Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  It is hard not to be struck by the mix of love and anguish Josiah and Sophia feel in relation to the three granddaughters who live with them. When I met the two younger girls, I was moved by the warmth between them and their grandparents—a warmth that belied the despair just beneath the surface. “The question is, are we doing it better this time around?” Josiah said. In early adolescence, Mackenzie started using drugs, and Sophia started calling the police. After a few arrests, Sophia went to court and said she couldn’t keep going this way. The judge asked whether Sophia would take her home, and she said, “Absolutely not.” Mackenzie said, “You never did this to my father!” And Sophia replied, “If I’d known more then, I would have, and maybe we wouldn’t all be in this mess.” Mackenzie went to a temporary shelter in Yarmouth, then to the only place in the state that treated addiction in teenagers. Sophia and Josiah now think that the second eldest, Madison, was born addicted. Kayla, the youngest, seems to be doing better, but since she’s just eleven, it’s hard to be sure.

  “My mother worked as a scrubwoman, cleaning office floors at a buck thirty-five an hour,” Josiah said. “We had to bring ourselves up. Then we brought our children up, and now we’re bringing our grandchildren up.” Sophia said, “For such a long time, I thought that everything was going to get better, and I told the kids that. I don’t have any hope left now. We used to say, ‘When is it going to end?’ Now we say, ‘We’ll just take it as it comes.’ The extent of alcoholism in the family makes me feel better, in a way; I can say that it’s genetic. If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have had children. Chuck could do better than he does, but I know he’s not out having a good time. Once I was saying to him, ‘Chuck, I’d like my life back.’ And he said, ‘Well, don’t you think I would, too?’”

  • • •

  As many as three out of four incarcerated juveniles have a mental health diagnosis, as opposed to one of five in the general nine- to seventeen-year-old population. Some 50 to 80 percent of incarcerated juveniles have learning disabilities. Juvenile crime is also associated with low IQ, impulsivity, poor self-control, deficient social skills, conduct disorders, and emotional underdevelopment. These predisposing characteristics are manifest terribly early. In one study, parents were asked to describe their toddlers; they were reinterviewed ten years later. Those labeled “difficult” as small children were twice as likely to have committed crimes as those labeled “easy.” Another longitudinal study looked at boys rated “troublesome” when they were eight to ten and found that they were three times as likely as controls to be adolescent offenders. Of course, for every simple equivalence (difficult babies become lawbreakers), there is a parallel possibility (mothers who find their children disturbing bring up criminals).

  Those who swing into full-fledged delinquency before age twelve are highly likely to become chronic adult offenders and are much more likely to commit violent crimes than are those whose behaviors kick in later. This may reflect habit; the norms of your childhood are particularly hard to buck. It may also be that some children who are troublesome early have that missing moral thumb and are manifesting something so fundamental to their personality that it will be nearly impossible to ameliorate. If a child’s delinquency stems from habit, then early interventions to break those habits might be effective; if it’s genetic, then such interventions are much less likely to succeed. These possibilities are, of course, not mutually exclusive.

  In the chapter on schizophrenia, I noted how many schizophrenics are in jail; in researching this one, I learned how many people in jail suffer from some vague mental health diagnosis. Incarcerating mentally unstable people with the larger prison population may exacerbate criminals’ destructive behavior toward themselves and others. Carol Carothers, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Maine, has said, “It is hard to imagine a worse place to house a child that requires services for their mental illness.”

  • • •

  Brianna Gandy, whose mother was a crack addict, was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and left in the charge of her grandmother. “I call my grandma ‘Mom,’ so she won’t forget that she’s taking care of me,” Brianna said to me. Her father was entirely absent. “He has no job; he doesn’t come to see me; he doesn’t call up here; he doesn’t write me,” Brianna said. “And I don’t know where he lives, so I don’t write him, either.”

  At fifteen, Brianna had been in all sorts of trouble, but was especially given to truancy and lying. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night and steal food out of the refrigerator,” she said. “And I would always tell my grandmother, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me’—when there wasn’t no one else it could be.” At fourteen, Brianna started running away; she would sit in a park at night until someone came along and invited her home for a meal. “Just random people,” she said. “Some of ’em couldn’t have kids—and always wanted a kid. So I was their kid for that time.” She also hung out with drug dealers and with homeless people. “I just don’t like to be told to do something that I don’t want to do.”

  Brianna was in for assault, and when she was angry, she was terrifying. “I had one assault here,” she told me. “At Harbor Shelter, I assaulted their director. At St. Joe’s, I assaulted staff. At St. Croix, I assaulted the director and staff there.” There was something eerie about the calm way she listed these offenses. “I want to be a chef or a plumber,” she went on, as though this sentence were contiguous with the last. “If I don’t find a job right away, I’ll be crocheting things to sell—instead of selling drugs, which I did, but it’s too much drama. I crocheted two shirts already, and a hat, and I’m working on a purse.”

