Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Love is not only an intuition but also a skill. Therapeutic prison programs such as the Home School’s provide structure and momentum for reflection, via group sessions, diaries, and letter-writing. Having a child at the Home School also provides learning opportunities for the child’s parents. Prison defines parameters for affection that are easier for some people than the unmapped, everyday world. You come on visiting day. You stay the whole time. You bring in those sneakers or help hold on to the girlfriend by treating her as part of your family. These obvious, concrete actions do not depend on sustaining a mood, which many people of short temper and shifting emotion find difficult. People who cannot achieve constancy from minute to minute can sometimes sustain it once a week. A valid trust—“my parents said they would come on visiting day and they did”—was nearly revelatory for many prisoners. In some cases, this support vanished when the child was released, but in others it functioned as training wheels: by the time the child’s sentence was up, the parents were ready to perform their roles with new confidence and skill, unassisted.

  Ideally, a juvenile’s reintegration into the family can also be a mirroring of his or her pending reintegration into society at large. The first time I attended family visiting day at the Department of Community Corrections of Hennepin County, I was talking to two boys who seemed to be in much the same situation. They were the same age, had similar sentences, and were being released at about the same time. I soon learned, however, that the parents of one had traveled two hours to show up for every court date, every family counseling session, and every visiting hour; the boy’s mother had already lined up a construction job for his release. The other boy halfheartedly joined in with his friend’s family because his own middle-class, educated family, who lived less than two miles from the facility, never came. These two inmates were being released into different worlds.

  I visited Castington, a high-security prison near Newcastle in the north of England, and found it more traditional and physically shabbier than the Home School. In Minnesota, staff would always tell the residents that they were under no obligation to talk to me. At Castington, I was invited to observe procedures and was present, for example, when new arrivals were strip-searched. The English inmates had not achieved the self-knowledge, or even the illusion of self-knowledge, that characterized their Home School counterparts. Frank Buckland, in prison for slashing the face of his cousin’s boyfriend, seemed daunted by his approaching release date. “I’ve got the violence pretty well under control in here,” Frank said; he had in fact been a model prisoner. “But I want to go out like the other blokes, have a drink, meet some girls. I don’t know whether I’ll go violent again.” He spoke of his future character as though it were a mystery beyond his control. “We’ll just have to wait and see,” his mother echoed helplessly. The young people at the Home School were taught to begin thinking about, and planning for, what they were going to do on the outside; in contrast, I didn’t meet a single Castington inmate who had any idea what he wanted to do with his life after his release.

  Reflections on the future from inside a prison are fantasies of sorts, but the coherence and hopefulness of any particular fantasy has considerable bearing on the inmate’s ability to turn his or her life around after prison. That Krishna spent his steak dinner with me extolling the virtues of gang life was a bad sign—just as Karina’s using her boyfriend’s murder as a reason to complete her GED was a promising one. The Home School provides a step-down program in which inmates are slowly returned to the world with supportive services. Terry Bach said, “I’ve had parents who feel comfortable calling me if something goes wrong after the kid gets out.” Karina had remained close to her favorite correctional officer and had turned to her for advice from time to time. The injection of humanity into these relationships is enormously productive.

  • • •

  For most horizontal identities, the issue of collective innocence is central; the heart-tugging argument is that disabled children do not deserve to be castigated. Here, we deal with guilty children and, in some cases, with parents who have grossly erred. Yet many of these families have also been marginalized and brutalized, emotionally and economically isolated, depressed, and frustrated. I kept meeting parents who wanted to help their kids but didn’t have the knowledge or means to do so effectively; like the parents of disabled children, they couldn’t access the social services to which they were ostensibly entitled. Heaping opprobrium on these parents exacerbates a problem we could instead resolve. We deny the reality of their lives not only at the expense of our humanity but also at our personal peril.

