Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Trapped in a Vice

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

Raymond J. Michalowski Jr., Series Editor

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Trapped in a Vice

The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Alexandra Cox

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cox, Alexandra, 1978– author.

Title: Trapped in a vice : the consequences of confinement for young people / Alexandra Cox.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017007405 (print) | LCCN 2017023691 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813570488 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813575650 (epub) | ISBN 9780813594187 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813570471 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813570464 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Juvenile detention—United States. | Juvenile delinquency—United States. | Juvenile justice, Administration of—United States.

Classification: LCC HV9104 (ebook) | LCC HV9104 .C625 2017 (print) | DDC 364.360973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007405

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Jamaal May, There Are Birds Here from Hum. Copyright © 2013 by Jamaal May.

Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.

Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Cox

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For everyone I’ve seen in the pens and through to the other side of them: your spirit keeps me fighting and your humor reminds me that we’re in it together for the long haul.

Contents

Introduction

1. Reproducing Reforms

2. Ungovernability and Worth

3. Racialized Repression: Barriers to the Emancipation of Young People at the Edges of the System

4. The Responsibility Trap

5. Conclusion

Methodological Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

There Are Birds Here

by Jamaal May

For Detroit

There are birds here,

so many birds here

is what I was trying to say

when they said those birds were metaphors

for what is trapped

between buildings

and buildings. No.

The birds are here

to root around for bread

the girl’s hands tear

and toss like confetti. No,

I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,

I said confetti, and no

not the confetti

a tank can make of a building.

I mean the confetti

a boy can’t stop smiling about

and no his smile isn’t much

like a skeleton at all. And no

his neighborhood is not like a war zone.

I am trying to say

his neighborhood

is as tattered and feathered

as anything else,

as shadow pierced by sun

and light parted

by shadow-dance as anything else,

but they won’t stop saying

how lovely the ruins,

how ruined the lovely

children must be in that birdless city.

Trapped in a Vice

Introduction

It was strange wanting to be a witness in a place no one cares about.

—Reginald Dwayne Betts, A Question of Freedom

IN 2003, WHEN I was twenty-five years old, I took a job as a caseworker at a public defender’s office in Harlem. I had never lived in New York City, and I had no experience doing social work nor any knowledge of the New York City court system. Before I got the job, I had worked for a few years in criminal justice policy reform, so I understood a bit about the behemoth system I would be taking on. I knew the work would be emotionally challenging, but I wasn’t prepared for the ethical and political questions it would force me to confront.

One of my many duties at this job was to go regularly to Rikers Island to meet with our clients. Anyone from New York City who is sixteen years or older and accused of a crime goes to Rikers Island to be held in detention if they have bail set or if they are remanded to custody by a judge. The island has around 10,000 inmates housed in ten smaller jails, with approximately 9,000 staff members. Just north of LaGuardia Airport, the island’s soundscape mixes planes taking off and landing with buses transporting family members and staff and the massive physical plant machinery that it takes to manage what is effectively a small city.

To see my clients, I had to possess what is called a corrections pass. This allowed me to bypass the lengthy lines of visitors waiting to see their loved ones, drop off clothing, pay bail, or pick up property. After checking in with a front-desk sergeant at the main intake building, I would wait for a white school bus reserved for official visitors and corrections officers to take us to one of the jails on the island.

One day, I arrived at Rikers during a shift change. I waited outside the intake building with a large crowd of corrections officers. In my first days at Rikers, I assumed that the officers and I would have some camaraderie; we all worked in the same system, after all. A number of my clients even had family members who worked as corrections officers. However, I soon realized that my brown legal accordion file tipped the officers off that I was connected to defense attorneys, the individuals their jobs had taught them to detest. My external marks of privilege—my clothing and my mannerisms—and the fact that they were overwhelmingly Black and Latina/o while I was white—perhaps also added to their perception that I was yet another white bourgeois lawyer-type coming to see the overwhelmingly black and brown clients under their care. The guards demonstrated no camaraderie with anyone associated with the defense; their body language—the rolling of eyes, their decision to steer clear of us on the buses that led out to the facilities, and their brusque manner when we would try to engage in conversation with them made it clear that any association by guards with defense attorneys was to be avoided. I knew I was viewed with contempt.

