisons, while drug
offenders account for nearly 61 percent of that expansion. In the state system,
less than 3 percent of new court commitments to state prison involve people
convicted of homicide. Only 7.9 percent of state prisoners were convicted of
violent crimes.63(*) The
U.S. Supreme Court, just like it has helped for the War on Drugs, has made it
impossible to challenge racial bias in the criminal justice system under the
Fourteenth Amendment. So by giving no boundaries to law enforcement, and by
making it impossible to contest the racial issues that those arrested faces it
is clear that the American justice system specifically targets young people of
color to fill the prisons.
To highlight how disproportionate some of the sentences during
the War on Drugs are, some cases speak for themselves: Edward Clary for
example. Two months after his eighteenth birthday, Clary was stopped and
searched because he «looked like» a drug courier. At that time, he
was returning home from visiting friends in California. One of them convinced
him to take some drugs back home to St. Louis. Clary had never tried to deal
drug before and had no criminal record. The police found crack cocaine on him
and arrested him. He was convicted in federal court and sentenced under federal
laws that punish crack offenses one hundred times more severely than offenses
involving powder cocaine. A conviction of sale of five hundred grams of powder
cocaine triggers a five-year mandatory sentence, while only five grams of crack
triggers the same sentence. Unfortunately, Clary had more than fifty grams of
crack, which meant the sentencing was going to be a minimum of ten years in
federal prison for a first time offender.64(*)Clary challenged the constitutionality of the
hundred-to-one ratio. His lawyers argued that law is arbitrary and irrational,
and it imposes too much different penalties on two forms of the same substance.
They also argued that the law discriminates against African Americans. Clyde
Cahill of the Federal District of Missouri, an African American judge assigned
on Clary's case showed that courts are powerless to address issues regarding
race discrimination. Indeed, he declared the hundred-to-one ratio racially
discriminatory in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Cahill believed
that race plays a major part in crack sentencing laws and policies.He also
argued that many people may not believe they are motivated by discriminatory
attitudes but they all have internalized fear of young black men, because of
the media imagery that has helped to create a national image of the young black
man as a criminal. He added that «The 100-to-1 ratio, coupled with
mandatory minimum sentencing provided by federal statute, has created a
situation that reeks with inhumanity and injustice.... If young white males
were being incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statute
would have been amended long ago». Therefore, he sentenced Clary to four
years in prison: as if Clary had been carrying powder cocaine.65(*) The prosecution appealed
Clary's case to the Eight Circuit Court of Appeal which reversed Judge Cahill
finding that the case was not even close. The court remanded the case back to
the district for resentencing. Clary, who was now married and a father, was
ordered back to prison to complete his ten-year term.66(*)
Even though Michelle Alexander's book does not deal
specifically with the case of juveniles, she insists that the most
comprehensive studies of racial bias involve:» the treatment of juvenile
offenders. The studies show that youth of color are more likely to be arrested,
detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure
residential facilities than white youths. The racial bias against African
American youth is affecting decision making. Indeed, a review of juvenile
sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white
offenders differently. For Blacks, crimes were committed because of internal
personality flaws whereas for Whites, it was because of external conditions
such as family conflict.»67(*)A perfect example is in the drug enforcement context:
Whether a kid seems to be a dangerous drug-dealing thug or just experimenting
drugs is subject to interpretation and racial bias by prosecutors. In the third
chapter of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of
Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander mentions a former U.S. Attorney who
said the following «I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop
the gun charge against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no
extenuating circumstances. I asked, `Why do you want to drop the gun offense?'
And he said, `He's a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him
was a rifle. He's a good ol' boy, and all good ol' boys have rifles, and it's
not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.' But he was actually a gun-toting
drug dealer, which shows how racially biased the system really
is.»68(*)
Something interesting as well is where police go when they
look for drugs, and it is not a surprise that they go in ghettos and barrios.
It would obviously be very difficult to go to white suburbs and do the same
things that happen in the poor black and Latino communities. It is not really a
big surprise if we consider how much easier it is to target these communities.
As one former prosecutor said, «It's a lot easier to go out to the hood,
so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your resources in an undercover
[operation in a] community where there are potentially politically powerful
people.»69(*)Here
again, we see how- for racial reasons, which often is linked with political
reasons- one part of the population is targeted and segregated as well as why.
Black and brown youth are the primary targets: young black teenagers who live
in a ghetto community are often stopped, interrogated, and frisked a great
number of times, several times a day for some. A law student who ventured into
a community for the first time described that during her ride with Chicago
police: «Each time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the
car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands
up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. And the officers would
search them. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn't believe
it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just seemed so
normal - for the police and the young men.»70(*) Here is the result of a
stigmatized category of the society: a regular day in which they get controlled
up to several times on a regular basis because they are considered potentially
delinquents. By doing this, it creates a polarizing climax in which these young
black teenagers end up feeling like this is the new normal instead of trying to
turn their life around. It is kind of an infernal cycle that makes them feel
like they are really criminals in the end. And it definitely has an impact when
an individual - or even a large part of the population - behave in a certain
way towards another: they end up doing the opposite of what they actually
should be doing. The fact that in these communities, a lot of those teenagers
may not have been raised by their father has a certain impact on what they may
think and what they may do in their lives. Indeed, the mass incarceration of
young black men has had a tremendous impact on the black family. It is reported
that more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison in
2000.71(*)
Thus, after an examination of the birth of mass incarceration,
the policies put in place to target young men of color with the War on Drugs,
and the justice system, which discriminates against young African American with
disproportionate sentences and ludicrous ways to stop «them» on the
streets, I am going to show in a second part what happens when these young men
are behind bars and the tremendous impact it has on their lives, emotionally,
morally and physically, especially for the teenagers who are locked in juvenile
detention centers, which will be my main focus in this part.
II - What Happens in Juvenile Detention Centers and
Jails?
A) Inhumane Treatment
In the many interviews I found about the experiences behind
bars, with a strong focused on youth, it seems abundantly clear that they
experience nothing less than torture behind these walls. Abuse in these
facilities can take various forms: from verbal abuse, to physical abuse,
psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. It is important to stress that
incarceration, especially for the youth, seems so unnecessary today. Juvenile
court was initially funded to rehabilitate the youth. But it does the opposite
nowadays: putting youth behind bars72(*) - mostly for non-violent offenses - drives them
deeper into criminality and increase the likelihood that they will wind up
behind bars. Not to mention as well that the juvenile system was created to
keep youth out of adult prisons, which is not the case: these institutions feel
very much like the adult correctional facilities out of which they were
supposed to be kept. If we analyze the situation, many teenagers go through a
phase and look for attention by doing things they should not do: it includes a
lot of actions that go against best interests.The likelihood that these
children, who are already insecure and vulnerable, respond well to being behind
bars and «get it together» is close to none. It only deepens their
issues. As soon as they arrive in those facilities, much of the same is told to
them: the example of a young man in Burning Down The House: The End Of
Juvenile Prison who recalls being told by a guard upon his arrival that
«he wouldn't die»: «You'll get beat up, get unconscious,
probably go to the hospital, get your tooth broke, nose broke, probably get a
black eye, but you won't die. So don't sway it.» What a newly arrival to
juvenile center must feel like when being told all of these things is a truly
scary thing.
The conditions in which these youths live are disastrous to
say the least. When young people describe the food inside the facilities, it is
something that they struggle with. Will, a young boy who spent six years in
juvenile prisons in California, said: «I don't know if you can call it a
meal» [...] «They feed you enough not to starve, but never enough to
satisfy you.» [...] «Young people are growing, and fourteen hours
without a meal is not sufficient, you're hungry all the time.» Will is
referring to the big break between dinner at five and breakfast at seven. He
said that it was actually the best-case scenario. Indeed, in a maximum-security
lockdown, there was no communal mealtime at all. It was sort of a humiliation
according to Nell Berstein. In solitary confinement, it is even worse: bag
meals consisting of bread, two slices of bologna, Kool-Aid, and a container of
room-temperature milk.73(*)
Will continued about hygiene, which, to him, was a mixed
blessing. «I've never seen a group of guys so into their hygiene,» he
said, «When guys go to jail, they really keep their bodies clean.»
Yet, he said that: «Showering was one of the worsts parts of jail».
Indeed, you have to get used to having guards keeping an eye on you when you
only have three minutes to take a shower.
Many inmates suffer from the relationship with the guards,
which is often violent. More than one-fourth of the youths in custody reported
that staff used «some method of physical restraint on them - whether
handcuffs, wristlets, a security belt, chains, or a restraint chair.» 7%
also reported to have suffered from pepper spray, while 30% live on units where
pepper spray is used.74(*)Nell Berstein mentioned that: «A federal survey
published in 2010 revealed widespread abuse and maltreatment in America's youth
corrections facilities. More than a third of youth in secure correction
facilities or camp programs reported that staff used force unnecessarily, and
30% said that staff placed youth into solitary confinement or locked them up
alone as discipline. Fear was pervasive as well: 38% of youth feared being
physically attacked by staff.»75(*) In the fifth chapter of her book, she enumerated a
couple of abuse inmates suffered from the guards:
· In Florida, a three-hundred-pound guard crushed a
twelve-year-old boy with his body, suffocating the sixty-five-pound child to
death. In California, groups of correctional officers slammed handcuffed boys
face-first into walls or set attack dogs on them, often in full view of,
security cameras.
· In Louisiana, guards assaulted sleeping children, or
entertained themselves by pitting boys in fights against each other, leaving
them with broken jaws, fractured eye sockets, and an array of other injuries.
· In Mississippi, guards ripped the clothing from
suicidal girls, then hog-tied them, naked, and tossed them into solitary. They
also shackled girls to poles and forced them to run in hot weather carrying
logs. Those who threw up from the heat and the strain were forced to eat their
own vomit.
· In Arkansas, young people were left naked in solitary
with the air-conditioning turned on high, or hog-tied and set outside at night
in freezing weather.
All those «incidents» are outrageous and yet, it is
the daily life that a lot of young inmates endure. Another big problem that is
often mentioned is guards using hands to break up fights, but also to do minor
infractions such as horseplay, talking in line, or simply talking back. One of
the most dangerous methods is «prone restraint»: Some guards force a
youth to the ground and lie on him or her, until they are convinced the youth
is under control. This practice has resulted in people dying, which has
prompted some states to ban the practice. All of this lead to a sense of
degradation and humiliation for the individuals who «live» in such a
way.