  Criminality appears to be more subject to resolve than many other conditions. No one can will his way out of Down syndrome, but some people can walk away from a criminal past. They usually require enormous supports to do so. Research on preventing crime has hatched a panoply of effective solutions, but we ignore most, writing off vast sectors of our society. While nearly three-quarters of people working with juvenile delinquents believe effective ways exist to treat the problem, only 3 to 6 percent believe that the juvenile courts are helping. Our lack of sympathy for these pariah children keeps successful treatment out of their reach. Aside from the common prejudice that therapeutic interventions are excessively soft on the criminal, the justification for withholding such treatments is often that they are ineffective and exorbitantly expensive. Neither justification has merit. The cost of jailing a minor ranges from about $20,000 to $65,000 per year. Prisons with more programs experience less violence, which reduces some expenses, but the major financial benefit lies in curtailed recidivism. A crime gives rise to enormous knock-on costs, including loss of property, trial expenses, health-care costs from injury, and psychological liabilities sustained by frightened victims. Joseph Califano, head of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, said, “Treatment and accountability are complementary rather than mutually exclusive objectives.”

  In a meta-analysis of 163 studies, William R. Shadish, professor of psychology at the University of California, Merced, demonstrated that family interventions are the most productive ones; another meta-analysis concluded, “The use of family and parenting interventions can result in a significant reduction in time spent in institutions such as prison and detention centers by juvenile delinquents.” As with autism or Down syndrome, early intervention brings the best results. The 2001 US Surgeon General’s report on youth violence confirmed that prenatal home visits to teach parenting skills to expectant mothers can reduce juvenile crime. Such programs are most effective when they are followed up; one researcher likened the approach to the dental model, in which regular maintenance is required to ensure good health—not the vaccination model, in which a single early-childhood action can prevent disease.

  An impatient society wants treatment to be more targeted, so most family programs do not set in until at-risk children are older and address only the families of known offenders. These therapies are mostly known by abbreviations: BPT, FFT, MST, SFT, BSFT, MFGI, FAST, FET, TFC. Most draw on cognitive/behavioral models; parents learn how to be consistent, fair, and emotionally open; children learn how to identify their feelings, manage their anger, and communicate better. Together, kids and parents improve conflict-resolution skills. Some therapies also deal with practical matters such as helping families to get adequate housing, food, and clothing. Some put children into model foster-care environments and then bring the biological family to observe the foster family as a prelude to returning the child to them.

  Alan Kazdin and his team at the Yale Parenting Center advocate disciplinary measures that are not associated with violence or fear; altering the home correctional system can steer young people clear of the state one. One study posited that a behavioral-communication approach could reduce recidivism by half. Another showed that kids on probation in a control group were almost ten times more likely to reoffend than similar kids who participated in family therapy. Another reported that institutionalized delinquents who received fam
ily therapy in prison had a recidivism rate of 60 percent, compared to a Sisyphean 93 percent rate for those who didn’t. At-risk children whose families received no early therapy were 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime before they turned eighteen than those whose families had received such therapy. These statistics have had little effect on how we deal with juvenile crime. Only one of ten juvenile prisons uses family therapies, and only about a quarter of these do so consistently. We rail against the atrocities perpetrated by kids, but we consistently choose the satisfaction of retribution over the efficacy of prevention.

  Basic family interventions, in approximate terms, can run anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000 per family served. The HighScope Perry Preschool Project showed that for new mothers deemed to be at risk, every $1 spent on treatment saved $7 in later costs—a number that didn’t even take into account the positive economic contributions of this nonoffending population. While California’s “three strikes” law has a cost per serious crime prevented of $16,000, and parole comes in at just under $14,000, parent training has a cost per serious crime prevented of just $6,351. Extremely good results have been shown for relatively inexpensive graduation incentives that keep kids in school. The Perry Project suggests that failing to intervene with at-risk low-income families with children under five in the United States may cost us as much as $400 billion. But while money spent on deterrence this year may vastly reduce prison expenses a decade down the line, it’s hard to apply this equivalence to a line-item budget, especially one that needs to pay off within a political term.

