The Juvenile Detention System Is A Factory Farm For Troubled Kids

My Six Years As A Tourist Inside A Kid’s Prison

I was 25 when I met Michael. He was 16.

I was working as an art instructor at the House of Corrections. Mike was being held for trial on adult charges.

In my twenties, I worked in every part of Philly’s juvenile justice system: intervention programs for chronically truant kids; the Youth Study Center, where kids awaited adjudication in Family Court, and the House of Corrections, the place where kids stopped being considered kids in the eyes of the law. I taught my classes on the “blocks” and “units” where my incarcerated students lived.

On the cellblock, everyone, including the Corrections Officers, addressed each other by their nicknames. I had students with names like Cowboy, Champ, and Fifty. I knew one young man only as Du-Rag. But Mike, unlike anyone I’d ever taught, wanted me to call him “Mike”.

He was quiet, and unusually polite considering his surroundings. I was used to arguing and trading insults back and forth with the kids during their first few classes. After they realized that I was going to keep showing up, no matter what they said to me — and that I had a bag full of X-Men comic books I was willing to share — things got easier. But Mike never tried to test me. He was just cool about it from jump street.

I taught my students in the “Green Room,” the activity room on the block. The cruel irony is that it was devoid of any real activities when my class wasn’t in session. It contained:

1. A broken weight bench with no weights.
2. A ping pong table with no balls or paddles.
3. A bookcase filled only with a series of books about breaking into the Real Estate trade in the 1990s.
4. An old boombox that only played the radio.
5. A TV and DVD player that sat on a wheeled cart.

My class often worked on the floor, and occasionally mice would come out to investigate my student’s projects. Every afternoon the Corrections Officers would wheel the TV cart onto the block and let the kids watch. When The Fresh Prince of Bel Air would come on at 4:30, these teenagers, who may have committed some truly serious crimes, sang along to the theme, just like every other kid on the planet.

It wasn’t that difficult to gauge the temperature of the class on any given day. Most kids wore their emotions like XXXL bomber jackets, they enveloped their young bodies; whatever they felt was all you could see.

Mike wasn’t like that, he wasn’t overcompensating, nor was he shy and scared, nor was he a raw nerve, like so many of my other students. He seemed a little more patient and a little more optimistic than everyone else.

When I met Mike he told me he wasn’t that interested in art. But a few of his friends were in the class, so he decided to give it a shot.

I explained to Mike that in addition to my art class, he needed to help me paint a mural. (I was trying to make the oldest operating jail in America a more beautiful place to live; it was a herculean task, to say the least.) I think Mike saw my class as a life-raft that could carry him out of the system — he held on as tightly as he could, for as long as he could. I respected the hell out of him for that. Even as his friends, who were more interested in art got sent away, or turned 18 and were moved to the adult side of the prison, Mike kept showing up.

Mike was given work-release after a few years, and I made sure he came to work for the non-profit that had sent me into prisons to teach. But, not surprisingly, the dedication he learned in prison failed him in the real world.

Mike was a 19-year-old who hadn’t spent more than eight hours outdoors in the last two and half years. So, it wasn’t surprising when an errand that should’ve taken him 15 minutes, actually took two hours. It wasn’t all that surprising that he began showing up to his job late. And it wasn’t surprising that Mike, at 19, didn’t understand the consequences of having 45 minutes of unaccounted time on his time-sheet—that those 45 minutes were the difference between a life inside the walls and a life under the sky.

When Mike showed up late to his halfway house, he was put back in jail for another two years.

It crushed me to learn that Mike had been lost back into the undercurrent of the system. That and a few other classroom traumas sped up the arrival of the inevitable. I was burnt out. I was already gone mentally. I tried to put the things I’d seen, the stories I’d heard, and the students I’d cared about, as far from my mind as possible. I wanted to be like other Americans when it came to thinking about prison kids — which is to say, not at all.

It’s not disinterest or thoughtlessness that keeps incarcerated young people out of the minds of most Americans — it’s the fact that juvenile justice is a complicated, self-contained world that intentionally keeps itself off the radar.

The system wants to protect the privacy of the young people inside. Even the designs and locations of the facilities are meant to discourage curiosity about their inner workings.

