Spirit in Action

The End of Juvenile Prison

Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison, by Nell Bernstein, takes an unflinching look at the travesty we call juvenile prison. She has an unequivocal solution - get rid of them. With some 20 years of knowing the system and by telling the stories of the victims of it, Nell explores the history, reform, trends, and consequences of the "reformatories" which do the exact opposite of their supposed purpose.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 25 Oct 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. [music] Most of us, even if we think prisons are necessary for adults, are queasy about the idea of sending kids to prison. Instead, we talk about kids in detention or reformatories, but the truth is that an immense number of kids in the USA are in prison with all the horror that that word can inspire. Nell Bernstein is my guest today and she spent a couple decades witnessing the heartbreaking toll that these prisons can take on our youth. The recent result of her work is a book, Burning Down the House, The End of Juvenile Prison. And it's a thorough, well-documented, scathing indictment of a failed system, which increases the amount of crime and costs enormously in terms of cash and lives. Filled with stories and personal examples, Burning Down the House points us to the only possible solution, not reform, but Burning Down the House and going a new and enlightened way. Nell Bernstein joins us by phone from the Bay Area of California. Nell, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. I'm very glad to be here. I'm pleased to have you here today, especially because your book brings us some good news and promises some light ahead in the tunnel. But first, unfortunately, I want to talk about the bad news, and I think we need to talk at least some about the bad news because for so many of us, it's the bad news that shocks us out of our complacency and gets us moving to improve the situation. How did you get involved with juvenile justice? You know, I became involved almost by chance. When I was in college, I spent a summer volunteering at a runaway shelter. That and a conflict degree seems to qualify me to work in a group home after I graduated, which was one of the formative failures that I think most of us experienced. The girls were not that much younger than me when they would ask me who were you to tell us what to do. Not only did I not have an answer, increasingly, I thought they were asking a very legitimate question. I couldn't figure out the relationship between whatever they had done, which was often just blowing through one too many foster homes, and the level of power that we and I were given over them to tell them what and when they could leave the house, whether they could talk to family members, when they could eat. There was a padlock on the refrigerator. So that was the beginning for me. I moved on to a job I liked a lot better. I spent the next decade as the editor of the Youth Newspaper Yoe in San Francisco, and right off the bat loved the fact that the kids were there of their own volition. Nobody was forcing them to be in my company, and that made the work possible. But it was the 1990s, and we worked with anybody who walked in our door, and as a result of that, I've increasingly found my staff being arrested and then too often incarcerated. So I go to court with them, and when that didn't help, would visit them at juvenile halls or write to them at state facilities. So it was really just friendship that drew me into this issue to begin with. So some of these folks are acquaintances and friends and coworkers for you. So for some of them, you end up hearing their stories, seeing how the situation plays out after you've gotten to know them moderately well, as opposed to befriending someone in prison and then getting to know them? Yeah, in terms of the book, I also did a lot of reporting, both in terms of research and such, but also a large number of interviews and had a wonderful research associate. Well, Roy, who also did interviews, but some of the stories in the book are also drawn from my own experience, or the experience of people who were in my life. I think now that you and I are very nearly on the same page. I hope I'm seeing correctly your position is that we need to get rid of juvenile prison. That reforming simply doesn't work, doesn't last. At what point did you get it and understand that the only solution is to scrap youth prisons? I want to clarify. I do think that the juvenile prison, as it now exists in, I guess, every state in the nation except Missouri, in other words, the large prison-like state institution, yes, it's beyond reform. And I think it's day, is it on or ought to be done? I'm not saying there's never an instance when somebody under 18 needs to be confined for some period for public safety. I just wanted to clarify that. And so, when did you get it? When did the clearness come to you? That's a great question, because I didn't go into the book thinking I would make the argument that we needed to abolish the juvenile prison. I knew that those, I knew, who had been into these institutions, had overall been devastated by the experience that it had done more harm than good. I knew there was a terrible problem with these institutions. And I guess I figured I would write a book that would describe that problem, certainly not the first to do so, and talk about how it might be fixed. But the deeper I got into my research, the less I believed that it could be fixed. And I don't think the turning point for me was a particular interview, because as I said, I already knew that this was a devastating experience for kids. But there were two statistics that one combined just seems to me incontrovertible. The first comes from a study of young people across the country, confidential interviews, which found that somewhere between 80 to 90% of all American teenagers at some point commit an act or act of delinquency serious enough that under the law, they could be locked up. So that taught me that it's not like we're talking about two groups of kids, delinquent kids and regular kids, but delinquency, as we