  Moral questions loom large in any discussion of such treatments. What message do we convey if we respond to violent crime with therapy? If we opt for less prison time, more crimes will be committed by people who would otherwise have been locked up. Three strikes was designed to reduce adult crime by 25 percent in California—a goal it may or may not have achieved. No preventive or therapeutic program has ever arrived at such ambitious goals. On the other hand, three strikes is scandalously expensive, and the state is on the verge of bankruptcy. We can’t dismantle the justice system or knock out crime with kindness; fire is often needed to fight fire. At the same time, the overwhelming evidence is that punitive justice can be strengthened with therapeutic programs. To discard the prison system in favor of therapeutic interventions would be crazy; but a prison system that is used without therapeutic intervention, as in much of the country today, is at least equally crazy.

  A peculiar arrogance accrues to people who cannot recognize the diversity of human impulses, and who feel superior because they do not lapse into behaviors that don’t tempt them in the first place. People disgusted by sexual predators say smugly that they don’t pursue the sexual favors of children, without acknowledging that they don’t find children sexually attractive. Those who do not tend toward chemical dependency express disdain for addicts; people with small appetites patronize the morbidly obese. A hundred years ago, my homosexuality would have landed me in jail, and I am fortunate to live in a place and an era that allow me to be true to myself. If I’d had to deny my longings, it would have been a different experience from that of straight people who have no such longings to deny. Spending time with criminals, I have seen that while many have poor impulse control or are weak or stupid or destructive, many others are driven by a compulsion. Some manifest enormous courage by refraining from theft although the wish to steal burns in them every minute, and their restraint of demons they cannot eradicate is categorically different from the lawfulness of people who find the idea of thievery distasteful.

  Families of criminals often struggle both to admit that their child has done something destructive, and to continue to love him anyway. Some give up the love; some blind themselves to the bad behavior. The ideal of doing neither of those things borrows from the idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin, but sinners and sins cannot so easily be separated; if human beings love sinners, we love them with their sin. People who see and acknowledge the darkness in those they love, but whose love is only strengthened by that knowledge, achieve that truest love that is eagle-eyed even when the views are bleak. I met one family whose own tragedy had led them to embrace these contradictions more than any other, one mother whose love seemed both infinitely deep and infinitely knowing of a blighted person. Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia’s.

  • • •

  On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, placed bombs in the cafeteria, set to go off during first lunch period at 11:17 a.m., and planned to shoot anyone who tried to flee. Errors in the construction of the detonators prevented the bombs from exploding, but Klebold and Harris nevertheless held the whole school hostage, killing twelve students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. At the time, it was the worst episode of school violence in history. The American Right blamed the collapse of “family values,” while the Left mounted assaults on violence in the movies and sought to tighten gun-control laws. Wholesale critiques of the larger culture were offered as explanation for these inexplicable events.

  The number of people killed that day is generally listed as thirteen, and the Columbine Memorial commemorates only thirteen deaths, as though Klebold and Harris had not also died that day in that place. Contrary to wide speculation then and since, the boys did not come from broken homes and did not have records of criminal violence. The wishful thought of a world that witnessed this horror was that good parenting could prevent children from developing into Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, but malevolence does not always grow in a predictable or accountable manner. As the families of autistics or schizophrenics wonder what happened to the apparently healthy people they knew, other families grapple with children who have turned to horrifying acts and wonder what happened to the innocent children they thought they understood.

  I set out to interview Tom and Sue Klebold with the expectation that meeting them would help to illuminate their son’s actions. The better I came to know the Klebolds, the more deeply mystified I became. Sue Klebold’s kindness (before Dylan’s death, she worked with people with disabilities) would be the answered prayer of many a neglected or abused child, and Tom’s bullish enthusiasm would lift anyone’s tired spirits. Among the many families I’ve met in writing this book, the Klebolds are among those I would be most game to join. Trapped in their own private Oresteia, they learned astonishing forgiveness and empathy. They are victims of the terrifying, profound unknowability of even the most intimate human relationship. It is easier to love a good person than a bad one, but it may be more difficult to lose a bad person you love than a good one. Sue Klebold once said to me, “I watched Rosemary’s Baby the other night and my heart really went out to Rosemary.” When Barbara Walters interviewed the father of one of Dylan’s classmates after the events, he said of the Klebolds, “They’re in a glass cage. And they have no more pieces to this puzzle than anybody else.”