The Youth Studies Center, for instance, backed up to Philadelphia’s Parkway, right in the middle of the city’s heavily trafficked and touristy Art Museum neighborhood. The building looked like every other drab post-war municipal building, effectively hiding the facility in plain sight. Most Philadelphians had no idea that it was stuffed to the rafters with kids awaiting their day in court.

The year I left, Pennsylvania State Welfare officials downgraded The Youth Study’s Center’s license over allegations of abuse, overcrowding, and outdated and unsanitary facilities. I had no direct knowledge of physical abuse in the facility, but I figured the conditions themselves amounted to a kind of abuse. (And they were nothing compared to the House of Corrections where Mike was housed.)

In a world full of young people without power or agency, where no one can get out, and no one can see in, and there is no outside oversight beyond the bureaucrats and politicians charged with running the facility; you have a recipe for unchecked neglect at best, and outright abuse at worst.

Many people don’t realize it, but there is no set standard for what these facilities do or how they execute their missions. There is a complicated tapestry of facilities that detain kids in this country, and they can vary wildly in mission and level of care. I worked with kids who were placed in centers run like boot camps; others were sent into vocational training. Most of these centers are run by private, for-profit companies. And many are located in rural areas, far from family members and advocates.

The Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, located just outside Philadelphia, operates 235 acute and behavioral-health facilities in 37 different states. One of those facilities is The Chad Youth Enhancement Facility in Ashland, Tennessee. In 2007, a 17-year-old boy named Omega Leach was strangled to death during an altercation with two staff members.

His death was a grim reminder of the uncertain situations and potentially hostile environments my kids could find themselves in after adjudication and placement.

As a writer I have two conflicting feelings about sharing my experiences: I caught a glimpse of something that was a deeply troubling part of American life and evidence of a systemic violation of very specific and very vulnerable communities. And for a long time, I didn’t want to think, write, or talk, about what I’d seen. Not only did I want to put the pain and suffering I’d witnessed on a weekly basis behind me, but I couldn’t share my stories because somehow I felt like they weren’t my stories to share. I wasn’t a full time resident or staff member on those blocks and units, and I didn’t look very much like most of my students or coworkers. As silly as it might sound, I felt like I didn’t have a right to share what I’d seen. It felt exploitive.

It’s especially difficult to get over this idea when so many of the incidents I had witnessed sound so sensational when committed to paper. How we deal with kids who commit crimes, especially serious ones, is an issue that it is vital to the health and future of our communities, and I was terrified of turning it into the equivalent of rubbernecking a car wreck. Do I share the story of the time my class was interrupted by a suicide attempt? What about the countless other stories of damaged kids, packed in together in small spaces, with very little to do except inflict harm on themselves and each other? Sharing any of it felt like conforming to some expected stereotype. Oz with kids.

There were enough big instances of violence during my six years as a tourist in those spaces that I began to lose perspective on the everyday horrors. It’s a world where the suicide attempts, acts of particularly brutal self harm or inflicted harm, and small riots stand out, but the casual conversations about learning to live with a colostomy bag, or what to do about an infected bullet wound, or the frustration and rage prompted by being on lockdown in your shop for 23 hours, or the constant ingestion of psychotropic drugs, just seemed commonplace.

It was a world where damaged kids were warehoused with many other damaged kids. A place where the only consistent exercise came in the form of being shuttled back and forth between spaces that were roughly equivalent in size to a McDonald’s dining room. I have struggled to admit that I was basically working in factory farms for troubled kids.

Trying to untangle the powerful emotions and conflicting feelings that are natural when you’re dealing with kids and violence and incarceration has been next to impossible for me. It has taken me seven years just to be able to get this much out. And quite honestly, up until the tragedies in Oakland and Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland and Chicago, no one outside a very specific niche was really interested in discussing the Omega Leach’s, or Mike’s, of the world and the system they’re caught up in. Up until young people started rioting, no one was very interested in reading the screams.

I know there are also excellent facilities, places that work hard on keeping kids with serious issues safe and creating opportunities for them to express themselves, burn energy in constructive ways, and get educations. The trouble is that in a system so vast and invisible, it’s difficult to tell the good apart from the bad. When a world like this is so hidden from view, it’s hard to know what questions we should be asking when it comes to reform, or where to start looking for answers. Hell, sometimes it takes seven years just to start a conversation about what you’ve seen.