Searches that can be very intense also add to the daily
humiliation faced by the juvenile inmates. Indeed, when guards search in a
room, they can tear apart absolutely everything: letters received from loved
ones; pictures, among others things. That is what a young man who spent four
years in juvenile detention said:» Sometimes, it would happen twice a
week. Once a week. It happens a lot.»76(*) Nell Berstein summed it up best when she said:
«Young prisoners learn in multiple ways that their bodies are no more
their own than are the cells they maintain so carefully or the uniforms they
wear.»
As if strip searches and supervised showers were not
embarrassing and mentally enduring enough for these young people, they also
have to deal with pat searches, which result in inadequate touching from
guards. I will develop a part on sexual abuse later, but it is important to
mention something first, taht the federal investigators of one Florida facility
wrote that: «Many of the youths informed us that some [staff] were
especially intrusive in conducting the searches.» «We heard a number
of reports of youth being groped by [staff] during the searches. One youth
noted, `some staff rub on your privates.' Another stated, staff `touch too
much.'»77(*) It is
not a surprising that when any human being suffers from such treatment, let
alone a kid, it does something that scar the individual for life. This is what
Luis, a young man, said to N. Bernstein in an interview: «When you're in a
place where you are segregated, ostracized-a physical environment that is
corroding, that is black, that is dark, that is isolated - all these things do
something to your brain, to your psyche, to your self-esteem. It is something
that your body internalizes, and it is obviously negative. A place that is dark
and eerie? This is something that no human being should adapt to. We are not
made to. You are supposed to be out in the sun, for God's sake!»78(*) He went further and said:
«Prison makes you hate yourself. The way prison is developed is to keep
you oppressed, and in a state where you cannot believe in yourself. Everyone
looks down on you, instead of looking down at you and helping you up.»
When I compare the interviews that I found, they are all so
different, but it seems that there is this one thing that is always mentioned,
and it is the mental and psychological effect on the detainees. David, who is
18 and waiting for his sentence described his life behind bars in the following
interview. This is just a part of the interview. The entire interview is in the
appendices.
Was your life exciting before you came in
here?
I was living in the fast lane and I didn't have no time
to think. Since I been off drugs I noticed I'm a real good person. I just
regret those "exciting days."
I think of me now as a man. I had to grow up
early. It's sad I did that to myself but I did. But I can't look at the past.
As far as me getting locked up, I'm happy. If I didn't get locked up I would
have kept going, I would have lost all my years.
How are you preparing for adult
prison?
You can't really predict it at all. I think prison is
not a rehabilitation and it's just there for us to kill each other or to get
that mentality that we're nothing. I can live through it. I gotta take it and
roll with it.
Did your environment contribute to you being in
here?
I carry my own weight. My surroundings had a lot to do
with it. [But] it was me, my decision. Made the wrong one. I just need the
opportunity to make the right one.
How are you preparing for adult
prison?
Instead of you getting ready for them, how about them
getting ready for you? Be confident in yourself. Be something different. You
gotta be a man of your own path.
I got something to say. It's still itching
in my brain. It bothers me when people say it's easy in here. I go through a
lot of pain. I sit and think about the things I done, and I sit there and cry.
For people who say this is easy, they don't know how much pain we go through. I
heard people down the hall from where I sleep saying they rather die than go
through this. Some people are stronger than others.
David is awaiting his sentence in Central Juvenile
Hall.79(*)
Another inmate, Jared, used a metaphor to describe the
emotional impact of incarceration. Talking to Nell Berstein: «He said that
after he was released, he went to the San Francisco Bay. Freedom, solitude, and
motion got the best of him; he swam too far and panicked, almost drowning
before he recovered enough to make it back to shore.» Jared described the
sensation of near drowning: struggle for air, terror of the depths, fear of
slipping past the point of no return. «That feeling almost drowning,»
said Jared, «is the only thing I've ever experienced that even came close
to being locked up.»80(*)This is a testimony of what these children go through
when they are locked up. There is a disastrous impact on them emotionally, even
though it is not necessary to keep society safe, in spite of what was said
during the super-predator era.
One person, Gladys Carrion, has been an advocate for these
youths and has spoken out about the impact of severing relationships during the
crucial passage that is adolescence. She is the head of New York State's Office
of Children and Family Services, which runs that state's juvenile facilities.
She is shutting down the juvenile prisons under her jurisdiction. «Kids
are punished when they're removed from their home,» she explained.
«We don't have to put them on the chain gang. They're removed. That is
punishment. I keep reminding my staff, that is the punishment:
removing the kids from their family from their school, and from their
community. I don't think you could do anything worse in the formative years of
a child, of a young person, than to remove them from their community. We are
interrupting their developmental process. We don't need to punish them any
further.»81(*)Yet,
this is what happens behind bars, and worse.
B) The Hole
It's difficult to think that there are worse things that what I
have previously described. Still there are two more forms of abuse that
completely break down these individuals in every way that there can be:
solitary confinement and sexual abuse, as I will show in the last part of this
chapter.
The Hole, as it's often called, may be one of the worst forms
of torture any human being can endure, and even more so in the case of
teenagers. Solitary confinement inside juvenile prisons are meant officially to
protect a child for his or her own safety, or to protect him or her from
others. It is also a way to evaluate him or her upon his or her arrival at the
facility. Most of the time, it is said to be for punishment, because of gang
concern among other things. There is only a room, a bunk, a metal toilet and a
door. This practice has been called by the American Friends Service Committee a
«no-touch torture... No one who has ever experienced more than the
briefest time in solitary would call it anything else, because it was designed
to destroy the mind and break the spirit.»82(*)The American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry is in line with what just said. In a 2012 policy statement, they
wrote that: «the potential psychiatric consequences of prolonged solitary
confinement are well recognized and include depression, anxiety, and psychosis.
Due to their developmental vulnerability, juvenile offenders are at particular
risk of such adverse reactions. Furthermore, the majority of suicides in
juvenile correctional facilities occur when the individual is isolated or in
solitary confinement.»83(*) In Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile
Prison, Nell Bernstein recalls how Oscar Wilde, who served two years' hard
labor in a British jail in the late nineteenth century was so appealed to
witness children locked alone in empty cells that as soon as he was released he
wrote to the Daily Chronicle.He wrote the following:
This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes
the grown man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the
solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its cell
for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the appalling thing. To
shut up a child in a dimly lit cell for twenty-three hours out of the
twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity. If an individual,
parent or guardian did this to a child he would be severely punished. The
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would take the matter up at
once. There would be on all hands the utmost detestation of whomsoever had been
guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence would, undoubtedly, follow conviction.
But our own actual society does worse itself. The inhuman treatment of a child
is always inhuman; by whomsoever it is inflicted. But inhuman treatment by
society is to the child the more terrible because there can be no
appeal.84(*)
Nell Bernstein provides some state data that indicate that
solitary confinement is frequent and routine.85(*)
· Youth in Ohio facilities spent an average of fifty
hours in solitary over the course of a single month.
· In New York City, nearly 15% of adolescents between the
ages of sixteen and eighteen spend at least part of their pretrial detention in
solitary confinement.
· A survey undertaken at the Texas State facility at
Giddings in March 2012- well into a major statewide reform effort- found that
87% of youth surveyed had been «confined to [their] room as
punishment,» 45% on ten or more occasions.
When asked to describe what solitary confinement was like,
Martin, who was 15 when he was arrested and sent to a Massachusetts Department
of Youth Services facility said: «They put you in a dark room. It is a
cell, but no lights are on, or they keep you in your cell and they take
everything in there out. They would leave you there for a whole day. You would
sleep on the metal, plain metal.»86(*)
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a member of Yale Law School, J.D.
Class of 2016. When he was younger, he spent some time in prison, and has
spoken out about what it is like to be in confinement (the entire interview is
in the appendices):
«In 1996, when I was sixteen, a fifteen-year-old friend
and I carjacked a man in Virginia. Shortly after being arrested, I confessed.
Back then, I did not know what it meant to be transferred to criminal court.
But I would learn. [...] It should not have been a surprise to anyone that part
of what I got out of my time in prison was nearly a year and a half of solitary
confinement.
For a time, I called cells in the solitary units of the
Fairfax County Jail, Southampton Correctional Center, Red Onion State Prison,
Sussex 1 State Prison, and Coffeewood Correctional Center home. Inside those
cells, I counted everything: days, weeks, months, birthdays, and frequently the
tiny markings on the wall. All told, I spent more than fourteen months in
isolation at these various institutions. Author Jack Abbott, reflecting on his
time spent in solitary confinement, wrote that it could «alter the
ontological makeup of a stone.» I know that what it does to men and women
is far worse.»87(*)
Jared and Curtis, two former juvenile detainees, used similar
words to describe their mental state in confinement. Jared said he had to
«split who [he was] and create a part of [him] that was able to cope with
being isolated.» Curtis said he was «fragmented». He felt like
he was cut into pieces.88(*)
The most appealing thing is that many youths who are placed in
solitary confinement are already survivors of abuse and other trauma. And being
there only add to their existing problems and actually leaves them unfit for
social interaction due to the mental damages from which they suffer.Yet, even
though the majority of researchers agree that this solitary confinement is
torture, this does not seem to lead to any breakthrough about changing this
broken system as Betts has said inTime: «President Obama's op-ed
reinforces the need to dramatically curb the use in confinement, but there are
broader reforms around the treatment of juveniles and adults in state and
federal prisons that have yet to become a part of the larger public
conversation.»89(*)
C) Sexual Abuse
It seems banal to say that a sexual assault is traumatic for
anyone, but even more for children, who are more prone to suffer from
post-traumatic stress syndrome and other lasting effects. The authors of the
report «Defending Childhood: Children Exposed to Violence», which was
launched by the Attorney General of the Department of Justice in 2010, state
that victims of sexual abuse may end up «detach[ing] physically and
psychologically leading to symptoms of psychological
dissociation.»90(*)
The figures about sexual abuses are horrifying: a 2010 survey
of the Department of Justice's Review Panel on Prison Rape found that 12% of
the juvenile prisoners had been sexually abused at least once over the previous
year. In some facilities, as many as 30% of the wards had been abused within
that time frame. About one fifth of the youths in the study reported being
sexually abused by other youths. One in ten had been abused by a member of the
staff. Sexual rates are higher in juvenile than in adult prisons, according to
the report, because of the frequency in which guards assault their young
charges.91(*) The study
also found that the rate of sexual assault was more than seven times higher
than reported in a 2008 Justice Department investigation based on sexual abused
claims filed with facility administrators.