define it, is actually a developmental phase. The research also showed me that those kids who just got a pass either were not locked up but allowed some kind of community intervention or more commonly, those kids that we just left alone, those who didn't get caught grew up and out of delinquency and just went on to live their lives. On the other hand, those users, primarily poor use of color, who found themselves behind bars for these same very common acts of delinquency, often went in a different direction. And the research indicated that being incarcerated actually about doubles, the chances that an individual will go on to be incarcerated as an adult. And that juvenile incarceration, more than anything else, is the greatest predictor of adult incarceration. And when I say that, people sometimes think, well, sure, because they're committing crimes when they're young, so they're committing crimes when they're older, but that's true even when you control for acts of delinquency. It's still the case that incarceration doubles the chance that you're going to go on to be locked up as an adult. You put those two together, everyone's doing it, essentially, and those who are locked up find their life prospects greatly diminished, and it's hard to reach any other conclusion than that incarceration for juveniles is what they call a medicine, iatrogenic, it's a response that is worsening the original problem. And there's a lot of worsening that goes. Again, you have so many stories in your book, now. I want to mention about drugs and the role that they play. I didn't see statistics in the book about how drug use or involvement predicts the outcome. My personal view, by the way, includes the fact that I've never done or used any drug at all, so I'm kind of unusual in our society, including the fact that I've never been tipsy with alcohol. So I'm a little bit bizarre as far as our society goes, but my attitude is essentially a libertarian attitude. I'm not into telling other people how they should or shouldn't get their pleasure. If I get mine by eating chocolate cake, as I do, then maybe I shouldn't be criticizing other folks who get pleasure by smoking pot. These days you're more likely to get judged for the chocolate cake, I'm afraid. Maybe that's just in California. So I wanted to be upfront about that. Having those attitudes myself, I was struck by how many of the stories that you shared in the book, where what happened was one parent or the other, or both, got involved in drugs, maybe pot or crack or drinking or something, that that led to a degeneration in the household culture. Things got messed up there, and the kids are essentially being ignored or neglected, and it's all part of the dominoes falling down the line to a really painful outcome. Did I correctly pick that up from what you wrote, or did I maybe invent it, or did you have the same impression? Well, yes and no. Definitely the young people that we incarcerate have experienced a tremendous amount of trauma, and quite often that trauma is within the family. I do want to be careful, though, because I think that there's a strong tendency to demonize the parents of children who end up incarcerated, and I just also want to make sure that I say that there are many kids who wind up behind bars whose parents are not addicted to drugs, and whether or not their parents are addicted to drugs whose parents are loving and broken-hearted and not to blame. So I do want to make that clear. But it's interesting, my last book was about children of incarcerated parents, and one of the things that I learned from those children was that incarcerating a parent for a drug addiction was devastating to that parent's children. I remember one young man who had been left alone for months, literally, after his mother's drug arrest, saying, "Using drugs, she's hurting herself. Take her away. Now you're hurting me." He thought that if she had been allowed to participate in a community program and not leave him to have the light shut off, and without a food, that would have been a good thing. So we criminalize drugs, lock up people's parents, and then we do it again with the next generation. It's definitely a cycle, but again, you are exceptional in never having tried illegal drugs. And again, for most adolescents, "experimenting" is a phase and is allowed to be a phase. I think that where the real split comes is in how we treat people who use or sell drugs depending on their race. And when I say that, I'm talking about research that shows that, okay, so let's look at black and white teenagers, although they're not the only kind. Across the board, a black teenager is, I think, 4.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white teen for the identical offense. When you get to drug offenses, despite the fact that blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, a black teenager is 48 times more likely to be incarcerated for the same drug offense as a white teenager. So that's where you really start to see not only the devastation of individual lives, but of communities. So the racism, the residual racism, the continuing racism that we have in our society plays a big role in how this gets acted out. Now I want to mention that I happen to have a pale skin. I qualify as white, but I do come from a large family where most of my brothers and sisters have dealt with alcoholism and other drugs. One of my brothers spent 10 months in jail for drug use, and there are DUIs and DWIs rampant in my family, so even though I'm a T-toler, I got to see a lot of such dysfunction up close. I think what you said now holds true in my family because we're white, and although there's been a lot of brushes with the law, but only seldom did it result in prison time. Three of my sisters who ran away from home, they went to group homes but never were incarcerated except for short stints. So I think I've seen that the white folks in my family largely got a pass on our law breaking in spite of the fact that we were doing all the things that land children of color in jail all too often. So appreciate your saying that. It's so rare for us pale skins. I think we're willing to acknowledge racism, but not to