The officers were not wrong: my office existed to challenge the law enforcement apparatus that employed them. Yet the paradox of Rikers was such that, in the minds of many of the men and women, boys and girls incarcerated on the island, we all represented the neglectful, abusive, and violent state. The guards enforced order, sometimes brutally, while the public defenders pressured clients to plead guilty in the limited time they spent with them. To the people behind bars, we were all the same representatives of a dirty and corrupt criminal injustice system: my clients called the corrections officers police and often conflated the roles of public defenders and district attorneys. The system became, for so many individuals who faced it over and over again, simply a process that screwed them over. The system felt particularly heavy and oppressive for my teenaged clients who were locked in solitary confinement for upward of eighty days because they spat at an officer or for the people who were forced to plead guilty to double digits because the alternative—losing at trial—could be so much worse.

As I stood in that parking lot alone while the guards made small talk with each other, I grappled with the question about whether state actors could ever play a positive role in the lives of people accused of crimes. I thought that the guards’ contempt for me was misplaced, unfair: I was going to Rikers Island to listen to people, to help them. But there is a long history of privileged white folks saving people of color from a system that was unmistakably akin to slavery, and thus largely intractable. Perhaps the officers’ attitude was, if you can’t beat it, join it?

I attended graduate school in England, where my questions about the state and its role in people’s lives were challenged even further. Despite its strong safety net and expansive social state, I witnessed similar dynamics of social exclusion in English prisons—particularly for poor people of color—to what existed in the United States. The same questions about social neglect emerged: how can the state buffer citizens from the crises that force them into the hands of the criminal justice system? And what if the crises that force people into the criminal justice system are actually a consequence of an inadequate social safety net and social welfare supports? Again, my questions focused on the role of the state in helping its citizens rather than oppressing them. In time, a more refined set of questions emerged: how is it possible to escape the punitive state? How are helping agencies implicated in punishment?

Pursuing answers to those questions led me to write this book. I sought to examine the role that the state plays in young people’s lives, and in turn, how young people perceive the state’s role in ostensibly helping them. I was particularly interested in the political and philosophical puzzle that young people in trouble with the law presented: as citizens-in-waiting who were brought into an inherently paternalistic juvenile justice system, what were some of the ways that they could exercise agency and self-determination?

I argue that the approach the state and its agents take with young people accused of crimes is harmful, illiberal, and racist. The system exerts a viselike grip over the lives of young people once they enter its grasp. Shaped by the forces of racism, classism, and sexism, the system demands responsibility of teenagers in the absence of social structures and supports that would allow them to meet those demands. As a result, they often falter.

One of these young people was Jacob, whom I met when he was just fourteen years old and incarcerated at the Hooper Secure Center in the Hudson Valley.¹ When Jacob was ready to leave Hooper, he gathered up his belongings, which included his GED certificate (high school equivalency), his books, and a check for the money he had earned while he worked at the facility’s kitchen. He got into a state van, and a staff member from the facility drove him just a short way to the local Amtrak station, where he boarded a train to New York City. He looked out at the Hudson River, wearing his own clothes for the first time in several years. Leaning back in the plush upholstered seat of the train car, he turned his gaze toward the commuters going from Albany to New York City and wondered if anyone knew that he had just been released from a juvenile facility.

Jacob got a job within a few weeks of his release, enrolled in college a few months later, and even secured a lease on a car. He gave speeches to younger kids who had been in the system, was interviewed by reporters, and went to a conference; he became a poster child. Yet just a few years later, Jacob was serving a two-year sentence in an adult prison. Now he’s starting over again.

Many researchers have written about why individuals like Jacob struggle to live a life free of crime. Some have focused on the roadblocks that those from America’s impoverished urban core face as they reckon with the stigma and burdens of a criminal conviction and the structural disadvantages of poverty and racism. This has helped us to understand the mechanisms structuring our high incarceration and recidivism rates, yet the whole story remains untold.

This book focuses on the neglect of young people like Jacob by the very institutions and individuals responsible for helping him get and stay out of the criminal justice system. It focuses on the moments when youth in the criminal justice system don’t conform to our expectations of how they should behave, only to disappear into homeless shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and adult prisons, as they cross the threshold from the juvenile to the adult system. It focuses on the institutions and actors who discard the young once their actions began to reflect the complex constellation of systemic and personal abandonment that have defined their entire lives. But it is also about the heavy hand of the state—for instance, the ways that Jacob first entered the system when he was fourteen, living in foster care, and desperate for money, and how he fell into the hands of the police, jail, and a lengthy sentence filled with behavioral change programming.