The youths more likely to be sexually assaulted are the ones
who have been sexually abused prior to their arrest. Indeed, nearly 25% of
young people who had been sexually assaulted before their incarceration were
abused again while in custody. 65% of those who had been sexually abused at a
previous correctional facility were targeted again at their next destination.
The numbers actually get worse: 88% of those who had been abused, were abused,
repeatedly: 27% had been assaulted more than ten times and 33% by more than one
employee.92(*)
Again, some others interviews give a proper idea about what is
going on behind bars. Roland, who spent nearly seven years in various
California State facilities said that the staff» let it happen... They
turn their back. Too much paperwork. Too much questioning.» He was
referring to ward-on-ward assault here.93(*) When he talked about abuse by guards, he said:
«I know some people that got sexually abused by other wards. If you are
about fourteen, you got guys who are about two hundred pounds, no fat, nothing
but muscle, and they grab you and are like, `Ey, you about to do this and
that,' and you're like, `No', and they are like, `You gotta do it'...» He
left the rest unspoken. It speaks volumes already about what may be going on
and how it, somehow, seems normal to endure sexual abuse in prison.
How does the sexual contact between wards and staff happen?
According to Roland, it is primarily «transactional»: youths traded
sexual acts or access for various forms of contraband, from a T-shirt to a
burrito. As a former ward said: «Other staff be seeing it and they write a
report and she don't come to work no more. Then you happen to see her while
you're at visiting and she's in another job duty, and you ask what
happened.» To him, the female guard was transferred because she was under
investigation. «A lot of the female staff go under investigation for
sexual contact with a ward.» Roland said. But usually, nothing much
happens to the sexual offenders, except for a transfer.94(*) The horror in what Roland is
describing is that he does not even seem to be aware that this is illegal as
Nell Bersntein points out in her book. That is the problem with prison: much of
what we have said in this part - the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, the
hole, the humiliations- are somehow rationalized. The system literally implies
the survival at the fittest
These children are not helped by the view of the Department of
Justice, which considers that most of the staff's sexual abuse of juveniles is
not violent as Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Just Detention
International points out. As she said:» Every act of sexual contact
between a staff member and a detainee, under any circumstance, is a crime in
all 50 states. If the detainee is a minor, it is also child abuse. The panel
failed to acknowledge these basic legal facts in its report.»95(*)The panel she is referring to
is the Department of Justice's Review Panel on Prison Rape, which basically
tried to justify sexual relationships between staff and ward, and to add to the
insult, put the blame on the kids: «young males who are victims of sexual
abuse at the hands of female guards are characterized either as smooth
operators who take advantage of «vulnerable» young women (who just
happen to control their every movement), or as hard-up, perpetually horny
boys-will-be-boys who are «only too ready» to service their captors.
Female guards in this portrait are either helpless, easily manipulated
creatures unable to resist their «sophisticated» young charges or
desperate spinsters who cunningly pursue a career in juvenile corrections
because they are sexually unfulfilled.»96(*)
It seems to be in line with what most victims tend to be told,
implicitly or explicitly: this is your fault. It has unforeseen consequences on
every victim, but even more on children and teenagers who end up with permanent
damage.
III- Once They Are Released...
A) The Prison Label: A Burden
After a second part where I specifically put my interest in
juvenile detentions centers, in this part, I will still try to analyze the
impact on the youths but also on young African American males. The thing about
the prison label is that it you're labelled a criminal as soon as you're
released and you face discrimination in employment, housing, education, public
benefits and jury service. Those labeled criminals can even be denied the right
to vote. Jeremy Travis, writer of the book But They All Come Back: Facing
the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry, said: «In this brave new world,
punishment for the original offense is no longer enough; one's debt to society
is never paid.»97(*)
Indeed, many of the people who plead guilty of whichever they are accused or
are not necessary told what would happen to them: to be deemed unfit for jury
service and automatically excluded from juries for the rest of your life; the
possibility to be denied the right to vote. These are rights that are
considered fundamental in this country: something 30% of African American men
will never be able to do again because they are labelled as
«felons».98(*)
What has been described before is just a part of what will not
be possible to do once you have that «felon» labelled. As a member of
the American Bar Association described: «The offender may be sentenced to
a term of probation, community service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this
offender, and perhaps any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of
his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and
welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing and federal educational
assistance. His driver's license may be automatically suspended, and he may no
longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses. If he is
convicted of another crime, he may be subject to imprisonment as a repeat
offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a
firearm or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the
right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable.»99(*)
What is even more shocking - in a way- is that judges are not
required to inform criminal defendants of some of the most important rights
they are forfeiting when the plead guilty in a felony.100(*) All of these civil penalties
make it impossible for ex-offenders to live in U.S mainstream society. How are
they supposed to adjust to life after prison when their chances of
rehabilitation are close to zero? As said before, it does not matter if you
have actually spend time in prison; as soon as you are branded a felon, you're
barred from public housing, and have to check the box indicating a felony
conviction on employment applications for nearly every job.
With all of this, it seems more than logical that most people
labeled felons go back to prison. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics
study: «About 30% of the released prisoners in its sample were rearrested
within six months of release.»101(*)«Within three years, nearly 68% former offenders
are rearrested at least once for a new offense.»102(*)What happens is that they are
stuck in a nasty cycle that give most none other choice but to go back to
prison. Loïc Wacquant has called this phenomenon a «closed circuit of
perpetual marginality.»103(*) Poverty, which is often what lead many of those
young black men to prison is exactly what they find again when they get out of
prison, and in an ever worse way than it was before.
Another point to dive into is the families which are a
significant part of what happens next as well. Those who rely on public
assistance and have relatives incarcerated may be reluctant to allow them to
stay in their house because of all the disproportionate policies regarding
ex-offenders. Indeed, public housing officials are free to reject applicants
simple on the basis of arrests, regardless of whether they result in
convictions or fines. The impact of the War on Drugs and the fact that it
targets mainly young black men introduce anxiety in these families, where most
of the time, the father or the son is a prey of the current system. The fear of
being evicted, which as it has said in the first part happen regularly,
contributes to millions of families being destroyed.
The question of work is another tricky thing for former
inmates. Indeed, to find work is one of the top priority of former inmates. A
Vera Institute study found that during the first month after release from
prison, they are more preoccupied with finding work than anything
else.104(*) Failing to
find or hold a job can have dire consequences: more time in prison.All these
constrains - deprivation of work; inability to provide for your family- lead
them to depression and violence. This is the what the U.S society has to offer
to people who have served their time. I have an example in Nell Berstein's book
with David, who was 17 when he was convicted of armed robbery. Now he is 22. He
wants to start over, have a job and have a decent life. The problem now is that
because of his time locked up and the stigma that came with it, what he wants
to achieve may be impossible for him. When describing how he feels, David
said:» That's where most of my anger comes from. Everywhere I apply, it's
like, `Your background, your background.' That's the only thing I hear back
from the jobs. `You meet the qualifications, but your background
check...'».105(*)
To switch to the youths, a review of multiple studies found
that 70 to 80% of youth released from juvenile facilities are rearrested within
two or three years.106(*) It echoes what many have said: the fact that most of
those who are locked up as teenagers return to prison as juveniles, adults, or
both show what a failure the justice system is from top to bottom. The primary
aim is to keep the citizens safe and to rehabilitate most of the delinquents
(especially since most have been locked up for non-violent offenses). But it's
not really what is happening. The system has failed society and has wiped away
any hope to rehabilitee that most of the people want.
B) Struggle And Trauma After Prison
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is common among the released
prisoners. What many, if not most, people go through in juvenile facilities or
prisons are life-changing experiences even if they may not be able to realize
it on their own. Re-adaptation to today society may be the hardest thing for
many who return home.
Eddie Ellis, who was serving 15 years in prison for
manslaughter (he killed a guy who pointed a gun at him) described to some
Middlebury student on their week end student symposium what it felt like to
«live» after prison and deal with the traumas. When his family asked
why he was eating alone, he answered: «Mama, I says, this is what I am
used to. I am used to being in my cell. I am used to eating alone. This is how
I am comfortable»107(*) Eddie Ellis also opened up about the struggles he
faces when he goes to movies «too dark and people moving too much»,
to a restaurant «I sit with my back to the wall so no one's behind
me», or in the subway»if it's too crowded I get off».
The rest of this interview is in the appendices but this part
is the most important as it highlights again the grave trauma that follows
someone who has been incarcerated. A study by UWM psychology professor Shawn
Cahill and his students found that Americans who have been incarcerated are
almost twice as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder than
people who have never been to prison.108(*)
As it has been said throughout this paper, the reaction to
traumatic events is always more difficult and has more impact on children and
adolescents. An interview with Will on Burning Down The House gives
some great details about the struggle you face once you're out of juvenile
detention. He was 15 when he went behind bars and 21 when he got released. Will
recalls that the first few weeks were difficult as he understood that the world
had moved on - some of his friends included - when he was away.109(*) As he said: «The
transition getting out is actually harder than being in jail. They bring you in
as a youngster and let you go as an adult, so you've never had the opportunity
to be independent [...] Then all of the sudden they let you out[...] now all of
a sudden, you're a grown man and you got to learn all these things for
yourself.»110(*)
Something as simple or complex actually as dating is something troubling for
someone who has been away for so long. Regarding this topic, Will continued and
said: «I was a kid,» referring to the last time he went on a date.
«All you had to do was ask a girl, `Will you go with me?' and it'll be all
right. But now if I ask a girl, `Would you go with me?' she'll be like, `Where,
and in what car?'» «It's not about just your relationship with the
girl anymore, it's about what you can offer her.»
About how he was affected to this day to his experience, Will
mentioned that: «To this day, I don't feel right unless I have someone
telling me, `This is the right thing to do.' Someone who's watching me. Am I
walking in a straight line? Even when I am by myself, I am wondering how do I
look, am I doing the right thing?»111(*)
Being super cautious to people is also one of the thing that
has had quite an effect on Will. «When people are being nice to me now, or
trying to be courteous, I always get kind of - like if people offer me
something, there has to be an ulterior motive. That's another internalized idea
I got from jail. I can't just receive something from somebody as a gift without
feeling like there's something attached to it. `What do you want from me?' I
don't trust genuine giving.»
