I Was A Juvenile In An Adult Prison
I went from being a high school kid to being labeled a menace to society.
I was involved in what was supposed to be a robbery, which turned into a shooting or “attempted murder.” In an instant, I went from being a regular high school kid in South Philly to being labeled a menace to society. I wasn’t even old enough to buy a pack cigarettes or go to prom. A simple night of hanging with my friends turned into 60 months behind prison bars.
After my arrest I was sent directly to the House of Corrections, the oldest operating jail in America, where juveniles held on adult charges wait for trial.
I knew this was not the life for me from the moment I landed in intake. You might know from TV that they strip you naked and search you. I had never been locked up before so this was all new to me. They separated me from the adults and gave me a blanket, sheets, and an orange jumper.
Newbies are all on quarantine for the first week. The area is separated from the rest of the juvenile block to make sure we don’t have diseases or infections that could be spread throughout the population. You spend twenty-three hours a day in your hut (cell), then you get one hour to move around the block: you get a shower, maybe watch some TV, before they shackle you and put you right back in your cell. The hole, where inmates go if they misbehave, has the same 23:1 schedule.
It’s basically like solitary confinement — except the block is so overcrowded that you’re always sharing a cell, no matter where you are. Back then my celly (cellmate) was one of the friends who got arrested with me. We honestly believed we would be out by the Fourth of July because one of the older guys we were arrested with admitted to everything. We were so young, we figured that if he admitted to to everything, we were cool. (I believed that if a person actually admitted to committing a crime, the rest of co-defendants were free to go. I never knew about conspiracy and I never knew I could carry the same weight of the actual perpetrator.) We were marking off calendar days. We didn’t really understand how real it all was.
Jail, especially as a juvenile in an adult facility, subjects you to some things you’re not used to and probably never want to go through again.
We wake up every morning for the count. This is when they make sure no one has died or hung themselves during the night. Once count was done we’d get a morning snack. Then they’d take us to school — or they’d take everyone who wasn’t in the hole, or on quarantine, to school. But they’d have to lock down the entire jail before they marched us through because juveniles aren’t supposed to come in contact with adults.
We’d pass through four or five gates before going upstairs to the five classrooms. We had math, english, science, all that stuff. The classes were good — you could tell that some of the teachers really cared. I graduated with honors.
We didn’t see anyone other than Corrections Officers, teachers, and other inmates. We would see counselors once in a blue moon. Maybe if we were lucky we’d get a visit. We’d eat our lunch in the classrooms. They fed us the worst baloney sandwiches back there. There was no recess or going outside. On the weekends we got cereal and cakes to crumble into our cereal, then we’d sit on the block all day.
In the two and half years I spent at the House of Corrections, we went outside maybe three or four times to play a little football. We went to the gym maybe five or six times. So in those two and half years, I spent maybe four hours outside and another three or four in a place where I could move around, or run. The rest of the time was spent in a cell, on the block, or in the classrooms.
These are kids with anger issues and you give them no recreation time, so they fight each other all day. Of course — that’s where animosity comes from. There were more fights on that block than I can count.
When you’re young you don’t think, so the fights break out and then the block gets locked down for like two weeks. When the block gets locked down, they won’t let you out of your cell. It’s torture. It gets tight in there. There’s literally nothing to do until the block workers come by with hot water and you can make Oodles of Noodles.
It’s not healthy. Damn near everybody on the block was on an anti-depressant like Sinequan or Sinequal. But that stuff just makes everything worse.
In the two and half years I was in the juvenile block, I think there were maybe three attempted suicides, all from boys who were looking at life for crimes like murder or robbery. Imagine being fourteen or fifteen and you find out that your gonna die in jail, that’s the worst, they were through.
Honestly, the miserable conditions were a big part of why I knew I was never coming back through those doors again. I hated being told when I could eat, sleep, take a shower. I wanted to be home with my family, not sharing showers with 200 plus people.
The road I was headed on before my prison stint was terrible: from petty crimes, to robbing people, cutting school to being out on the streets with my friends. It was just a matter of time before those streets claimed my life. I believe jail actually saved me from my own path of destruction. I could have easily been another murder statistic. Jail opened my eyes to see I was much better than what I was becoming. But it wasn’t like that for most of the guys I was locked up with — for most guys I knew, prison just did more damage.
I got released from prison when I was 18. I did work release for a while and stayed at a halfway house. But I wasn’t prepared for a world with distractions like fast food, females, and the outdoors. It was hard for me to realize that being fifteen minutes late was the difference between being outside and going back to jail. Those fifteen minutes violated the terms of my release and I found myself right back in jail. I spent the next two years being bounced around different adult jails while finishing out my sentence. Now, I’ve been out for eight years and I’ve been off parole for five.
It’s wrong to send kids away for the rest of their life without giving them a chance for parole. You have no idea what you’re doing when you’re 14 or 15 years old. I know dudes who made horrible mistakes, but they were still just kids — if you send them away for twenty or thirty years they could still have a chance to come out and have some kind of life, do some good in the world. You can’t take the actions, no matter how bad, of someone who’s not old enough to vote or maybe even drive and use it against them for the rest of their life. You can understand why a young boy would want to end his life after finding out he was gonna die in jail.
Whether you want hard jails or not depends on what side of the system you on. If you want to create more problems, if you want to punish them then leave it like it is. If you want to actually help them and make it so they don’t keep coming through a revolving door, give them rehab programs. Give them a chance to think outside their situation.