acknowledge our own racial privilege. And as the mother of two 13-year-olds, I am increasingly aware of that privilege. I have the privilege of not fearing every day that they will be arrested. I look back at my own adolescence, and I tend to think that I was kind of a goody-goody, but when I really think about it, as early as elementary school, I was a chronic loiter, and I could have been put behind bars for that. I called it hanging out downtown with my friends, but in some neighborhoods, that's not how it's perceived, so I really appreciate your acknowledging that distinction and also the distinction between being arrested, being involved with the law, and being incarcerated. Because my book is not a blanket argument against the entire juvenile justice system. It specifically looks at large prison-like state-run juvenile facilities and the effects I always have on kids, so I think that distinction is really important. There's something else you discuss in the book, and I had to hit myself and they had when I read it. I said to myself, did I just sleep through this? In the mid to late 1980s, there emerged this idea of the super predator. Kids are so dangerous that you just can't take any chances with them, and you know, they have always been juvenile delinquents, but now they are so dangerous that you have no choice but to jail them, lock them up, throw away the key. I lived through the 80s, but somehow I missed this radical change in public sentiment and how we dealt with juvenile delinquents. Could you describe what effect that had on our juvenile justice system? Yeah, and you know, it's clear, I might have missed it too, except the super predator phobia hit when I was working with teenagers, and I saw it very clearly. Our office, the East newspapers office, was in the financial district of San Francisco, and it was always a challenge for kids from on the way San Francisco works outlying neighborhoods to get downtown. There were the purse clutches and the street clusters, but once body count came out, which was the book that made the argument, the very specifically racialized argument that this generation of monsters was upon us, things changed. I mean, I would see the sidewalk literally part when some of my staff members would walk down the street, or I'd be walking with them, and people would ask me if I needed help. The level of fear that these kids faced really rose, and a couple of kids just said, forget it, it's too much work to spend all this energy convincing strangers, I'm not going to hurt them just to get to work. Another young man had a t-shirt made that said, no white lady, I don't want your purse. It wasn't a joke, nobody laughed. In fact, it actually worked. People would look at the t-shirt, take another look at him, and actually kind of relax. That showed me not only the kind of blatantly racial nature of our fear, but also the importance of communication. In a very straightforward, somewhat sardonic way, he was communicating a message, and people were hearing it. And that really stayed with me, the need for us to hear from and get to know those teens we most fear. In all of this, we're talking about juveniles, those under 18 years old, and I think I probably have a somewhat different perspective on juvenile development than you or most people in the USA, because I lived in a village in Africa for two years when I was in the Peace Corps. And my impression was that kids there developed, learned to take responsibility, are given responsibility, and live up to that much earlier than kids in the USA, that we actually kind of delay kids' growth and maturity, by the way we approach things. For example, girls in Togo got married and had babies starting around 15 years old, and the girl was tending toward old maid if she wasn't already underway by 18. And the boys were typically working full time by their later teens. That, having been said, you present some information about brain development in the book that makes me think that maybe my impressions about the male ability of mental development is flawed or unfair. Could you share that information on brain studies? Because I think it's really important when talking about holding kids accountable. Yeah, I'm happy to share it, although I'm inclined to think that it underscores your point. From what I know of other cultures, which is not as firsthand as your knowledge, they accommodate adolescent brain development instead of criminalizing it. But in the last decade or so, brain imaging has become much more sophisticated, and one thing that we've learned is that the frontal cortex, which controls things like understanding cause and effect, and linking a present action with a future consequence. All of the things that inhibit delinquency, impulsivity, isn't fully developed until the mid-20s. And once you understand that, I think that you can begin to go one of two ways. You can ignore it and continue to criminalize things that are essentially developmental, or you can accommodate it and create rights of passage that allow a young person to enter the community increasingly as her brain develops. Rather than be pushed out of it, I'd be curious to know more about how criminal justice is handled in the countries that you live in. Because the United States is far and away the world's greatest incarcerator of its young. And that's even accounting for the fact that we've seen a 40% drop, which is a very significant drop in the number of young people we incarcerate. That's been the drop over the course of about a decade, even accounting for that, were seven times ahead of our closest competitor, which I think is France, maybe England. And just kind of off the map in terms of most of the world, in terms of the number of young people we place behind bars. You mentioned something earlier about families. Now, my impression is that families and strong communities make a tremendous difference in getting through the juvenile ages. If your kids are only 13, you're just running into the iceberg right now. But my impression is that having some strong family, maybe parents, aunts, grandparents, and community, like schools, counselors, peers, other supports, that's important