  The last Sue Klebold heard from Dylan, the younger of her two children, was “Bye” as he let the front door slam on his way to school that April 20. In the middle of the day, Tom received a call about the shootings at school and learned that Dylan was a suspect. He called Sue. “I had a sudden vision of what he might be doing,” Sue said. “And so while every other mother in Littleton was praying that her child was safe, I had to pray that mine would die before he hurt anyone else. I thought if this was really happening and he survived, he would go into the criminal justice system and be executed, and I couldn’t bear to lose him twice. I gave the hardest prayer I ever made, that he would kill himself, because then at least I would know that he wanted to die and wouldn’t be left with all the questions I’d have if he got caught by a police bullet. Maybe I was right, but I’ve spent so many hours regretting that prayer: I wished for my son to kill himself, and he did.”

  That night, police told the Klebolds to leave their house—both so the police could turn it inside out, and
for their own safety. “I thought about Dylan being dead,” Sue said, “and I thought, ‘He was young and healthy and maybe he could be an organ donor.’ And then I thought, ‘Would anyone want the organs of a murderer?’ That was my first taste of how the world would see my son.” The Klebolds went to stay with Tom’s sister for four days, returning home on the day of Dylan’s funeral. “We didn’t really know what had happened,” Sue said. “We just knew Dylan was dead, that he’d killed himself, that he was involved with the shooting.”

  As Littleton’s period of mourning began, a carpenter from Illinois erected fifteen crosses on a hillside near the school. “I was so buoyed by this,” Tom said. “I wanted to be a part of the community. And I thought we could all grieve together.” Sue remembered, “There were flowers, and Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses had as many as everyone else’s.” Then the parents of some of the victims destroyed Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses. The youth group at a local church planted fifteen trees, only to have some of the victims’ parents arrive with a press escort to chop down Dylan’s and Eric’s trees. At the high school graduation ceremony a week later, there were encomiums for the victims, but the head of the school told friends of Dylan and Eric to make themselves scarce. Before long, reports referring to the incident started using the number thirteen rather than fifteen. “The shorthand was this,” Tom said. “Thirteen kids died. Two Nazis killed them, and the parents were responsible. It was a lynch mob.” Sue said reflectively, “I think the other parents believed they had experienced loss, and I had not, because their children were of value, and mine was not. My child died, too. He died after making a terrible decision and doing a terrible thing, but he was still my child, and he still died.”

  The Klebolds’ lawyer had advised them not to talk to the press; their silence exacerbated local hostility. “You’d read something, and you couldn’t respond to it,” Tom said. “You knew that it was false, misleading, inflammatory.” Sue said, “It was just like constantly being hit, and being hit again. And you couldn’t fight back.” In an act of agonizing catharsis, Sue handwrote notes to the parents of each child who had died or been injured. Though she did not feel responsible for what had happened, she wanted to mitigate the devastation. “To me, the only way to heal this community was to try to have a one-to-one relationship with each of the victims,” she later explained. “My journey is not complete until I can say to these people, ‘If you ever want to speak to me, I am available to you. I will meet in your home, a pastor’s office, with a mediator if you want. If it would help you to talk to me, I’m here.’” She has never done it, because a counselor cautioned her that by contacting them, she might retraumatize them. “But I cried for their children just as I did for mine,” she said. While the Klebolds faced a great deal of hostility, moments of unusual love also surfaced. “A few weeks after Columbine happened, I got a hug from the checkout clerk at Home Depot,” Tom said. “Neighbors brought us food. And when I took my car in to have a bent wheel fixed, the mechanic said to me, ‘At least you didn’t change your name.’ He respected that.”