  Brianna’s grandmother was at a loss over how to deal with her. “Since I got locked up, we talk more about personal things,” Brianna said. “I’ve been telling her things that I wouldn’t usually, like about getting raped—let’s see—two different times. When I was three, by the neighbor; when I was thirteen, by my ex-boyfriend.” Brianna’s grandmother had suggested Brianna join Job Corps. Despite Brianna’s disinclination to live with her grandmother, this proposal hurt her feelings. “I was wondering why she didn’t want me home once I’m out of here—if she loved me anymore,” Brianna said. But then she added, “I wish my grandma didn’t love me so much and would just leave me alone and stop interfering.” To wish for and resent parental love is a familiar adolescent paradox, but Brianna seemed completely unaware of any incongruity in her statements.

  • • •

  Clearly, a confused relationship to reality can enable criminal behavior—but so, too, can depression. Jackson Simpson shares his mother’s depressive tendency, but whereas she has manifested the illness through withdrawal and drinking, he has manifested it through failure and aggression. Jackson told me that he’d always “had an interest for people who were depressed,” and he thought a lot about his mother’s diagnosis, but he couldn’t seem to see that it might also apply to himself.

  Jackson joined a gang when he was in the fifth grade and “ended up selling drugs, using drugs, carrying guns,” he said, “stealing, robbing—everything you could pretty much name. I wasn’t raised like that. I knew it was wrong, but after you do it for a while, you actually like it.” He had committed the felony assault that landed him inside, however, only after he failed to make the basketball team at his school; his life’s dream was to be a basketball star, but his school required that players have a minimum grade point average, and his was too low. He was so distraught that he dropped out; he eventually enrolled elsewhere, but he never bounced back. Earlier deeds had earned him probation, but following the basketball debacle, he fell into serious trouble. “He knew it was his fault and he was angry at himself about it,” his mother, Alexa, said. “The self-esteem got real low. When you’re in court every other month? And you’re still doing things that you know are wrong? To me, that’s a form of depression.”

  Six months after the basketball incident, Jackson was arrested on charges of assaulting someone. He
was eighteen, and they planned to try him as an adult. Jackson finally gave a confession as a way to get a plea bargain, and he was sentenced to time in the Home School. “I knew it was making my mother’s depression worse,” he said. “In court she’d just be crying. Could barely even walk—had to have my dad help her in the courtroom. You could just see it in her face. They was so disappointed.”

  Alexa said, “I started drinking. I’m on antidepressants now.” Jackson’s depression likewise remained acute and carried with it an intense disaffection. His appetite and sleep were dysregulated; he was unable to imagine future plans. “I love my parents,” he said. “But I’ve always thought I was adopted, because growing up, I felt like nobody could ever relate to me. I didn’t even understand myself. That’s how different I felt. And I still do.” Jackson’s error carried its own punishment. What he had done to his mother and how he had disappointed himself—these things caused him so much pain that his confinement to a jail cell was merely secondary. He was alone in ways more profound than any physical lock and key could enforce.

  • • •

  The public endlessly debates what children and teenagers who have broken the law deserve and don’t deserve: drug treatment, adult sentencing, mental health care, etc. Yet juvenile justice in the United States is largely a story of gross abuses. In 2003, an article in the New York Times described Mississippi’s juvenile detention system: “Boys and girls were routinely hogtied, shackled to poles or locked in restraint chairs for hours for minor infractions like talking in the cafeteria or not saying, ‘Yes sir.’” A lawsuit brought against the operators of one center said, “Toilets and walls are covered with mold, rust, and excrement. Insects have infested the facility, and the smell of human excrement permeates the entire building. Children frequently have to sleep on thin mats that smell of urine and mold.” Many children claimed to have been assaulted by guards; many were locked in their cells for twenty-three hours every day; infections caused by filthy conditions were rampant. Suicidal girls in Mississippi prisons have been stripped and put on lockdown in isolation cells with no light or window, and only a drain in the floor.

  Another Times story reveals that in California’s juvenile facilities “youths in solitary confinement are often fed what officials call ‘blender meals,’ in which a bologna sandwich, an apple, and a carton of milk are pulverized and fed to the inmate by straw through a slit in the cell door.” A state review showed the California juvenile prison system to be “a dysfunctional jumble of antiquated facilities, under-trained employees, and endemic violence that fails even in its most fundamental task of providing safety.” The US Attorney General’s office found in Nevada that staffers were “punching boys in the chest, kicking their legs, shoving them against lockers and walls, slapping youths in the face, and smashing youths’ heads in doors” and subjecting them to “verbal abuse in which their race, family, physical appearance and stature, intelligence, or perceived sexual orientation were aggressively attacked.” A report by the Florida Inspectors General described how staff at a juvenile facility stood by as a seventeen-year-old begged for help and slowly died of a ruptured appendix. The list could go on and on. Joseph Califano has said, “We have fifty-one different systems of juvenile injustice with no national standards of practice or accountability.” The abuse in the juvenile justice system is commensurate with the corrupting nature of its absolute power.