in a good future. But the more that that is broken down, the less likely the kids in that environment are going to be able to avoid juvenile prison. Now, that's my impression, including things I read in Burning Down the House, but I'm completely amateur at this. You're the expert, so what's your impression about it? You know, I think that that's true. On the other hand, I think that, again, when you want to talk about cultural differences, whatever the family does as children become teenagers, and I'm seeing this with my own at a certain point. And very gradually, I hope you hand them over to the community. They're not in the house all the time. And one's hope is that the community, well, instead of demonizing and criminalizing them, takes some role in raising them. Every so often a kid will say something that I never forget, and one of my kids, I remember saying during the super predator years, that he wished that when he and his friends were getting rowdy or too loud in the streets, the older people in his neighborhood would come out and yell at them, or if that was too scary, bang on the window, instead of immediately calling the police on them. His mother, he said, used to talk about an era in which anybody's mom was willing to discipline you, because everybody felt some responsibility for the children of their neighbors. Again, I think we want to be careful as demonizing certain families, like many of my pale-faced contemporaries, I'm part of a two-career household. That's not just something that's happened in my family, that's a huge cultural change, and for most of us, there's not really another way to do it. But that creates tremendous changes in the neighborhood, and I think we haven't, as a culture, caught up with that. Of course, the individual family is tremendously important. I mean, I would despair as a parent if I didn't think that, but the larger context matters as well. If you just tuned in, I want to remind you that we're speaking with Nell Bernstein. Her recent book is Burning Down the House, The End of Juvenile Prison, and Nell is my guest today for Spirit and Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host of this Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org. And on that site, you'll find the programs of our last nine years for free listening and download, plus a list of the stations where they are carried, links to our guests and comments. So, when you visit, please do post a comment and make our conversation two-way. Plus, there is a donate button, and that's how this full-time work is funded, so please click. But even more important, remember to support your local community radio station with your wallet and your hands. They provide an invaluable slice of news and music you get nowhere else. So, start by helping them continue that service. Again, Nell Bernstein is our guest today for Spirit and Action, her book Burning Down the House, The End of Juvenile Prison. There are so many threads I could follow, Nell, but one of the important ones that I want to get to very soon is the signs of hope in this area. There's so much that's distressing we could talk about and maybe one of those distressing experiences that you had, which turned into a hopeful path and good news is a good place to start with. When I read your experience with the young man you called Jared, it struck me that you could have been one of the persons filled with fear, saying, you know, lock 'em up, they're super predators, we need to do this to keep ourselves safe, but you didn't end up there. Could you talk about that situation? Yeah, and this is a story that takes place over the course of a couple decades, actually. Jared was one of the first young people to become part of the staff of our youth newspaper, and at the time that his cousin, who was actually the young man I was just talking about, brought him in, he was just a few weeks out of St. Quentin where he'd been sent at 15 after bouncing in and out of juvenile facilities when he was younger. I remember that his face still had that very neutral look that you often see inside prisons took a while for him to kind of let that go, but he was a tremendous writer and a very enthusiastic writer would work for days on a story, and that was our relationship as editor to writer. Whatever our relationship was, it wasn't enough to keep him from coming into the office one afternoon, pretty visibly drunk and holding a gun to my head. I was just terrified, probably more so after the fact than during the incident, but I had never seen a handgun before, much less at that kind of close proximity, and at the time and to this day I don't think he would have intentionally hurt me, but when you combine alcohol and a firearm, there's danger, and I did feel that my life was in danger. And my reaction to that was, I'm not proud of it, and it wasn't vengeful, I didn't want him locked up, but I did want him gone. I did feel like the only way I could feel safe again was not ever to see him again, and that led to a pretty intense conflict with our mutual employer who had become quite close to him and understood that he couldn't work in the office anymore, but wasn't willing to end her personal relationship with him. In fact, I think, but then he had moved into her house and begun the process of really becoming part of her family, and I was really angry. I felt like she was putting him above me, and as long as I stayed in that victim mindset, it was very hard for me to accept her willingness to continue to accept him. You know, my path went another way, and so did his, and our paths didn't cross for a number of years. In the early years when they did, I still had that kind of physical fear reaction. But in the book I describe an encounter that we had, I would say 20 years after that moment with the gun, we saw each other at an informal memorial for our mutual employer's husband, a professor who had also taken Jared into his home and raised him as a member of his family, and later in his life had developed both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which is a devastating combination. And it was Jared who took a primary role in caring for him as he lost control of