It's difficult to expect teenagers/young adults to be
rehabilitated when first, once they are released, they have this kind of a
scarlet letter on them that scream «Convict», and second, the trauma
that they experienced and still experience once outside. The problem is when
this trauma is not dealt with, it turns into rage and disdain towards a large
part of society. Darren, a former inmate said that to him, some youth choose
not to participate in today's society because nobody has been able to protect
them from the abuses they have endured in juvenile prison and nothing has shown
them that they can actually succeed and have a chance to be happy. Darren
talked about some of his friends that are in this case: refusal to be a part of
this society. «I have friends who don't want to work, they don't want to
pay taxes, because of the traumatizing experiences they had within the
infrastructure of the system,» he explained. «They are conscious as
to why they choose the position in society that they do, after coming through
an experience like that.» «Not only that,» he went on, «but
some have the perspective that people who were paying taxes that paid for
[their incarceration] were responsible, so if they do harm to those people,
they don't really care, because they feel like [the taxpayers] failed
them in the first place. That's a position that some of these young
so-called prisoners, re-enterers, violators, hold.»112(*)
Darren hit the nail on the head at this point because these
young people's experiences have been filled with nothing but trauma and it is
almost impossible to expect them not to feel this way if you understand the
consequences on a psychological level that being locked up has had on them.
C) Reform Of The Justice System: Some Signs Of
Hope?
Different factors over the last couple of years have led to
some reforms and a drop in the number of juveniles confined: - 39% from a high
of 108,802 in 2000 to 66,332 in 2010.113(*) It's important because it means that there is a
certain shift in the treatment of juvenile delinquency. It has been shown with
the closure of more than 50 facilities in 18 states between 2007 and 2011. Some
states, who were known to be in favor of locking up juveniles such as
California, Louisiana, New York, Illinois and Texas have taken a completely
different approach. The example of California is the best: their daily
population in juvenile centers have dropped of more than 90% - from 10, 000 in
1996 to 922 in June 2012.114(*) The same goes for Texas, after the scandal of the
sexual abuse in the mid-1990s, the state has closed 9 youth correctional
facilities and the numbers of young people detained went from 4,700 in 2006 to
1,500 in 2012.115(*)
Some of the outrageous mistreatment of children and a couple
of events.The 2010 Great Recession has made the cost of mass incarceration too
high to continue to fund, especially since it was show that mass incarceration
was counterproductive, especially for the youth. A couple of studies since the
last decade about adolescent brain have pointed out that the brain is not fully
developed untilyou are around 20.116(*) Basically, it means that some teenagers sent in
adult court are not judged accordingly. That is something the U.S. Supreme
Court has taken into account for the juveniles safety as Nell Berstein
explained in the tenth chapter of Burning Down The House: The End of
Juvenile Prison: «Roper v. Simmons in 2005 abolished the
death penalty for juveniles; Graham v. Florida in 2010 barred
mandatory sentences of life without parole in noncapital cases; and Miller
v. Alabama in 2012 extended the protection against mandatory life
sentences to all juveniles, regardless of offense, all relied on the
understanding that there were fundamental differences between the adolescent
brain and the adult brain.»
Then, some scandals in several states such as bribery in
Pennsylvania - where judges sent children to for-profit prisons for non-violent
offenses - and widespread sexual abuse in Texas led to this shift.117(*) Adding to this what has been
said in previous parts regarding the fact that locking up the youth failed to
rehabilitee them but actually led to more crime and that most of them upon
their release suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and were unable to
have a stable life, leading to recidivism made it possible to realize that a
change was fundamental. This radical change, which has been seen all across the
country, has led the majority - as Nell Bernstein has pointed out- to ask
themselves an important question: Are juvenile prison really needed?
Let's take the example of the New York state which has
completely changed its approach to juvenile issues thanks to Gladys Carrion.
She was the commissioner of New York's Office of Children and Family Services -
she now leads the New York City Administration for Children's Services - and
during her time as commissioner, she has completely transformed child welfare
and the juvenile justice system of the state of New York. What she has achieve
in the state of New York is astonishing: From 2007 -when she started to 2012 -,
New York State has shut down eighteen facilities and halved the numbers of
juveniles held in state institutions. Gladys Carrion was also able to save $74
million from the closures of the facilities and cash them to support
community-based alternatives to incarceration.118(*) It is not a small
achievement at all if we refer to the 2006 Human Rights Watch and American
Civil Liberties Union who released a report, which called New York «among
the lost hostile juvenile justice agencies we have ever
encountered».119(*)
Gladys Carrion made no mistake when she was how racial biased
the system was in her State. Indeed: «More than 60 percent of youth from
New York who were in custody were being held for misdemeanor-level offenses.
The overwhelming majority of those in institutions were young people of
color.» To that, she made it clear that: «it literally broke my heart
to go in and look at these kids that are all black and brown. And I'm thinking,
these could be my kids. They look like my son. They look like my nephew. These
are all black and brown faces, and I can't stand it.»120(*) She went on: «it became
evident that too many young people were being placed in state juvenile
institutions because of mental health needs or other social service needs, not
because these young people pose a significant threat to public safety.»
She highlighted the failure of the system, especially when it
comes to its cost: «New York spent $272,000 a year [per youth] to operate
a failed system. We know that incarcerating young persons is not in their best
interest.»
Having been such an advocate to the cause of young children
and teenagers, Gladys Carrion has been praised by the Department of Justice for
her effort to put an end to the abuses in the correctional facilities. As a
commissioner, Gladys Carrion has met several judges with whom she has tried to
argue that the facilities - in which many youths were detained - lacked
everything and some did not even have mental health services to deal with the
issues adolescents were going through. In her own words, Gladys Carrion said:
«After that meeting, the judges almost had to stop sending kids to me.
They just stopped... It was very important to cultivate that [relationship],
because they control the front door.»121(*)
The fact that she took it to the media on a local and national
scale to denounce the failure of the New York justice system did not help make
her job easy but she still fought to ensure that it was done properly.
According to her, the key to make such a change possible is to
be willing to lose your job rather than compromise your value.
«It requires a tremendous sense of urgency.» She
said. «You really, really have to care about young people and be committed
that this can't continue one day longer. You have to feel it. In every
young person in my facility, I see my son or daughter, I really do. There can
only be one standard. The standard we have for our own children is the standard
that we need to have for young people that we institutionalize.»122(*)
Gladys Carrion is saying something that may seems obvious but
it is the most basic start to actually have an impact on the reform of the
justice system: to actually care about the people suffering from it as if they
were your loved ones. That is why she added: «We have to want for each
child what we want for our own sons and daughters. There has to be a simple
standard. These children matter.»
The changes brought by Gladys Carrion have to be sustainable
in order to transform the system once and for all, at least in the state of New
York for now. The questions of these reforms - not only for New York but for
the whole country - is whether it will last and if there will be complete
shutdown of juvenile facilities and whether the help provided for young
children and adolescents - those of color, since they are the ones targeted by
the justice system - will make a difference and have an impact strong enough to
make sure that the overwhelming majority of young people of color don't end up
in prison or owe a debt to society that will never truly be fully paid.
Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to demonstrate how the U.S justice
system was racially targeting young black people and keep them out of the
mainstream society by putting them in juvenile detention or in prison. It was
put into motion with the launching of the War on Drugs during the Reagan era,
which resulted in the mass incarceration of many young black people (and can
definitely be considered as the newest version of what was before: Slavery and
Jim Crow Laws)and causedeverlasting damage to the black family in the United
States as many children find themselves with a parent in prison with one
children out of nine who have had a parent incarcerated.123(*)
Most of the laws put in place related to drugs - especially
crack - targeted poor ghetto communities, which happened to be overwhelmingly
black. The same thing can be said for the juveniles with the horrible effect
that the «super predator» era launched in 1996 by John DiIulio,has
had on the American youth, especially youth of color: adolescents were now seen
as monsters who could be judged in a same way an adult would be, which resulted
in the many inhumane treatment and a big wave of teenagers sent to juvenile
prisons.
In both cases, for the drug issue and the super-predator
issue, the media have played a crucial part in helping to promote these false
claim under Reagan for the War on Drugs, and through DiIulio for the
«super-predator» problem that the USA were allegedly facing.
Institutional racism is not a new concept in USA. It has
always been this way. The recent progress over the last few decades have not
overshadowed the fact that the entire justice system among others that are
still racially biased even if it is not as explicit as it used to be. When we
take an in-depth look at the causes of the marginalization of many African
American as today, it follows the same pattern that was put in place at the
time of Slavery and the Jim Crow laws. Except that because nowadays, racism is
in majority perceived as negative - that is actually debatable - the new system
of mass incarceration due to the War on Drugs target certain part of the
population but not straightforwardly as the two previous systems. As it was
said, the consequences are heartbreaking overall but especially for Black
males: 1 in 3 African American male born today can expect to go to jail with
the current trend.124(*)
Thus, a large part of the U.S. population is discriminated
against and left out of the mainstream society before going to prison because
of social, economic, and educational reasons that are due to social racism.
When they are released, they face the impossible task to try to live with the
stigma of being a former convicted person. In many cases, former inmates go
back to prison because they are «stuck» with no loophole.
Most of the people in prison - even those who are convicted
for violent crimes, which are not the majority though- suffer from some sort of
mental conditions that were not treated before they were in trouble, and were
definitely not treated inside prison and after the potential release for some.
Many have experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and behind bars have only
increased their issues.
An idea that is merely a fantasy actually in USA is that going
to prison should not prevent anyone from having the possibility to redeem
himself/herself and get another chance in the society. Except that it appears
abundantly clear that it is close to impossible to get rehabilitation, not only
because of how you are marginalized, but because of the failure to take care on
a psychological level the traumatic experience that prison is for every former
inmate and to actually deal with what you go through behind bars: literally
physical and psychological torture. Indeed, as we have seen, whether it is in
adult prisons or in juvenile centers, the practices are so outrageous that the
scars and the disdain - especially for youth of color - may never disappear.
They have been so broken as we have seen in many interviews that even when they
were physically assaulted, it almost got to a point where they could not feel
the hurt anymore because everything had been taken away from them.