Impoverished young people in trouble with the law, like Jacob, are uniquely situated at the crossroads of multiple interlocking systems of social welfare and punishment. Because of their poverty, their often-troubled family existences, and their risk-taking, teenagers encounter the disciplinary power of poverty management in unique and important ways.

This book is about a generation of young people who have grown up in extreme poverty. The story begins in 2008, shortly after the global financial collapse. Many of these young people were born in or around 1996, when the federal government enacted welfare reforms that replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which placed caps on the amount of welfare assistance that individuals could receive in their lifetimes and imposed strict requirements on individuals to find work. The individuals who have most suffered under these and a number of other social welfare programs are the most impoverished Americans, especially single parents and their children. State-based general assistance programs, which provide a safety net for the poorest of the poor, especially single men and individuals without children who do not qualify for other government assistance programs—like Jacob—have been cut significantly in the past decade.² New York’s general assistance levels have fallen in real terms by about $100 a month per recipient.³ In a recent study of the prevalence of extreme poverty (living on the equivalent of $2 a day), researchers found that this form of poverty has risen sharply between 1996 and 2011.⁴ So too has social inequality, or the rising gap between rich and poor, and the increasing barriers for individuals seeking social mobility. Households with children living on no income are the most deeply affected by the welfare policy changes.

Almost every teenager I interviewed for this book lived in a household where his or her parents were unemployed or had very low-income service-sector jobs. Some of their parents participated in training programs mandated by welfare centers, such as those for home health aids, but their engagement in those programs provided them with no income.

Young people seem to struggle the most under the burdens of social inequality. These forms of inequality play a significant role in determining their life outcomes.⁵ Young people faced higher rates of unemployment than adults after the world financial collapse.⁶ Yet job training and employment opportunities are scarce. For example, only 7 percent of the 200,000 disconnected sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in New York City were served by existing educational and job training programs in 2008, and there were an estimated 12,000 program slots available to serve this group.⁷

These teenagers and their families frequently interacted with state actors and agencies charged with helping poor people—welfare centers, social security offices, Medicaid offices, corrections officers and cops, public hospitals, jails, family court, and child welfare offices. Government officials treat them in a manner that has been termed neoliberal paternalism. This form of governance emphasizes self-mastery, wage work, and uses of state authority to cultivate market relations.⁸ It is both paternalistic in that individuals facing government interventions see them as heavy-handed and focused on facilitating their change toward waged workers, better parents, more effective students, and so on, and neoliberal in that it emphasizes their role in the market as individuals capable of self-direction and sufficiency.

This book is one of a number of recent studies about young people’s experiences in the juvenile justice system. These studies have provided us with a rich and troubling story about the deeply negative effects of punishment and incarceration in young people’s lives. The studies, which have taken place in all parts of the United States, from Rhode Island to California, have revealed that much of what young people experience in custody and in the system more broadly across the country are very similar to what I have observed in New York; many young people struggle to manage the dual philosophies of care and control that exist in the juvenile justice system; the young people often fake it to make it through treatment, and they face harsh material and structural obstacles upon release from custody that prevent them from stopping offending.⁹ It is clear that our current system of punishment does not work; many, many young people—at rates as high as 90 percent of boys in New York—enter the adult system after spending time inside of a juvenile prison.¹⁰ Involvement in the juvenile justice system actually harms individuals more than it helps them.

This book situates the story of Jacob and similar young people in the context of this contemporary political economy and a juvenile justice system that is undergoing rapid change and that is raising new questions about help and hurt in the lives of young people. The setting is New York State, the birthplace of the first juvenile prison in the country and now the site of a serious experiment in closing juvenile prisons and system reform. The experiments that are being conducted in New York today (and elsewhere around the country) seek to provide more therapeutic and less punitive interventions in the lives of young people accused of crimes than have ever existed. Juvenile facilities have closed across the United States, unprecedented numbers of young people are being shifted to community-based alternatives to incarceration, and there are historically low numbers of youth crime. However, much of what we see happening today has happened at several other points in U.S. history, and much of the logic that undergirds it—that is, that system involvement may actually make young people more likely to commit crime—has been happening since the late nineteenth century, even if it is undergirded by new evidence today. While facilities close, new therapeutic interventions have been expanded that include a deeper penetration into the lives of children and their families.