his mind and his body, and it was Jared who bathed him and fed him and even carried him in his arms. I remember looking at Jared at this memorial, and he was sitting under a tree, and my then quite young son, who was and is a very dedicated magician, was showing him every trick he knew. And Jared was demonstrating really, I thought, tremendous patience and engagement, and it struck me, and not only did I not fear this kid anymore, I trusted him with my child, and I don't think that there's a deeper trust that you can have. And the reason that I could do that was because our mutual friend and employer had stood by him, you know, had offered him a relationship that didn't depend on his good behavior, that was unconditional, which I think is what every human being needs to navigate the world, but especially to navigate the passage that adolescence is, especially the passage through and out of delinquency. And it was a real relief in that moment to realize how long I had been in my instincts to exclude him, because holding him close had turned out not only to turn around his life, but to enhance my safety in all of ours. And that has come to be my broader view, that we're isolating kids right at the moment when what they need is to be held close. All the evidence is that that's a very dangerous thing to be doing. So in some respects, and the way that I formed my own mind, and this may not work the same for you now, love is the answer, this unconditional love and acceptance and support that's going to be there, that's the answer. Now, that's something I embrace because I'm on that end of the spectrum, it fits well with my Quaker beliefs and practice, and it's what I've seen work, including in me. But my beliefs aren't not so much in the mainstream, and I'm pretty sure that there are lots of people who would say to me, or more importantly to you, that you're naive, a soft-hearted liberal. You're in denial that it was a flip of the coin or a roll of the dice, whether in this case, maybe Jared ripped off your employer, or maybe she got shot when Jared was drunk and pointing the gun at her. And then you might have a completely different outlook on this situation, where Jared might never have got to the place where he could so compassionately pay back the tenderness and care that helped change his path. Do you get criticized about or accused of being naive about the hopeful path for such troubled youth? You know, you really shouldn't read the comment section on anything that you publish or any interview that you give, but more often than being accused of being naive, I'm accused of being a liar. When I describe the conditions inside some of these facilities, when I talk about a kid I knew who was forced to kneel in chains almost naked with the rest of his unit for two weeks, people say that I'm either, well, no, not that I'm naive, that I'm making it up, exaggerating, or maybe being taken in by a manipulative kid. But stories like those are not only borne out by official investigations, which I read until I was blue in the face, they're often, what the kids tell me is often an understatement. For example, the young man who talked about being made to kneel, when I tried to verify that, it turned out that at the facility he was talking about, young people were regularly made to kneel on sharp objects. But in terms of the specific question of is it naive to tell this sentimental story about Jared, here's the thing. When we don't lock a kid up and that kid goes on to commit an act of violence, that's when you hear these accusations of do-gooders and knife-tay. When we do lock a kid up and that kid is released, because everyone is released, right, the Supreme Court has even ruled that it's unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile to life, even if you charge him as an adult. So when a kid goes through this intervention of incarceration and then is released and escalates in violence, nobody says, well, gee, we were awfully naive to lock him up knowing that juvenile incarceration doubles the chances that a kid is going to wind up incarcerated in other committing crimes as an adult. But that is what the research shows, that this particular intervention of taking a kid away from his home and his community, depriving him of both natural relationships that he has and the opportunity to form new ones with maybe people who work for the juvenile justice system and can be caring towards him. But that particular intervention is the greatest predictor of adult criminality and adult incarceration, that's what the research shows. So I think it's in a way naive to think that by putting a kid in the cupboard for a few years, we can solve the problems of a gun saturated country that tends not to support its youth period. So let's get to the positive news, and I've got a couple things I'd like to bring up right away. Number one, Red Wing, which is a small town in Minnesota, about 90 mile drive from where I live, here in western Wisconsin. You held the juvenile facility there as a much more positive example of dealing with kids than is found in most states, not as good as the Missouri model, which we'll get to, but a dramatic improvement over the commonplace treatment of kids. Could you talk about Red Wing and why it's better than most of what we see? I'd be glad to. Red Wing was just a very good facility. I don't actually think it falls under the umbrella of the answer, but it was a facility where the warden clearly loved the kids. It was the only place that I went where young people were allowed to show me around without some sort of adult supervision, which to me, that level of transparency I thought was very telling. And the other thing that was really striking about Red Wing was in a very rural area, but the warden had made a long-term effort to involve the community. And there were so many volunteers that when I was there, I think they outnumbered the kids, and though they would have things like a cottage grandmother who, when the kids come home from school, would bake milk and cookies for them. And the kids would sort of repay that kindness by going out into the community and learning swing dance, so they could dance with