Rethinking Juvenile Justice: A Book Review
The Washington State Law Library has added a number of criminal justice, social justice, and narrative nonfiction titles to our collection in recent years. This is the second in a series of short reviews of these books.
The American juvenile justice system is broken beyond repair and has strayed far from its original purpose. This is the blunt assessment laid out in journalist Nell Bernstein’s Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison (The New Press, 2014, 365p.). To browse for this title in the Washington State Law Library’s collection, click here.
Part treatise on the history of America’s juvenile justice system and part exposé of the abuse juveniles suffer at the hands of those who work in what Bernstein unapologetically calls “juvenile prisons,” Burning Down the House aims to refocus juvenile justice policy on its original goal: rehabilitation.
Bernstein has done her research. She traces the roots of America’s juvenile justice system to Progressive-era “Houses of Refuge,” established for the purposes of educating and employing both delinquent and disadvantaged youth. She argues that from this inception juvenile prison populations have always been driven by class and race. Today, up to 90 percent of all teenagers report committing a crime that would result in detention, yet 72 percent of incarcerated youth are persons of color. She states, “The criminalization of adolescence has made way for an unofficial, largely unacknowledged, but brutally effective apartheid that has so dehumanized large numbers of poor black and brown children — painted and treated them as so profoundly ‘other’ — that we no longer need take notice of their inextinguishable humanity, much less the vulnerability of their tender years.” (pg. 62)
Drawing on personal interviews, Bernstein’s raw depiction of the lives of incarcerated youth both before and during detention is a revelation. She explores the role early trauma plays in the lives of inmates and the lack of therapeutic solutions offered once they are incarcerated, saying “Young people rarely miss the fact that their own offenses draw a sort of attention that offenses against them do not.” (pg. 161) An entire chapter is dedicated to solitary confinement in juvenile prisons, and stands on its own as an authoritative source on the topic.
Bernstein’s main argument, that states need to rethink juvenile justice and start from scratch, is supported by her research showing that rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship. She highlights programs and systems that put this principle to work. Such as the Missouri Model that relies on regional therapeutic programs that cover the full spectrum of juvenile rehabilitation needs, from day programs to small secure-care facilities, allowing offenders to stay connected in their communities.
Burning Down the House will be of particular interest to readers looking for a closer examination of the lives of youth offenders, both in and out of juvenile prison, and the abuses heaped upon them by an out of control system. While Bernstein proposes solutions to the problems of America’s juvenile justice system, she doesn’t have an optimistic outlook. Her dim assessment? Juvenile prisons are a “manifestation of our abiding need for a population of ‘others’… This belief is so fundamentally reassuring that we resist relinquishing the system that sustains it, no matter how high the mountain of evidence against large-scale juvenile incarceration grows.” (pg. 271)
For more information:
‘Burning Down The House’ Makes The Case Against Juvenile Incarceration, Fresh Air interview with Nell Bernstein
Washington State Supreme Court Symposium, Looking To the Future: Adolescent Brain Development and the Juvenile Justice System
Understanding Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, edited by Marilyn D. McShane and Michael Cavanaugh
A New Juvenile Justice System: Total Reform for a Broken System, edited by Nancy E. Dowd (SC)