The double standards have to be point out here though: many of
those people in prison who are considered delinquents or dangerous for society,
and yet, when they are abused, the abuser is safe from facing consequences and
the blame is put on the victims (as usual). It is tragic because the youth is
supposed to be the future and for a lot of these young adolescents of color,
they just feel angry all the time - which is understandable- considering the
fact that they have absolutely nobody to turn to when they are tortured in
juvenile centers (as if being away from their family and environment, adding to
this the never-ending discrimination, was not enough).
As of today in 2016, a number of activists and politicians
have asked for a reform, especially regarding the racialized justice system
that has caused mass incarceration. Topics such as abuses behind bars, and the
treatments of youth have been prominent as well.
To address most of these issues, the example to follow would
be the one of Gladys Carrion who has completely transformed New York State's
handling of juvenile delinquencies and the social and health problems linked to
this. As she said, to solve these problems, you need someone who has great
empathy and is willing to lose his or her job in order to fulfill his or her
purpose to make things better.
Unfortunately, as it was said earlier, racism is really a
particular issue in the United States, especially in the justice system and the
country has witness such violent killings of youth black men by white police
men, many of those black men were unarmed it should be noted.Indeed, Police
killed more than 100 unarmed black people and this was just in 2015.125(*) Many of those killings,
dating back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2013 have put the country in a
dire situation with racial tension.A number of names can be added to the one of
Martin: Freddie Gray, John Crawford Eric Harris, Tamir Rice. The shooting of
the later has caused even more outrage because he was only a 12-year-old boy,
playing in a park who was apparently was perceived as much older by the
officer.
A movement was born out of all this violence: Black Lives
Matter which is international and campaigns against violence and systemic
racism towards black people, especially killings by law enforcement officers,
racial profiling, and inequality in the U.S criminal justice system.
It was important to finish on this particular problem to
emphasize on the fact that racial issues towards African Americans males have
always been a part of the United States and that even in this era where it
seems that the entire world have made tremendous success for every kind of
equality - racial and gender in particular - it appears that it is not going to
help the case of the millions of African Americans suffering from all forms of
racism in the United States. And even if mass incarceration came to an end, it
seems that a new way to exclude and discriminate against African Americans
would be put in place anyway.
Appendices
Table of Contents
Behind bars: Four teens in prison tell their
stories................................42
Reform the Nation's Juvenile Justice
System......................................53
Behind bars: Four teens in prison tell their
stories
Nicholas, 17, says that interviewing four teens in jail showed
him that we must listen to and learn from their stories.
By Nicholas Williams, 17, Daniel Murphy
HS
Nicholas asks: "What can we expect these teens to do with life
sentences, sit in their cells and rot?"
When I arrived at Central Juvenile Hall, I was expecting
guards, watch towers, basically the setting of the Shawshank Redemption. I was
told to wait in a small lobby room, which separated the prison from the outside
world. While waiting, I saw a few inmates getting on a bus. They wore handcuffs
and carried brown paper bags behind their backs. I wondered what these kids
did. I looked at each one, trying to guess his crime. "Maybe he robbed a store,
maybe he killed somebody, maybe he was selling drugs." Some people might ask,
why would I want to write a story about juveniles in prison? Why would anyone
want to read what these criminals have to say? Who cares? It's easy to judge
juvenile criminals as bad kids, but not so easy when you're looking into the
eyes of a teenager who is going to spend life in jail.
I know there are victims of violent crimes whose voices go
unheard. But recognize that some people who commit crimes have many reasons
behind their actions. It's a cycle. This is what happens to kids who didn't
have direction or anybody who cared, who had to learn about life the hard way.
They were brought up this way so that's how they're going to treat others.
Sometimes, it's okay to give a voice to the "villains." They have been victims
too.
Inside Juvenile Hall, Javier Stauring, the Catholic chaplain, was
there to guide me through the facility and be present during the interviews. We
sat down on a bench in the middle of the yard. He told me that high-risk
offenders wore orange jumpsuits, and those wearing gray and yellow suits were
minor offenders or those who violated their probation. The four teens I was
going to interview were all high-risk offenders. Out of 550 inmates in Juvenile
Hall, 180 were being tried in adult court, Javier said. He explained that I
couldn't ask any questions about their crimes, use their full names or take
pictures of their faces because they were minors and their cases were
pending.
While we sat talking, a few teens walked by with a guard, their
heads facing the ground and their hands behind their backs. I watched them
walk. Then one of them turned to look at me, and I turned my head to avoid eye
contact. I felt that he didn't want to be looked at. I wouldn't want someone
who was free looking at me walking around in prison. I felt uncomfortable that
day, like I didn't have any clue what these kids had been through. Did I feel
sorry for them? Not right away. I was surprised by the innocence of their
faces, like they didn't belong there. I was really shocked when I saw a boy who
looked like he was about 10 walking in a line with other kids, wearing
handcuffs. I also felt glad that my life didn't take the same road as these
kids' lives had.
Then I met the four teens and I found out just how bad their
situations were. Even though I had prepared a list of questions, I didn't know
what to expect. Would they cry? Would they be angry? Though none of the four
had an emotional outburst, some questions during the interview caused them to
pause and try to hold in their emotions while thinking about painful
memories.
When I first met the two girls, Mayra and Elizabeth, I was
expecting two huge girls, bigger than me, with short hair and tattoos. But two
petite, feminine and pretty girls walked in ... What? What could they have
done, and to be wearing orange suits at that? Yet both were smiling and saying
hello to me.
And when I met the two guys, they seemed calm and laid back.
Though they were the same age as me, they seemed older in their ways. They had
experienced a lot and you could see it in the way they carried themselves.
Elizabeth was more to herself, the day-dreaming type; Mayra was tougher, more
independent; Mark was heavy in size, but you could see the sensitivity in his
eyes; and David was thoughtful, no doubt.
All four had drifted into a negative lifestyle at a young age. It
seemed as if it was impossible for them to overcome their problems. The two
girls said they had been sexually and physically abused. Both said that leaving
home at a young age was the only thing they could do to save themselves from
future torment. The two guys, however, had wanted that wild lifestyle. Both
confessed to having been ignorant and making bad choices. What I learned from
talking with them is that there are some things we have no control over--our
families, where we live and who we know. It was simple for me to see that all
four kids had no control over their lives. All they knew was what made them
feel better at the moment.
There are a lot of negative aspects about prison, but some
positive things can come out of being locked up. David even said, "I'm glad I'm
in prison, or else I'd still be out there [getting into trouble]."
Prison, for many out of control teens, is stopping them in their
tracks so they don't go further with a criminal and violent life. Prison allows
these teens to stop and think. David told me that his time in prison has
allowed him to figure out that he's a "really cool person."
Teens should get a chance to
change
Even though they may take responsibility now for
their actions and want to change their lives, they still have to serve their
time. That's the way our system is. I know they have a debt to pay to society,
but why doesn't our system allow young people to redeem themselves? I don't
think our judiciary system deals well with people once they are in the system.
Okay, they're in prison, now what? Mayra is only 17, what can we expect her to
do with a life sentence, sit in her cell and rot? I don't think the system
expects or encourages kids to change their lives around. But I can't complain
too much because prison is keeping criminals off the streets and away from my
family and me.
Talking to these kids, I realized they had many problems growing
up. Some had no friends at all, and many have dysfunctional families. This
doesn't excuse the crimes they committed, but it helps explain why.
After one day at a prison, I see that in prison, it's just you
and time. Too much time for the kids I met that day. That time in prison is
time they wish they had to spend with their friends and family. Time they wish
they had to go on a date, to play sports, to go to school, to watch television,
to lay down on their own beds, to walk free, to laugh and have a good time
again. It's time spent feeling regret for their past actions. No matter how
much they regret the past, they will have to finish growing up in adult
prison.
`I was a chronic runaway'
Elizabeth, 18,
awaiting sentencing
What's a typical day like?
Six o'clock in
the morning we get up. We keep our clothes outside the room. We have to get up
and grab our clothes. We have about 4 or 5 minutes to get ready. Breakfast is
at 7 o'clock. That's usually disgusting. Then we go to school for a couple
hours, go to lunch, go to school again, come back, eat dinner, we get one hour
of recreation, take our showers.
What was it like when you got
arrested?
Really? I was high. So all kinds of things were going
through my mind. Just like shock. I couldn't even cry. I just sat down
quiet.
Was being a troublemaker exciting?
It was for
me, back then, just my lifestyle.
Were you into school?
When I was around fifth grade. My mom put me in a placement
because I was running away. I kept running away. I was a chronic runaway.
They'd put me somewhere and I'd run away from it.
I
had, uh, problems at home (softly) ... and um, out of sheer boredom I guess.
Mostly neglect. Well, I'd been molested for years. Finally I told my
grandmother about it. That it was my stepfather. She called the cops and I ran
away and right before he was supposed to go to court he shot himself in the
head. My sister had a brain tumor and my mom was always busy at the hospital.
We had to move into this tiny duplex and I was by myself all day. I was 11 or
12. It's really boring in Texas. That's where I'm from--Austin,
Texas.
One day I'd just go out to have fun and I wouldn't go home the
next day. It kept on escalating. I'd spend a day in jail and keep on going. My
mom had a boyfriend, and he used to physically abuse my sister. I tried to
intervene one day and he grabbed me by my neck. I started talking s--- outside
the house, just yelling at him and he came out with a knife. So I really had to
run. This lady called the cops and what did they do? They arrested me. They
arrested me on a runaway charge. Nothing happened to him.
My mom made me seem like this bad kid. I just wanna go and have some fun. My
mom didn't have very much money, and if you don't have clothes, you're an
outcast [at school]. I had good grades, all A's and stuff like that, but I just
couldn't take being in school so I dropped out.
How do you feel compared to the average
teen?
I feel like a totally different species. I feel older
actually, `cuz I've seen so much. They don't even know, they're in school, they
have their proms, and they're going to college. And I just can't relate. I feel
I can't even hang out with them, they're too different.
Did your parents try to discipline you?
My
mom's form of discipline was just to get rid of me. It makes me mad today. She
paid my brother to kick my a-- for leaving, you know, paid him. He didn't want
to but he did it for the money. It just made me more mad and I ran away
again.
What do you think your parents could have done that would
have helped?
If my mom had set me aside and talked to me, asked me
what is it you want, why are you running away. That would have helped me.
What do you say to people who think Juvenile Hall is
easy, watching TV all day or something?