these grandparents or play bingo with them. I think it was the young men who were acting as my guides who posed the same kind of hypothetical challenge that you posed to me a couple times. Well, we're bad. Why do we deserve milking cookies? I remember this kid saying, "Well, we earned that cookie. If we didn't go to school and behave and do well, we didn't get that milking cookie." And he was very proud of that, but that made me a little sad because it was great, but it wasn't unconditional. And I did feel a little sad that that was as generous and as welcoming as this particular community was, the system is just not set up to offer anything without a condition. And I did have the impression, as I read your story of that encounter, that even though the kids didn't seem to be too stuck on the idea that they were in prison, that you kept repeating the question. That seemed to be your focus of the negatives instead of theirs. Well, it was kind of hard to miss because they were locked inside, but it amazed me that one of them brought up that question. One of the kids asked me, "Do you think we're incarcerated?" and I turned the question back to them. And these two young men spent 15 minutes kind of debating it. And the reason that they had time to debate it is that an alarm had sounded, which they told me meant there had been some kind of a fight or misdeed, and a kid was being taken to, I forget what they called it there, but the isolation unit saw a certain confinement. So there were definitely some of the really negative parts of the prison experience taking place, yet these kids, because they were in a very good prison, just kind of weren't sure if they were incarcerated. And these were the same kids who told me, one of them told me that he felt safer inside the institution than he did out, which I thought was just a heartbreaking commentary on as you were talking about the community he lived in and the world that he lived in, that these were his options. But yeah, I was for sure very aware that I could leave and they couldn't. And to give you a little view of my own values and prejudices, now, I believe in maintaining a balance of rights and responsibilities, and I believe that both carrot and stick motivations are successful in affecting our personal choices and actions. So how does that work for you? Do your kids only get rewards, no negative consequences, no timeouts? I'm sure you don't slap them in solitary confinement, but do you only give them cookies and no punishments? No, no, when they were younger, the big thing was taking away electronics. I think the modern family, that's what we do. We take away the TV when they're younger and the cell phone when they're older, but I don't mean to brag, but I have pretty good kids. My boy's better than your kids. What do you do when he's the AD? No, really, really. He's been something close to an angel, never did anything wrong. And I believe he's never, ever lied to me. And he's 27 years old now, he's an incredible kid. You know, I'm not joking and I'm pretty sure that every teacher that he had up through high school and all who've known him will tell you, this is one honest, straight shooter kid. That's kind of my big thing as a parent, is don't lie to me, because when trust is gone, then there's really not much left to build on. So on those occasions when one of my kids has lied to me, and they really are quite rare. And I'll tell you, in the Internet of your kids, we know. Yes, we know. It's all right there on Facebook, we know. Yeah. You know, my son, well, I will tell a personal story. He wanted to go into San Francisco with his friends. We live across the bay and asked us if he could. And we were sort of thinking about it, as he old enough to do this on his own with his friends. And as we were thinking about it, he said, "You can track me if you want." In other words, he would give us his phone and we could put software in that would allow us to track him. My husband and I were both horrified and said, "We don't want to track you. You know, we want to trust you. And if we can't trust you enough to feel comfortable with you doing this, then it's not okay for you to do this." And I just think that's what it comes down to, is trust. When my kids were little and did something they weren't supposed to, I think they felt shame because they didn't want to disappoint us. That's a lot more powerful than fearing that you're not going to be allowed to watch television. So maybe we have slightly different perspectives, but I have twins and I had this wonderful, very wise babysitter when they were young who told me quite young, like one, two. The biting age, at least in my experience, that when they fought, what I ought to do, if I was by myself, was pick up the aggressor first because that was the kid who was crying out for attention. And that seemed so unfair to me, right? Because what I had done in the past was pick up the "victim" and cuddle and comfort that child and just sort of shut the etiquette out. That was the stick, right? But her way worked better, much better in terms of greatly decreasing this action that I wanted to stop, which in this instance was biting your sibling. So you know, what do we want to do? Do we want to do the thing that for some reason feels right to us in the abstract, which I think so many of us is to incarcerate so that we are sure that we're using a stick and not a carrot when a kid is bad, or do we want to do the thing that works? And there's just so much research now showing that this particular stick, excluding a kid from the community, putting him in a locked room, depriving him of much of what he needs developmentally, is not only ineffective, but counterproductive. I think we really have to ask our question, are we trying to solve the problem? And if there's this much evidence that an intervention is counterproductive, what is it that we are getting from it that makes us hold on to us so tightly? There's a lot of wisdom in what you just said, especially thank you, thank you for the personal story about the babysitter. Yes, I had no choice. Well, good. I tried to put you in a situation where you had no choice but to share the best. Sorry