“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tens of thousands of young people are incarcerated in youth prisons across the country; thousands more are also locked up in adult prisons and jails. According to “Children In Prison,” a report by the Juvenile Law Center, “Too many incarcerated youth are subject to solitary confinement — often for 22-24 hours per day — strip searches, shackles, and chemical sprays. These abusive practices cause physical injuries, emotional trauma and psychological harm, and interrupt healthy development. Youth in prison also face physical and sexual violence, compounding the trauma imposed by their isolation and separation from their families, friends and communities” (https://jlc.org/children-prison).
In the former death row building of the nation’s largest adult maximum security prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, children in prison – mostly black -- are subject to solitary confinement, extreme heat in cells without windows, and little to no time out of their cells.
According to a recent ACLU Press Release, (https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/emergency-filing-details-routine-solitary-confinement-for-youth-at-angola-prison) “a new emergency filing in the ongoing Alex A v. Edwards lawsuit (https://www.aclu.org/cases/alex-v-edwards), children at Angola describe:
* “Being placed in solitary confinement for 72 consecutive hours when they arrive — only being released from their cells for a few minutes to shower;
* “Being locked in their cells at times for over 23 hours for punishment, only let out to shower in handcuffs and shackles; and
* “Being handcuffed and shackled as punishment when they are occasionally allowed to go outside for recreation time.”
ACLU’s filing “ asks the court to order the state to remove kids from Angola and place them in youth-appropriate non-punitive settings, and bar the state from placing children in adult carceral facilities.”
“Solitary confinement is even worse for children than it is for adults, and even short periods of solitary can do irreparable harm,” said Tammie Gregg, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.“Children in the juvenile system are legally required to receive rehabilitation, education, and treatment. But in Angola, for almost a year, the state has subjected children to punishment and abuse, depriving them of their rights and further harming already traumatized young people.”
“The state’s treatment of kids in Angola has been a series of broken promises,” said David Utter, lead counsel and executive director of the Fair Fight Initiative. “The state promised the Angola facility would close in the spring. The state promised the kids wouldn’t be held in solitary. The state promised the kids would receive their education and treatment. None of this has come to pass. We are asking the judge to take urgent action to put an end to this unprecedented mistreatment.”
Conditions facing young people in Louisiana’s Angola prison are not all that unusual. Earlier this month, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a Commonwealth Court judge told Pennsylvania officials that they had “30 days to take custody of 26 young people living at Philadelphia’s juvenile jail to alleviate severe overcrowding.”
According to the report, “the facility, meant to house 184 young people, was holding upward of 230. Children were sleeping on the floor and living in unsafe conditions, the city said. The state said its facilities were also at or near capacity.”
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Before 1900, children were punished with equal ferocity of adult punishment, often administered by the Church. According to Wikipedia, “Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, few legal differences existed between children and adults.Children as young as six and seven years were considered productive members of the family and their labor contributed to family income. In court, children as young as seven were treated as adults and could receive the death penalty.”
In 1899, the court in Cook County, Illinois established the first juvenile court, recognizing that crimes committed by children are different from adults, and should be punished differently.
According to the Juvenile Law Center (https://jlc.org/youth-justice-system-overview) “By the mid 1920s, every state in the country had established a separate system of criminal justice designed to acknowledge those differences called the juvenile justice system.”
In 1967, a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court found that that “the Constitution requires that youth charged with delinquency in juvenile court have many of the same due process rights guaranteed to adults accused of crimes, including the right to an attorney and the right to confront witnesses against them. Following Gault, the Supreme Court extended additional constitutional rights to youth, including the right to have the charges against them proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the right against double jeopardy. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that youth were not entitled to jury trials in juvenile court, but several states have judicially or legislatively elected to provide youth a right to jury trial.”
The 1980s and 1990s found politicians screaming about predatory youth and they launched “tough on crime” initiatives. “States enacted mechanisms to move youth from juvenile to adult criminal court for trial and punishment. In some cases, these new laws saddled children with the most severe sentences—death and life without the possibility of parole. Many of the new state laws also exposed youth to the dangers and potential abuses attributed to incarceration with adult offenders—much like they had experienced before the creation of the original juvenile court more than a century earlier.”
While crime rates among juveniles have decreased in recent years, harsh penalties and conditions remain, as witnessed in Louisiana. In some cases, the Juvenile Law Center noted, “Youth who can’t afford to pay for their freedom often face serious consequences, including incarceration, extended probation, or denial of treatment—they are unfairly penalized for being poor and pulled deeper into the justice system.” Unpaid debts increase recidivism, JLC has reported.
In Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System, author Jeff Hobbs recognizes that America's youth incarceration system "is convoluted, flawed, and above all intractably mired in generations of seesawing, opportunistic, naïve, racist thought — but, for the time being, it is incrementally improving and being redesigned, with deeper concern for the individual."
Hobbs adds: "[T]he humans within the system, both those tasked with operating its many layers and those subject to its labyrinthine laws — [are] impassioned, benevolent, weary, admirable, and truthful. Above all, I've found young people incarcerated, even for truly heinous acts, to be redeemable..."
Over the past two decades, the number of young people in juvenile detention dropped by 77 percent. Instead of ratcheting up punishment, the country’s juvenile justice system needs to focus on rehabilitation, mental health services and education of incarcerated youth. After all, incarcerated youth will one day return to society.