We rarely ever get to
listen to the radio at all. TV, we get only one hour a day. We don't get the
news so we don't know what's going on in the world. TV and radio, that's nice
to have but you wouldn't want to sit there and watch TV all day, that's not a
luxury. [Juvenile Hall is] really dirty to me. The girls, I wasn't scared of
them, because I'd been living on the street all over so I wasn't scared of
anything, especially not some little girls.
How does it feel to lose your freedom?
It
hurts more than any kind of punch, slap, anything that was ever done to me.
Having my freedom taken away is the worst thing that ever happened to me. It's
not the fact I'm in jail that I'm scared. For a while I didn't know when I was
gonna get out. It felt like the whole world was going on without me, and I was
stuck. I have a little sister born after I started running away and I don't
even know her. My family came out twice this year. You have special visits,
half an hour. For the past year, I've seen someone I know from the outside for
one hour, that's it. It's pretty hard being out here all by yourself. I can see
what they're doing to us. How kids are sent to jail when they just need a slap
on the head or something. I used to really really hate the cops. Hate 'em, hate
'em. I still don't approve of what they're doing but I understand. I used to
hate other people's lifestyle. Now I know it's different people and I don't
hate them anymore. I can associate with different people. I'm a lot more
open-minded, don't hate so quickly, don't judge so quickly.
Elizabeth is awaiting her sentence in Central Juvenile
Hall.
`Can I get a second chance in
life?'
Mark, 17, serving 13-year sentence
Have you been in here before?
Two times
before. [When I was arrested] I was just trying to figure out what was going
on. I was like `Man, this is a bad dream.' I was just waiting to wake up. Ain't
waked up yet.
Was your life exciting before you came in
here?
Exciting like I was always watching my back? Or the parties?
Robbing and stealing. It was like an adventure, yeah. But it was an adventure
going nowhere.
What's a typical day here like?
Wake up, wash
up. Same thing, different day. That's how it is.
What were you doing when you were free?
I was
playing football. I'm mad missing out my teenage days. I regret what I did, and
it's like `Damn.' If I live in the past, that's where I'm gonna stay, in the
past. Damn, it'd be fun [if I was free]. It's the new millennium. I haven't
even been on a date, know what I'm saying. I ain't gonna see none of that.
Don't grow up too fast, `cuz you're gonna be mad if you do.
Did your parents try to discipline you?
I'm
stubborn, I know I'm stubborn. My parents they did try to discipline me but I
was too wild. It was like I couldn't be tamed at the time.
Do you have any talents?
I like to rap. I can
write. (He writes plays with theater group called Usual Suspects.) Writing is
one of my skills. Give me a beat and I can freestyle for you right now.
How does your family deal with you being locked
up?
I know they don't like me being in here but I been in here
before. When I hit 13 that was when I really stepped up the criminal ladder. It
was the adrenaline rush and all that and I didn't think about my family. I try
to let them know it's gonna be alright. It affects my family a lot. Even when I
had a bad day I still smile. I just try to make them feel good when they're
here.
How does it feel not to control your
fate?
Dang, somebody else got control my life. I should be
believing in God more. I should but I really started to lose faith. No ...
well, I didn't lose it, I just didn't know where to put my faith. If I walk
into court one day and the judge had a bad weekend, his wife trippin' on him or
something, he could take it out on me. I expect the unexpected when I go in the
courtroom. My fate is sealed already but my fate isn't in the court's hand,
it's in my hand. Fate really has to do with what you feel inside than what
people make of you. If God wants me to be in jail, it must be I got some kind
of gift that God wants me to spit to other cats in here.
What do you think about Prop. 21?
Why should
I walk around with a label on me because I made a mistake when I was young? Can
I get a second chance in life? When you go to the pen, you don't do nothing.
All you do is time, get contraband, learn to hate somebody. I want to be a
positive person, somebody that helps somebody, somebody who helps the
community.
Prop. 21, it's like a spear in this whole
community's heart. My little brother was sitting in a car, somebody was shot,
and my brother got to do adult time for that. They taking our rights away. You
putting little kids in adult facilities, that's forcing them to grow up
already. This little kid, he did this crime right here, but they don't see this
as his first time doing it. [Little kids out there won't be deterred by longer
sentences]... the homie got 25 years to life, they look up to that. I don't
know why but they do. "He gonna ride it out, he's a
rider."
Society's a fool if they don't see that. Little
kid, he has so much to prove. Them older hounds--"I ain't got nothing, I got
life. Let me go and send this kid up the river too." That little kid, he's
believing the hype. "You want me to shank him, okay, I'm gonna do that, go in
the hole, go to Pelican Bay, don't see my momma." Little kid, he should be put
in a program. When you send them to the pen all you making is a better
criminal.
Mark is serving 13 years in L.A. County Men's Jail.
`I carry my own weight'
David, 18,
awaiting sentencing
Was your life exciting before you came in
here?
I was living in the fast lane and I didn't have no time
to think. Since I been off drugs I noticed I'm a real good person. I just
regret those "exciting days."
I think of me now as a man.
I had to grow up early. It's sad I did that to myself but I did. But I can't
look at the past. As far as me getting locked up, I'm happy. If I didn't get
locked up I would have kept going, I would have lost all my years.
Did your parents try to discipline
you?
My mom tried so many ways to control me. I couldn't let a
woman take control. I felt too grown. I felt, I'm a man. I was too stubborn,
hardheaded.
How are you preparing for adult
prison?
You can't really predict it at all. I think prison is
not a rehabilitation and it's just there for us to kill each other or to get
that mentality that we're nothing. I can live through it. I gotta take it and
roll with it.
Did your environment contribute to you being in
here?
I carry my own weight. My surroundings had a lot to do
with it. [But] it was me, my decision. Made the wrong one. I just need the
opportunity to make the right one.
What's your maximum sentence?
25 years to
life. If I lose my case, it's life without parole.
Is it hard to wait for the results?
I'm
like, get this over with. It's like stripping you slowly. People rather die
than go through this slow pain. Go ahead and give that to me. They think this
is a game that can be played with. This is our life.
How does it feel not to control your fate?
I don't think nobody controls my fate. God controls my fate. If I
get a long time, it's `cuz I got to learn something. And if I go home it means
I'm ready. God has control. And I'm very happy he has control.
What would you be doing if you weren't locked
up?
With the state of mind I have now, I'd be occupying myself
with a trade and I'd be going to school to be an actor. And keep myself busy,
occupied. The last time I was out my mind was stuck on drugs, money and other
things. I don't want that to sneak up on me. I got high expectations of
myself.
How are you preparing for adult
prison?
Instead of you getting ready for them, how about them
getting ready for you? Be confident in yourself. Be something different. You
gotta be a man of your own path.
I got something to say.
It's still itching in my brain. It bothers me when people say it's easy in
here. I go through a lot of pain. I sit and think about the things I done, and
I sit there and cry. For people who say this is easy, they don't know how much
pain we go through. I heard people down the hall from where I sleep saying they
rather die than go through this. Some people are stronger than others.
David is awaiting his sentence in Central Juvenile
Hall.
`At night when nobody sees you, you
cry'
Mayra, 17, serving life sentence
Were you ever into school?
I dropped out of
school when I was 13, seventh grade. Because my family didn't have enough money
and the rest of the girls, I used to see them every day with different kinds of
clothes. I used to be with the same clothes almost every day you know. It used
to hurt me seeing them have everything. So that's when I dropped out.
Did your parents try to discipline you?
I had
a lot of discipline, `cuz my dad is coming from Mexico. You know the whips for
the horses, he would hit us with those. With anything he could find he hit us
with until my back would be bloody. When I was in Mexico, he hang me from a
tree and hang me there for one hour `cuz I think I stole a candy. He was
abusive to my mother. My dad used to leave black eyes on her, and when the cops
came and she would cover it with her hair. That's one thing, it didn't work.
`Cuz that makes you angrier. After he used to hit me or whip me, he would tell
me don't cry, why you crying, I'm gonna hit you harder, I ain't hitting you
hard. I had to hold it in, I couldn't cry because he'd hit me more. So I had to
hold my tears in and it built up you know.
What do you think your parents could have done that would
have helped?
I would have liked for my mother when my dad was
hitting me to tell him something. My dad hitting me and she wouldn't do
nothing. I would like for my mom to stick up for me. If I did something wrong
instead of hitting me, it would be better if they would have told me that's
wrong.
What was it like when you first came to Juvenile
Hall?
The first time when I got arrested my friend told me,
they're gonna ask you where you're from, they're gonna rape you. So get in
there and put a front and start walking like you're crazy. So I was walking
like this (she swaggers with her arms raised to her chest). When I first came
all the girls started laughing at me and one said, what are you doing? I said I
don't know, I'm scared. And she said, it shows.
How does it feel to lose your freedom?
It
hurts. It hurts being here `cuz every time they see their mother on Sunday,
they see them cry and that's what breaks your heart in here. You miss your
family. You don't want people to see you cry so at night when nobody sees you,
you cry.
What do you need to help you get through
this?
I need my mother. I need when I go to sleep to have her
next to me and tell me everything's gonna be okay. I need my son. I was
pregnant here and I had him here. He's six months old. His name is James.
How are you preparing for adult
prison?
I'm kind of scared. Just the thought of being with all
those old people. I'm not prepared. I'm just scared. Rapes, guards, getting
raped by women. I'm not ready, I'm scared. If I do go over there, I have a good
friend. But I'm still not ready, I don't think I'll ever be ready. But if I
have to go, I have to go.
Mayra is now serving a life sentence at a women's state
prison.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation ISSUE BRIEF January 2009
Reform the Nation's Juvenile Justice System
Across the nation, juvenile courts and corrections systems are
littered with poorly conceived strategies that increase crime, endanger young
people and damage their future prospects, waste billions of taxpayer dollars,
and violate our deepest held principles about equal justice under the law.