  To immerse myself in the worldviews of juvenile prisoners, I took a position advising a theater project at the Hennepin County Home School. The school’s ethos is not representative, which is why I chose it; Minnesota is known for its strong focus on rehabilitative programs. With a population of mostly recidivist felons and a particularly strong program for underage sex offenders, the Home School presumes that punishment is accomplished by the lack of freedom accorded to inmates. The well-kept campus houses about 120 juvenile felons at a time, with 167 acres of grounds and a staff who help inmates understand their emotional lives as a means to contain their destructiveness. It offers full high school classroom work, with particularly strong arts and athletics programs; the name was chosen so that prospective employers would perceive the graduates without prejudice. It also provides intensive individual, group, and family therapy, as well as a special program for substance abusers. In some ways, it felt less like a prison than like a boot-camp boarding school; one inmate complained, “They want you to think all day. I’d rather be breaking up rocks or shit.” Some of the kids keep up friendships with staff after they leave; some return to visit the place, nostalgic alumni of their own punishment. Many express ambitions to go to college; though few follow through, the desire reflects the optimism with which they have been treated. Let it not be supposed, however, that it is all talk therapy and crafts. Freedom of movement is constrained; even using the bathroom requires permission. When necessary, units are put on lockdown, and inmates are placed under harsh restraints. Outbreaks of violence, although usually quickly contained, are not uncommon.

  The play I worked on with a group of twenty residents and several supervising adults was intended to awaken them to their capacity for accomplishment, and to teach them a better way to express their pain. Cynics decry such programs as incompatible with punishment, but giving wayward kids insight into how to build a better life benefits the society at large. Habits of ruthlessness had made the inmates’ own hearts obscure to them. The director of the theater program, Stephen DiMenna, composed an affecting monologue for a broken chair and asked the kids which emotions he was expressing. The kids came up with “mad” and “resentful” and “weak” and “angry,” but it took them twenty minutes to think of “sad,” an alien concept to this roomful of sad people.

  The Home School uses family therapy to resolve conflicts between inmates and their parents, to coach offenders on how to interact at home, and to train parents to exercise more effective control. Such methods may be crucial to breaking the kids out of a criminal identity, and to helping their parents see that their children’s problems are not immutable. “I show these parents how to encourage their kids,” said Terry Bach, one of the resident case managers. “These kids are just thirsty for praise. No matter how tough they seem, they need, they want, that.”

  The post-Freudian notion that all flaws are based in family relations is out of favor. It remains common, however, to blame an abusive childhood environment for the rate of juvenile crime, and certainly criminality can be the upshot of fear, loneliness, hatred, and neglect. I met parents of offenders who were preoccupied with their own problems or who seemed unacquainted with the usual rules of love, people who witnessed their children’s pain without the slightest disturbance of their own mood. Some parents were criminal themselves and couldn’t imagine or didn’t value a different life. Some were hooked on substances. Others were so mired in poverty that they thought survival justified any means. Some were so angry at their children that affection seemed to have closed up shop, and some were acutely depressed. Many had given up on children they felt incompetent to help.

  Some kids laughed when I asked how their parents felt about their incarceration. “Why the fuck would they even care? I’m in here, they don’t gotta pay no bills for me,” one inmate snarled. Others had no idea where their parents were. One said, “I’d love to have parents who hate me, like everyone here complains about, instead of just not having parents at all.” Another said, “When I get outta here, I’m gonna find my mom and tell her I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused her, and then maybe she’s gonna love me, if anyone can.” When a female staff member addressed one inmate affectionately as “son,” he said tartly, “I don’t have no mama and no woman ever called me son and you ain’t gonna be the one to start.” One said, “I’m so homesick all the time—which is weird, ’cause I have no home.”

  But this popular narrative of abuse and neglect was not the most common one. Even if they couldn’t cope or were narcissistic, most of the parents I met in researching this chapter loved their kids. Most kn
ew that it would serve their children’s interests to avoid crime—or at least to avoid punishment. Some were afraid of their own children. Many engaged in self-criticism and voiced a wish to make up for past deficits. Staff told me that some parents who seem attentive when their kids are in prison disengage once those kids are released; they can’t act on love once a formal structure for it is removed. Even among those who loved well, affection often did not seem to keep regular company with insight. Nonetheless, love is among the good medicines for crime and anger. A broken family is still a family, and a broken home, still a home.

  The relationship between kids in the justice system and their parents usually follows one of four tracks. The parents may abandon the child when he goes to prison, which may lead the child to feel lonely, lost, isolated, and desperate. The parents may abandon the child, which may prompt the child to take responsibility for himself or herself. The parents may remain or become deeply involved with the child, making the child feel that a bright future is possible. The parents may remain or become deeply involved with the child, reinforcing antisocial behavior by creating a permissive atmosphere of denial.