The juvenile justice system is a palimpsest: the system we have today bears many traces of its predecessors. The first juvenile prison was established in New York in 1825, and the first separate court for young people was created in Chicago in 1899. The founders of the nation’s juvenile justice system believed that children should be treated differently from adults and thus served in a separate system. But not every child was considered worth saving. Black children weren’t worth saving. Nor were Native American or Mexican children. Children who were considered to be imbeciles or mentally or physically deficient were banished to facilities for life. Thus, the original form of the juvenile justice system was one that was fundamentally exclusionary in that its practices were focused on keeping out those young people deemed to be unworthy in our society.¹¹

Today, we still exclude youth from our vision of who should be saved, but in less visibile ways. Juvenile facilities are no longer racially segregated. Young people are no longer held for life in mental hospitals and asylums. But police officers in this country disproportionately arrest high numbers of youth of color. The vast majority of young people who enter the criminal justice system are impoverished, and their families have encountered various social welfare institutions—from public assistance, social security disability, public housing, to health care. Young people accused of violent crimes in New York and across the country face lengthy sentences.

The current system, and system actors, exclude and abandon young people but does so through engagement with them as liberal citizens. By liberal I am referring to the values of civil and social rights and freedoms in citizenship. American liberals have been committed to notions of freedom, even if those opportunities are facilitated by law and policy, as in the case of efforts to achieve racial justice in the country in the 1960s.¹² In today’s juvenile justice system, the individuals left behind in this quest to promote liberal citizenship are those kids who are not virtuous enough in their demonstration of citizenship. After leaving juvenile facilities and jails, violating probation, or failing their community-based alternative to incarceration programs, getting sanctioned by public assistance and finding themselves homeless and riding on the subway instead of living in homeless shelters, or running out of psychotropic medication and declining into a delusional panic, these young people end up in adult jails, prisons, and other institutions of social exclusion when they do not meet the expectations set for liberal citizenship by the individuals who have managed them. Yet it is the liberal state itself that creates the very standards for failure.

In previous systems, overtly racist and segregationist practices and policies reigned. What is different today is that many of the individuals in charge of the juvenile justice system will disavow racism and actively participate in a federal initiative to reduce racial disproportionality within the system. At Rikers Island, the system is also no longer staffed overwhelmingly by white people; more than half of the staff in New York’s juvenile prisons are black. A Latina woman led the charge to close to thirty of New York’s facilities. The former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, who went on to lead New York City’s criminal justice reform efforts, led efforts to overhaul the District of Columbia juvenile justice system and has publicly declared that large juvenile training schools should be shut down. A recent book calling for the abolition of juvenile prisons has hit the newsstands in force, and its author has made the progressive public speaking circuit.¹³ Hundreds of private foundations and liberal-minded groups have direct access to policymakers and legislators and are actively involved in promoting what many would consider to be a movement away from incarceration—including more alternatives to incarceration, more therapeutic interventions, more job programs and greater access to education. Young people may in fact be forced to work in a social structural system that exists at least in part because it meets the needs of economic and political interests that favor social order and social control over poor communities, immigrants, and people of color.¹⁴

Yet so many teenagers like Jacob find themselves in the adult justice system because the process of governing young people charged with crimes inevitably results in a class of the ungovernable—those who cannot and will not meet the standards and expectations set out for liberal citizenship by the individuals who run juvenile justice systems and the ancillary social welfare sector. Once they are deemed ungovernable, this class of individuals effectively disappears, only to turn up in other systems of social control and punishment beyond the juvenile justice system. We don’t necessarily have statistics to track this group; once young people exit the juvenile justice system and enter adulthood, they are branded with a different state identification number to track them through a new system. No longer desirable poster children in need of saving, they’ve aged out of foster care, too old to mentor, with the debts, children, failed relationships, health and mental health problems, and the crises of an adult. They fail, but in more important respects, they fail to submit to a system aimed at their submission by revealing the parts of themselves that are sometimes ugly or discomfiting to those in charge.¹⁵

When I was working at the public defender’s office in New York, I had a client who was a poster child and then decided not to be one. I met Nina in 2004 when she was sixteen years old. Brilliant, fiercely mature and sophisticated for her age, Nina was incredibly resourceful. She had been taking care of herself for two years after her parents abandoned her for their drug addictions. She had worked her way up a small local crack-selling network, a girl among men, but one who was a formidable competitor in that game.

My job was to get Nina into school; she had been arrested and charged with selling drugs, and although the judge had kept her out of jail, the only way we could help her get out from under the case was to make sure she was back in school. Nina needed a parent’s signature to reenroll, and nearly a year later, with both of her parents on the streets and then incarcerated, we still had no way to get it. Yet we found a solution—a GED/college program miraculously accepted an opinion written by a lawyer from a community-based youth program that Nina met all of the criteria for being an emancipated minor. In short order, Nina ascended from drug dealer to college student.