These problematic practices persist even as scholars, advocates, and hands-on
juvenile justice practitioners have vastly expanded our understanding of what
works (and doesn't work) in combating delinquency over the past 20 years, as
well as how to undertake effective system reform. Indeed, among all of the
policy areas affecting vulnerable children and families, juvenile justice
probably suffers the most glaring gaps between best practice and common
practice, between what we know works and what our public systems most often do
on our behalf. The most urgent need is to reduce our wasteful,
counterproductive overreliance on incarceration and detention, and instead to
redirect resources into proven strategies that cost less, enhance public
safety, and increase the success of youth who come in contact with the juvenile
courts. Reducing racial disparities and combating abuse in juvenile facilities
also require immediate attention. While juvenile justice is largely a state and
local responsibility, the federal government can and should make a crucial
contribution. Often, states and localities lack the financial resources and
technical know-how to reform their juvenile programs and practices, and they
have long looked to Washington for guidance. Indeed, since the Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) was passed in 1974, Washington has often
played a vital role in setting minimum standards, conducting and disseminating
research on best practices, and providing funding to help states and localities
improve their juvenile systems. Unfortunately, in recent years the federal
government's role in juvenile justice has suffered due to inattention and
drift. With the landmark JJDPA up for reauthorization in 2009, the Obama
administration has an unparalleled opportunity to use the resources and
influence of the federal government to jumpstart a long-overdue renaissance in
our nation's approach to adolescent crime.
Recommendation: Restore the capacity of the Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to serve as a national incubator and
catalyst for improving juvenile justice policies and practices. Since 2000,
total federal juvenile justice funding declined by nearly 60 percent, and the
budget for OJJDP's core research and dissemination efforts was slashed 90
percent from $6.8 million to just $700,000. Meanwhile, despite evidence of
widespread rights violations in juvenile justice, the federal government has
done little in recent years to expand or intensify its efforts to protect the
safety and well-being of court-involved youth. To reverse this troubling trend
and restore OJJDP's leadership, the reauthorized Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention Act should:
· Restore OJJDP's budget for nationally sponsored research,
demonstration, and public information efforts to its 2002 level or higher.
Added funding will allow OJJDP to expand production of timely research and
replenish its in-house staff expertise. However, administrators must reverse
recent practice and award grants based on scientific merit as judged by career
OJJDP staff and objective peer reviewers.
· Restore OJJDP support to state and local juvenile justice
efforts to 2002 levels or higher, but tie funding to proven and cost-effective
strategies and require outcome evaluations for all federal investments. OJJDP
should require outcome measurements for all federally financed programs and ban
the use of federal funds to support models that have been proven ineffective.
· Use OJJDP's funding and influence to encourage or require
state and local tracking of key juvenile justice indicators, and establish a
uniform measure of recidivism for youth released from correctional facilities.
· Study the feasibility of a uniform juvenile justice data
collection system to provide researchers and policymakers with information
essential to good planning and practice, and to promote data-driven and
evidence-based policymaking in juvenile justice.
Recommendation: Focus the energy and resources of OJJDP and other
federal agencies on crucial and pervasive shortcomings in juvenile justice
practice. As the Casey Foundation documented in its 2008 KIDS COUNT Data Book
essay, «A Roadmap for Juvenile Justice Reform,» our nation's juvenile
justice systems are plagued by several pervasive weaknesses - areas where
policy and practice often diverge dramatically from our knowledge of what
works. In the coming years, federal efforts should be specifically targeted to
help states address these priority concerns. PRIORITY FOCUS #1: Combat
overreliance on training school incarceration and pre-trial detention.
Juvenile justice systems routinely detain and incarcerate youth who
pose little or no danger to public safety, despite research that community
supervision and non-residential, evidence-based programs are more effective and
vastly more cost-efficient. Nationwide, in both pre-trial detention centers
(analogous to adult jails) and youth correctional facilities (analogous to
prison), less than one-fourth of confined youth have been involved in violent
felonies. Many have committed only misdemeanors or status offenses. To help
states reduce reliance on confinement, OJJDP should:
· Fund and encourage states to replicate intensive and
evidence-based nonresidential alternatives to incarceration for lower-risk
youth.
· Help states transition away from the failed model of
incarcerating youth in large, congregate care training schools, where
recidivism is uniformly high, and instead adopt the «Missouri model»
with a regionalized network of small facilities offering positive youth
development and behavioral treatments. Through this approach, 70 percent of
youth released from Missouri juvenile facilities avoid recommitment to any
correctional setting three years after discharge--far better than most states,
even though its costs are low compared with other states.
· Support comprehensive reform efforts at the crucial front
end of the juvenile system, the detention phase, following the Annie E. Casey
Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) model. JDAI is
now being replicated in 100 jurisdictions nationwide, and many sites have
sharply reduced confined populations without harming public safety. JDAI model
sites in Albuquerque, Chicago, Portland (OR), and Santa Cruz have lowered their
daily detention populations by 38 to 75 percent without any uptick in youth
offending.
PRIORITY FOCUS #2: Take aggressive steps to reduce racial
disparities in juvenile justice. Perhaps the most troubling
characteristic of our nation's juvenile justice system is the shameful and
persistent overrepresentation of minority youth. The research is now clear that
youth of color are treated more harshly than white youth at every stage of the
juvenile process, even when they present the same histories and are accused of
the same crimes. In 1988, Congress amended the JJDPA to make addressing racial
and ethnic disparities a «core requirement,» but it offered little
guidance and few consequences for inaction. Consequently, few jurisdictions
have made progress in reducing disproportionate treatment. To remedy this
pervasive injustice, the core mandate in JJDPA should be strengthened, and
states should be required to analyze each stage of the juvenile court process
for racial equity, and to develop corrective action plans to reduce disparate
outcomes.
PRIORITY FOCUS #3: Combat abuse and protect the safety of
youth confined in juvenile facilities. Conditions of confinement
within juvenile detention and corrections facilities are deeply problematic.
Violence and abuse are rampant in many facilities, as are the excessive use of
isolation and dangerous or overly harsh disciplinary techniques such as
four-point restraints, strip searches, and pepper sprays. Juvenile systems in
California, Texas, and several other states have been plunged into scandal in
recent years by revelations of endemic abuse, and the Associated Press recently
reported that 13,000 cases of abuse were reported in juvenile institutions
nationwide from 2004 to 2007. To better protect confined youth, the federal
government should: establish a mandatory reporting system for all unusual
incidents, injuries, and deaths in secure facilities; develop guidelines on the
proper use of seclusion and restraints in juvenile facilities; require states
to develop and implement plans to ensure the safety and prevent abuse of
confined youth; expand funding for the U.S. Justice Department office
responsible for investigating conditions of confinement; and repeal federal
legislation that inhibits private litigation over conditions of confinement for
juveniles.
PRIORITY FOCUS #4: Limit the number of youth tried in
adult courts. Brain studies and social science research now show
conclusively that adolescents are less mature than adults (and therefore less
culpable for their crimes), and more likely to desist from crime and respond to
rehabilitation. Studies consistently find that young people prosecuted and
punished in the adult justice system are more likely to re-offend than similar
youth retained in the juvenile system. Nonetheless, an estimated 200,000
youthful offenders are tried in adult courts every year, many of whom are
punished in adult prisons or probation/parole systems. Some live in states that
define the age of juvenile jurisdiction at 16 or 17, rather than 18, and many
others are transferred to adult courts through ill-considered transfer and
waiver laws passed in the 1990s. To inhibit these counterproductive practices,
Congress should repeal federal laws that encourage the transfer of juveniles to
adult courts and corrections for specified crimes. OJJDP should provide funding
and encouragement for state efforts to reverse rules that result in large
numbers of transfers to adult court, and encourage all states to set the age of
majority at 18. Also, just as the U.S. Supreme Court has banned the death
sentence for crimes committed before age 18, OJJDP should encourage states to
prohibit life sentences without parole for crimes committed by underage
offenders.
PRIORITY FOCUS #5: Conduct research and support
demonstration projects to address other pervasive weaknesses in juvenile
justice systems. Specifically, OJJDP should support, evaluate, and
disseminate results of initiatives for overcoming:
· Inattention to the parents and families of court-involved
youth. Despite evidence that families continue to play crucial roles in the
success or failure of court involved youth, juvenile courts, probation
agencies, and correctional systems seldom engage parents/families in making
decisions or designing individualized interventions.
· Overzealous prosecution of minor crimes. Juvenile justice
systems have shown an increasing propensity to prosecute minor cases in the
juvenile justice system - often as the result of ill-conceived «zero
tolerance» policies. Formally prosecuting routine misbehavior - rather
than diverting non-dangerous youth from court and serving them informally -
harms youth, with no benefit to public safety.
· Dumping of special-needs youth better served by other
systems. Juvenile courts and corrections systems have become a dumping ground
for youth with mental health problems, abuse and neglect histories, and
learning disabilities who should be served by public systems with specialized
expertise in addressing these problems.
· Inadequate access to counsel. In a series of recent
reports, the American Bar Association and the National Juvenile Defender Center
have documented severe weaknesses in the legal representation offered to
low-income youth involved in juvenile court. Under a revised JJDPA, states
should be required to provide prompt access to qualified counsel for all youth
in the juvenile justice system, and they should receive funding and assistance
to help improve their juvenile indigent defense systems.
PRIORITY FOCUS #6: Strengthen JJDPA core requirements
aimed at:
· Preventing the confinement of status offenders. Before
Congress enacted JJDPA, juvenile courts locked up nearly 200,000 young people
every night for noncriminal behavior like running away from home, skipping
school, and underage drinking. After JJDPA made federal funding contingent on
deinstitutionalizing these status offenders, the number of confined status
offenders dwindled to 10,000. In recent years, however, many jurisdictions have
been exploiting a loophole that allows confinement of status offenders who
violate a court order. This Valid Court Order loophole should be closed.
· Keeping youthful offenders and adult offenders separate.
For more than 30 years, JJDPA's «jail removal» and «sight and
sound separation» requirements have kept juvenile offenders out of adult
jails - or, if jail is the only available option, in separate units away from
adult offenders. However, this protection was not extended to youth tried or
punished as adults. JJDPA's rules should be revised to allow states flexibility
to serve youth convicted as adults in juvenile facilities.
Recommendation:
Improve the juvenile justice workforce.
In any effort to address the problematic practices described
above and to adopt promising reforms, a key variable will be the talent,
training, and dedication of the workers involved. Therefore, as recommended by
former OJJDP Director Shay Bilchik, OJJDP should provide assistance to states
in recruiting, training, and retaining juvenile justice workers, including
support for:
· Partnerships between state agencies and universities that
offer a career track for college students into the juvenile justice field (as
is done in child welfare); and
· Internship experience and tuition subsidies for college
students who commit to working for a juvenile justice agency within the state
for a minimum number of years.
