The laundry at the Colorado State Industrial School for Boys. It still looked like that when I did time there.
In August 1959, I emerged a free person from the Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado, after 23 months of incarceration. I was 12 years old. It was a grim, crumbling place, the product of reformers who thought preparing the jailed children there for deadening factory work was an enlightened approach. I've written about it
here and elsewhere:
The place was established in 1881, only five years after Colorado became a state. It was meant humanely to "rehabilitate" children for whom the term "juvenile delinquent" had not yet been invented. Sixty years later, in 1941, its superintendent was ousted because of the cruelty going on there. By the time I was incarcerated—the result of a year's worth of truancy, thievery and an attempted armed robbery with five other boys—the reform school was supposed itself to have been reformed. No more floggings, it was true, but violence, including beatings and rapes, was common and rarely reported. Fear was a tool of administrative control. So they not so subtly encouraged violence and then punished whomever they chose, perpetrator or victim.
That was 56 years ago and you would think our society would have learned how to do things better in more than half a century. A few places have, but the way locked-up juveniles are treated in other places is ... criminal. Most importantly, juveniles were rarely imprisoned with adults for most of the 20th century. Now, particularly for the poor and minorities whose parents' lawyers can't wiggle them out of incarceration with pleas of "affluenza," it's all too common. So is solitary confinement. Many of the old problems still crop up as well, especially sexual assault. And it's hard to find worse examples of institutional racism.
Dana Liebelson has written about this in a lengthy piece in the Huffington Post, "Cruel And All-Too-Usual: A Terrifying Glimpse into Life in Prison—As a Kid." It's not reading for the squeamish:
In the course of reporting on a lawsuit against the Michigan prison system, I obtained a series of videos depicting the treatment of underage inmates in adult facilities, as well as hundreds of prison documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other sources. (Jamie is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.) These materials show under-18-year-olds being restrained, held in solitary confinement, forcibly extracted from their cells, tasered, and allegedly sexually assaulted. Some of these incidents would not violate any official rulebook, but are simply accepted practices inside adult correctional institutions.
In 1822, when prison reformers in New York proposed the nation’s first juvenile institution, they saw the need to keep children separate from adults as “too obvious to require any argument.” The juvenile justice system was founded on the idea that young people are capable of change, and so society has a responsibility to help them overcome early mistakes in life. More recent science has only confirmed this principle. Because adolescents’ brains are still developing, their patterns of behavior not yet fixed, they have a far better chance of being rehabilitated than adults. And yet this potential is lost in prisons and jails, which barely recognize any distinction between adults and minors. Amy Fettig, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said, "The adult system is not designed in any way, shape or form to treat children, to rehabilitate children, or to recognize that children are different than adults."
There is more to this commentary below the fold.
Ryan Grim, who also writes for the Post, added his own voice to the revelations in Liebelson's piece, calling them an "American Horror Story." He says, "The overincarceration of people in American society has reached pathological levels, but for the same treatment to be meted out to children demands immediate intervention." Indeed, it does.
He also has a six-part prescription: "1. Keep kids out of adult prisons. [...] 2. Focus on education. [...] 3. Stop using solitary confinement. [...] 4. Don't use cell extractions except for life-saving purposes. [...] 5. Better prepare kids for re-entry. [...] 6. Stop locking up so many children."
That's a good list. Such reforms ought to be no-brainers. But we've heard them all before. The reason they haven't been acted on is that far too many authorities stand in the way of making such changes. They're the same numskulls who think it's reasonable to try 12-year-olds as adults.
And as Liebelson points out, a 2007 study found that nearly 10 times as many black kids are sent to adult facilities than white kids. Between 2010 and 2012, there were 257 children prosecuted as adults in Chicago. Only one was white.
America can truthfully say it is exceptional in its incarceration of children in adult prisons. Even Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not usually viewed as progressive bastions, have banned trying kids as adults. Sending kids to adult prisons means that we've given up on them. Any society that gives up on children has given up on itself. But despite the horrific stories—and Liebelson is hardly the first to explore the subject—reform is sporadic and vigorously resisted. She writes:
Changing the treatment of children in prison means more than changing the location of their housing or the schedule for their showers—it also means changing the culture. And when adult facilities have attempted to overhaul policies for young inmates, they have found it to be a daunting task. New York City officials recently issued new policies for the treatment of underage prisoners on Rikers Island. Seventy-five officers resisted the reforms and were transferred to other jobs, according to The New York Times. Frustrated with the slow pace of change, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York will install a federal monitor to restructure the facility. [...]
On the national level, the issue rarely surfaces, even in a newly receptive political climate for criminal justice reform. Legislation backed by Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Cory Booker would ban punitive solitary confinement in juvenile facilities, but wouldn’t affect youth held in adult prisons.
Children are not adults. And none of them should ever do time in an adult prison, not even one with the most enlightened staff and policies, which are few and far between.