guys. But let's talk about something of what's going well. You mentioned earlier that there had been a 40% decrease in incarcerated youth across the country. Now, that's over about a decade. Some of it because of tight budgets and, you know, some of it comes from gains in wisdom and insight, likely fueled by fiscal pressures. Talk about what's going right and what's prompting us in that direction. Well, I think that that is the most promising thing. I mean, a 40% drop over a decade is phenomenal and it varies from state to state and in terms of making it happen. I sort of saw a recipe for change. Definitely, I'll had to include a budget crisis, but there was a period where those were almost universal. So that was my problem, required a scandal, either a newspaper or a journalistic investigation or the federal Department of Justice or most often both. Advocacy, especially advocacy on the part of young people who had been incarcerated and on the part of their parents, just kind of refusing to let the silence persist. These are all elements that combined to create this reduction. My fear is that the most important element has been fiscal because if that's so, then when the inevitable shift in our economy comes, I tend to think it's inevitable, then the risk that the beds that are empty now will fill up is pretty high. I think that it's really important that we seize this moment as an opportunity to question an intervention that has been just kind of like a matter of course for a very long time. Violent juvenile crime has been dropping since just about the moment that the super predator folks promised it would start to arrive. So has overall juvenile crime. And in fact, the tough on crime people sometimes say, "Well, that's because we're locking the criminals up," but the drops have been more steep in those states that have reduced their population behind bars. That's all promising. On the other hand, if you look at history, in the 1970s, a guy named Jerry Miller, who was then the head of the Massachusetts Training Schools, went through the same kind of conversion experience I think I did in terms of coming in as a reformer and ending up an abolitionist. And he was actually in a position to abolish. And he did close that state's training schools and either come up with community alternatives or in some cases, just let kids out. Although there was great controversy in the years that followed, 40 states followed suit, not closing all their facilities, but closing many as is happening now and cutting populations. And that continued until the mid-80s and until the super predator scare came along. And then we started filling them up again. So I think that we have to just be very vigilant to make sure that this is not another pendulum swing and that it really represents one of those moments when a society realizes that something has taken for granted for a very long time is long. And I think the moments in our history or when that has happened have been the great civil rights movements. And one thing that those movements had in common is that they're led by those affected. And that's the kind of change that I am hoping for, but I don't think we've seen it yet. So let's talk about Missouri, the Missouri model and the miracle that's happened there. Why is Missouri so much better than the rest of us? I suppose we could have something to do with being part of the Midwest, but Massachusetts and other places had a head start and there's plenty of impetus for reform. Like, you know, a judge in Pennsylvania who's getting kickbacks for putting more kids, sentencing more kids so they'd end up in private for-profit prisons. Lots of reasons why other places could have been the first down the path of sanity. Why is Missouri leading the way? You know, that's an interesting question. I can tell you more about how it worked, event about why it worked. Well, that'll do. What they did in Missouri was close a lot of, well, actually they closed all of their large state facilities and replaced them with much smaller, regionally based, home-like institutions because they did remain institutions with no more than maybe 30-35 kids. And it turned out that that was a model that made rehabilitation possible. They also talk a lot in Missouri about culture. The staff are trained to see the kids as kids, and that's a value that's reiterated and reinforced every day. You know, I spent some time in Missouri, talked with Kim Decker, who runs the system now. But of the many things that he said that were profound and important, the one that I remember the most was something he said in testimony before a federal committee that was looking into sexual abuse in juvenile facilities. Because that is a problem that has seemed unsolvable. About 12% of all kids are sexually abused during their time behind bars. But of that 12%, 10% of all kids are abused not by another ward, but by a guard. You know, we even have a special law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, that is aimed at doing something to reverse that. But even having a law aimed at preventing something that I think is already illegal doesn't seem to stem it in some states, except for Missouri. My recollection is that Tim Decker's testimony was that no, they didn't have a PREA implementation committee, and they didn't do a lot of special training around how not to rape the children in their facilities. They did have some training around boundaries, but the culture was one in which the kids were seen as fully human, and when that's the case, it becomes a lot harder to torture them sexually or otherwise. So I think that when I say how, what Decker always says is culture trumps everything, and very deliberately they managed to change the culture. Now I will say this, I was very impressed by Missouri, I also resisted being impressed. I didn't want to see a better prison. What really impressed me when I got there was that that was their attitude exactly, and they're now like other states in the process of trying to reduce the population that's in these just about perfect facilities so that they're not using incarceration for kids who, as I don't know who coined this to this phrase, but it's