List of References
I - Primary Sources
Official Reports:
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse,
https://nsduhweb.rti.org/respweb/homepage.cfm
Solitary Confinement of Juvenile Offenders,
http://www.aacap.org/aacap/policy_statements/2012/Solitary_Confinement_of_Juvenile_Offenders.aspx
Defending Childhood,
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/defendingchildhood/legacy/2012/12/12/cev-executive-sum.pdf
Review Panel on Prison Rape,
http://ojp.gov/reviewpanel/pdfs/panel_report_prea_apr2016.pdf
Berkeley Media Studies Group,
http://www.bmsg.org/
Interviews:
BERNSTEIN Nell, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile
Prison
BETTS Reginald Dwayne, «Only Once I Thought About
Suicide».
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/only-once-i-thought-about-suicide
COATES Ta-Nehisi, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass
Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
GATELY Gary, «Experts: Brain Development Should Play Bigger
Role in Determining Treatment of Juvenile Offenders»
http://jjie.org/experts-brain-development-should-play-bigger-role-in-determining-treatment-of-juvenile-offenders/105927/
KEREN Robert, «Life After Prison»,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/03/08/life-after-prison/
«Behind bars: Four teens in prison tell their stories»,
http://www.layouth.com/behind-bars-four-teens-in-prison-tell-their-stories/
Letter:
Prisoner 4099 - Oscar Wilde's letter - The National Archives,
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/prisoner4099/historical-background/transcript-letter.htm
II - Secondary Sources:
Articles:
BETTS Reginald Dwayne, «I Spent My Teen Years in Solitary
Confinement and This Is What I Learned»,
http://time.com/4196656/juveniles-criminal-justice-reform/
COATES Ta-Nehisi, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass
Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
GOLDBERG Eleanor, «Here's Proof Mass Incarceration Doesn't
Reduce Crime»,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/proof-mass-incarceration-doesnt-reduce-crime_us_56255cfbe4b08589ef489a3d
KESSLER Glenn, «The stale statistic that one in three black
males `born today' will end up in jail»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/16/the-stale-statistic-that-one-in-three-black-males-has-a-chance-of-ending-up-in-jail/
MANN Sarah, «Psychologist finds link between PTSD and
prison»,
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-psychologist-link-ptsd-prison.html
PAQUETTE Danielle, «One in nine black children has had a
parent in prison»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/one-in-nine-black-children-have-had-a-parent-in-prison/
SILADY Alex, «Which States Put the Most People in
Prison?»,
https://smartasset.com/insights/which-states-put-the-most-people-in-prison
WAGNER Peter and RABUY Bernadette, «Mass Incarceration: The
Whole Pie 2016».
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html
«Police killed more than 100 unarmed black people in
2015»,
http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/
«Private Jails in the United States»,
http://civilrights.findlaw.com/other-constitutional-rights/private-jails-in-the-united-states.html
«10 Reasons to Oppose "3 Strikes, You're Out"»,
https://www.aclu.org/10-reasons-oppose-3-strikes-youre-out
«War on Drugs Policing and Police Brutality»,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800748/
Books:
ALEXANDER Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In
the Age of Colorblindness
BERNSTEIN Nell, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile
Prison
DAVIS Angela, Are Prisons Obsolete ?
LE DANTEC-LOWRY Hélène, De l'esclave au
président : discours sur les familles noires aux Etats-Unis, part
III, Chapter 1
* 1 Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The
Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
* 2 Idem.
* 3Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 6.
* 4 Idem.
* 5 Nell Bernstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 7
* 6 Idem. Page 13.
* 7 Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 59
* 8 Idem.
* 9 Peter Wagner and Bernadette
Rabuy. «Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016».
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html
* 10 Angela Davis. Are
Prisons Obsolete?
* 11 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 49
* 12 Idem. Page 53.
* 13 Idem. Page 6.
* 14 Eleanor Goldberg.
«Here's Proof Mass Incarceration Doesn't Reduce Crime».
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/proof-mass-incarceration-doesnt-reduce-crime_us_56255cfbe4b08589ef489a3d
* 15 «Private Jails in the
United States».
http://civilrights.findlaw.com/other-constitutional-rights/private-jails-in-the-united-states.html
* 16 Alex Silady. «Which
States Put the Most People in Prison?».
https://smartasset.com/insights/which-states-put-the-most-people-in-prison
* 17 Wiki
* 18 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 30.
* 19 Idem. Page 31.
* 20 Idem. Page 34.
* 21 Idem. Page 34.
* 22 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 36.
* 23 Idem. Page 40.
* 24 Idem. Page 41.
* 25 Idem. Page 44.
* 26 Hélène Le
Dantec-Lowry, De l'esclave au président : discours sur les
familles noires aux Etats-Unis, part III, Chapter 1.
* 27William Ryan, Blaming
the Victim. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
* 28 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.Page
47.
* 29Idem. Page 48.
* 30 Idem. Page 49.
* 31 Idem. Page 50.
* 32 Idem. Page 52.
* 33 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 53.
* 34 Idem. Page 54.
* 35 Ta-Nehisi Coates,
«The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
* 36Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 56.
* 37 Idem. Page 56.
* 38 «10 Reasons to Oppose
"3 Strikes, You're
Out"»https://www.aclu.org/10-reasons-oppose-3-strikes-youre-out
* 39Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 56.
* 40Idem. Page 57.
* 41 Idem. Page 58.
* 42 Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 72.
* 43Idem. Page 72.
* 44 Ta-Nehisi Coates,
«The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
* 45 Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.Page 73.
* 46Berkeley Media Studies
Group,
http://www.bmsg.org/. Citing in
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of
Colorblindness. Page 74.
* 47Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
* 48 Idem. Page 75.
* 49 Idem. Page 78.
* 50 Idem. Page 75.
* 51Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 60.
* 52 Idem. Page 60.
* 53 Idem. Page 61.
* 54 Idem. Page 65.
* 55Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 67.
* 56«War on Drugs Policing
and Police Brutality»,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800748/
* 57 Idem.
* 58Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 74.
* 59 Idem. Page 77.
* 60Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 98.
* 61National Household Survey
on Drug Abuse,
https://nsduhweb.rti.org/respweb/homepage.cfm.
Citing in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the
Age of Colorblindness
* 62 Idem. Page 100.
* 63 Idem. Page 101.
* 64Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page
112.
* 65Idem. Page 113
* 66Idem. Page 114.
* 67 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 118.
* 68Idem.
* 69Idem. Page 124.
* 70Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, Page
125.
* 71Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The
Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration».
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
* 72Nell Berstein,
«Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 7.
* 73Idem.
* 74Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 31.
* 75Idem. Page 83.
* 76Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 32.
* 77Idem. Page 33.
* 78Idem. Page 34.
* 79«Behind bars: Four
teens in prison tell their stories»,
http://www.layouth.com/behind-bars-four-teens-in-prison-tell-their-stories/
* 80Nell Berstein,
«Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 37
* 81Idem. Page 36.
* 82Nell Berstein,
«Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 131.
* 83Solitary Confinement of
Juvenile Offenders.
http://www.aacap.org/aacap/policy_statements/2012/Solitary_Confinement_of_Juvenile_Offenders.aspx
Also seen in Nell Bersntein, «Burning Down The House: The End of
Juvenile Prison.
* 84Prisoner 4099 - Oscar
Wilde's letter - The National Archives,
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/prisoner4099/historical-background/transcript-letter.htm.
Also seen in Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of
Juvenile Prison.
* 85Nell Berstein,
«Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 133.
* 86Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile PrisonPage 135.
* 87Reginald Dwayne Betts,
«Only Once I Thought About Suicide».
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/only-once-i-thought-about-suicide
* 88 Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.Page 144.
* 89 Reginald Dwayne Betts,
«I Spent My Teen Years in Solitary Confinement and This Is What I
Learned» http://time.com/4196656/juveniles-criminal-justice-reform/
* 90 DEFENDING CHILDHOOD,
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/defendingchildhood/legacy/2012/12/12/cev-executive-sum.pdf
Also seen in Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End
of Juvenile Prison.
* 91 Nell Berstein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 104.
* 92Nell Bersntein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 106.
* 93Idem. Page 107.
* 94Idem. Page 117.
* 95Nell Bersntein, Burning
Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 119.
* 96Review Panel on Prison
Rape,
http://ojp.gov/reviewpanel/pdfs/panel_report_prea_apr2016.pdf.
Also seen in Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile
Prison.
* 97Jeremy Travis, But They
All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Also seen in
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of
Colorblindness.
* 98Brian Kalt, «The
Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service,» American university Law Review,
Vol 53, October 2003.
* 99 American Bar Association,
Task Force on Collateral Sanctions. Introduction, Proposed Standards on
Collateral Sanctions and Administrative Disqualification of Convicted
Persons.
* 100 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.
Page 143.
* 101 Jeremy Travis, But
They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Also seen
in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of
Colorblindness. Page 94.
* 102 Idem.
* 103 Loïc Wacquant,
«The New `Peculiar Institution': On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,»
Theoretical Criminology 2000.
* 104Martha Nelson, Perry
Dees, and Charlotte Allen, The First Month Out: Post-Incarceration
Experiences In New York City. Also seen in Michelle Alexander, The New
Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 148.
* 105Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 183.
* 106 Idem. Page 182.
* 107Robert Keren, «Life
After Prison»,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2011/03/08/life-after-prison/
* 108Sarah Mann,
«Psychologist finds link between PTSD and prison».
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-psychologist-link-ptsd-prison.html
* 109 Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 187.
* 110Idem. Page 188.
* 111Idem. Page 189.
* 112Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 193.
* 113Idem. Page 201.
* 114 Idem. Page 202.
* 115Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 202
* 116 Gary Gately,
«Experts: Brain Development Should Play Bigger Role in Determining
Treatment of Juvenile Offenders»
http://jjie.org/experts-brain-development-should-play-bigger-role-in-determining-treatment-of-juvenile-offenders/105927/
* 117 Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 204.
* 118Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 214.
* 119 Idem. Page 215.
* 120 Idem. Page 217.
* 121 Idem. Page 220.
* 122Nell Berstein,
Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 221.
* 123 Danielle Paquette,
«One in nine black children has had a parent in prison»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/one-in-nine-black-children-have-had-a-parent-in-prison/
* 124Glenn Kessler, «The
stale statistic that one in three black males `born today' will end up in
jail»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/16/the-stale-statistic-that-one-in-three-black-males-has-a-chance-of-ending-up-in-jail/
* 125 «Police killed more
than 100 unarmed black people in 2015»,
http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/
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