Nina became a poster child. She was asked by the organization’s director to speak at our annual fundraiser and charmed everyone she met, with a narrative that confirmed the idea that if only we give teenagers a chance to grow out of crime and a few strong resources, they will thrive. I quickly learned, however, that the poster child narrative forces us to ignore the long-lasting damage wrought on individuals by poverty, racism, and systemic neglect. Like many teenagers, particularly those whose early childhoods were marred by neglect, Nina struggles with deep emotional pain and depression, and although her successes have been enormous, they wouldn’t be legible or obvious to many.

The poster child is a liberal’s fantasy: the young person who has left the streets for college or for a middle-class job with social mobility. By leaving the ghetto, they leave all of their troubles behind, for it was really just their position in the ghetto that made them commit crimes. This story, of course, denies individuals access to the complexity of human existence; it ignores the scars of racism and structural disadvantage in individual’s lives, of one’s racial identity and social history and its importance in shaping one’s orientation to oneself and one’s community, and to some extent it participates in the very narratives about the American Dream that so many liberals would disavow as mythology.

This book is about individuals like Nina who lead complex and unique lives; it is an imperfect attempt to situate those lives in a broader historical and political context to talk about the ways that the system affected them. Books like this necessarily elide the complexity of people’s lives, their motivations, and their agency. In my time outside of academia, I continue to work with public defenders to present individuals’ life stories to judges and prosecutors. I am reminded daily that it is impossible to draw sweeping conclusions about why people commit crimes and what led them down the paths they traveled. In presenting the claims I do, I attempt to convey the damage that is done when we treat individuals in trouble with the law as objects that can be poked and prodded according to the whims of a system that refuses to recognize their individuality.¹⁶

Theoretical Orientation

The philosophical orientations and governing ideologies about youth crime have great consequences for the everyday lives of individuals charged with crimes. They steer individual actors’ decisions about where to intervene in teenagers lives, and most important for this book, where not to intervene. I focus on the present-day ideologies about the governance of youth crime, using New York as a case study. Governing authorities force youth to express responsibility for their offending actions and for their future compliance with the law, but they do not actually facilitate the attainment of that responsibility, or more important, that ability to get out and stay out of the system. Those youth who are unable to live up to the expectations set out for them by governing agencies are abandoned. I argue that this process of responsibility-making is marked by assumptions about appropriate expressions of gender, race, and class.

This book examines four elements of the punitive philosophy that are used against impoverished and risky youth: ungovernability and worthiness, responsibility, and redeemability.

Young people in trouble with the law—especially young people of color—are deemed to be ungovernable and thus in need of court interventions. The book charts the efforts of adults in the criminal justice system to manage young people whom they consider to be unmanageable. Interventions that rely on the idea that the young people who are inherently bad and ungovernable (that this is an assumed part of their culture) fail to recognize the effects of a bad and pathological social structure on individual’s lives.

New York, like many other states across the country, has faced significant reductions in government support for welfare since 1996, when federal welfare reform occurred. The federal welfare reforms were partially facilitated by the strong embrace by political actors of the concept of individual responsibility in the marketplace. This idea, stemming from neoliberal political philosophies that prioritize the role of the free market, a reduced social state, and individual responsibility and accountability, was popularized in the United States during the Reagan era and embraced by politicians of all stripes.¹⁷

In response to the retrenchment of welfare supports, state actors in places like New York have effectively been forced to promote notions of individual responsibility for those individuals who are under the control of the state. Put more simply, for young people about to leave a juvenile facility, it is in the state’s best interest to encourage them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find work and education because the state itself does not have the resources to provide such services to them. At first, Jacob succeeded in realizing this goal; he was able to find at least moderately stable forms of employment and education on his own.

Many of the interventions aimed at young people charged with crimes in New York and elsewhere are guided by state actors’ desires for the realization of redemptive narratives in the lives of young people who have violated the law. In recent years, many states, including New York, have publicly embraced what they call more rehabilitative and therapeutic strategies with young people, turning away from a lengthy period, during the 1990s and early 2000s, of harsh law-and-order approaches to them, which often involved the imposition of lengthy sentences, the introduction of adult-level penalties, and the use of get-tough interventions, such as boot camps