used pretty widely for kids that were mad at rather than kids that were scared of. One side note I think I should bring up, you mentioned in the book Burning Down the House, The End of Juvenile Prison, you mentioned the cost per kid to keep them in juvenile prison. I think it's over 88,000 per kid per year, and it strikes me that that's far more than what it costs to keep an adult in prison. I've seen such figures as in the 20,000s or up to 45,000 or even higher. So first, is it true that juvenile prison costs more, and if so why? Well I think that on average it costs 88,000 dollars, the comparison I'm more inclined to make is for education because we spend it on average about 10,000 dollars to educate a kid. In California, where I live, it got as high as $225,000 a year and not coincidentally education spending dropped to 8,000 and something per kid. And what I asked, you know, how do you spend $225,000 a year? I was told that a lot of that had to do with the cost of the multiple and ongoing lawsuits against the system. So the cost of defending, the cost of settlements, and also the cost of trying to implement the various mandates that came with being sued for abusive conditions. These lawsuits are common across the country. I think that there isn't a cost as higher as that there's some effort required to meet young people's needs. It's legally required that they be educated and that some more of an effort be made to provide health care and mental health care. But there's a tremendous disconnect between the money spent and the results. So because of that, I can't really answer your question. One or two more things I'd like to ask you about, you know, because this is spirit and action, I like to know about the role that religion or spirituality or other such big picture views of what's behind it all. What role these play in either helping or perhaps hurting the outcomes? One thing you didn't talk much about in the book, and again, the book is burning down the house, the end of juvenile prison, you didn't mention much about religion. And I understand that for adults in prison, this is a major part of their lives. They've got ministries that come into jails, Native American, Christian, Muslim, all sorts. And for adults, that plays a major role. Does religion pay this kind of a role in juvenile prison? Well, you know, I'm very familiar with the phenomenon you're describing. A lot of people find God in prison. That didn't come up as much in my interviews with juvenile, but there were several kids who talked about losing their religion behind bars. For instance, the young man who was forced to kneel for two weeks in his underwear was a long row of fellow prisoners. And he had been a very observant Christian prior to this experience. Said that somewhere in those two weeks, he lost his face, which until then had been very sustaining to him during his incarceration. And it wasn't the suffering per se. It was listening to the guards just kind of chat and banter and pass the time as if the kids kneeling in front of them were just not there or not human. That that was inconceivable to him, a God who would allow their humanity to go so completely unrecognized. Just didn't make sense to him, but he stayed a seeker. He started going to Native American ceremonies and exploring other faiths because the need for faith, I think, does get stronger in any kind of trial, really. And what about for you now? Did spirituality or religion have any role in motivating you to put in this effort? Over a couple of decades, really. Clearly. It's a labor of love on your part. What has been the big picture that's motivated you and supported you in continuing to do all this work? Well, I'm glad that we talked about our own children because this book is really a continuation to me of my last book, All Alone in the World, which is about the effect of parental incarceration on young people. When I began to do the reporting for that book, I was pregnant, and now my kids are 13, so my whole experience of parenthood has been tied up with my experience of prison. Not my first-hand experience, but my long investigation of the effect of incarceration on families and children and young people. So I think that it affected me, perhaps most profoundly as a parent. Maybe it's the reason that I don't rely very heavily on the stick as we discussed earlier. I think that also the reverse has been true, that the fact that my interest in these kids and what happens to them has coincided exactly with my own journey into motherhood is no coincidence. I am falling apart right now because my 13-year-old is at summer camp for the first time. So I think my sensitivity to the pain of separation is very informed by my first-hand experience of parenthood as well. And that makes perfect sense to me now. One of the things you repeat over and over in the book is that we have to get away from seeing these kids as other. That they are all our kids, that when we make decisions about them as if we see them as our own kids, we make better and wiser decisions. The book is Burning Down the House, The End of Juvenile Prison, and that's the goal here. Not simply reform, but completely getting rid of these prisons because the effects of reform have been faint and fleeting. And because the whole system is counterproductive and based on fallacies, it's by my guest, Nell Bernstein. And I think you'll find that the book is a fascinating read filled with so much of her personal experience and witness that you can't help but be present to the importance of what Nell is advocating. So Nell, thank you so much for doing this hard work, staying present for decades to the youths you've seen, known, worked with. When I know it's got to have been painful to watch, and thank you so much for the trials and rewards of raising your own young teens, a labor of love in itself, and rich by all you've done for so many more kids to whom you didn't happen to give birth. What a great gift you've given to them and all of our society, and thank you especially for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for our really thought-provoking conversation. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)