Back then, California’s juvenile facilities were notoriously harsh, violent, dilapidated, dull, and overcrowded, with young wards routinely subjected to solitary confinement, and some forced to exercise and attend classes while locked in cages. Use of physical force and psychotropic drugs was rampant. Violence hung about the place like a bad smell. Classes were frequently canceled due to a shortage of teachers. Jobs were hard to come by, and vocational programs were minimal. Correctional officers had the power to punish young inmates by adding time to their sentences, with the result that California juveniles were locked up almost three times longer than the national average. Even once they were released, California youths seemed unable to escape from the prisons’ grasp. More than 80 percent returned to state custody within three years of getting out.
A 2003 lawsuit, Farrell vs. Harper, led to wholesale reform. “This is not a system that needs tinkering around the edges, this is a system that is broken almost everywhere you look,” a panel of state-approved correctional experts concluded in 2006. Later that year, the panel issued a plan for the complete restructuring of California’s juvenile facilities.
It took time—and continual pressure from reformers—to implement the plan. But in fewer than ten years, California’s juvenile facilities went from being some of the worst in the nation to some of the best. “They don’t throw people in the hole very much, the violence is way down, the satisfaction of the staff and the kids is way up,” says Don Specter, executive director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, which filed the original lawsuit in 2002 and has been tracking the state’s progress ever since. “It’s a totally different place.”
Instead of focusing exclusively on punishing bad behavior, staff now track and reward good behavior. Youths get “positive checks” for complying with the rules, but also for using the interpersonal skills necessary to do well on the outside—skills like asking for help or talking through a conflict. Behave well all day and you can stay an hour later in the common areas instead of having to return to your room at eight p.m. Do well all week and you snag candy, chips, or soda from the “incentive locker.” A month of good behavior wins you an invitation to a pizza or nacho party. And if you do well for long enough, you can apply for a weeklong stay in one of two “incentive rooms,” cells that have been converted into mini–man caves, with DirecTV, video game consoles, comfy, colorful bedding, and—of crucial importance in stiflingly hot Stockton—a fan.
RISKY THINKING
“Let me ask you,” Ricky Lindsey said. “Do you have risky thoughts going on throughout your day?”
Lindsey, a parole agent at Chad, was addressing Richard and a half dozen other young men in a small meeting room inside Chad’s Feather Hall, the living quarters for the facility’s lowest-risk, best-behaving youths. It was late afternoon. The young inmates had completed school and work for the day. Now they had just one more obligation before dinner—CounterPoint, a cognitive-behavioral program designed to teach problem-solving and perspective-taking.
“Fear of getting in trouble,” offered a young man in a white T-shirt. He tipped his chair back against the whiteboard behind him. The room, bare except for an easel, wasn’t much larger than a walk-in closet. Richard sat quietly, elbows on his knees, listening.
“What would get you in trouble, though?” Lindsey asked. He was a genial fireplug of a man who spoke informally, like someone from the neighborhood.
“Like, behavior.”
“What kind of behavior gets you in trouble?”
“Anger.”
“What makes you angry?”
“Rage.”
“What makes you rageful? Come on.”
“Disrespect.”
“When you feel disrespected, how does that make you feel?”
“It hurts.”
“It hurts? What does it make you want to think?”
“My feelings be like wanting me to react,” the young man said.
“Justification?” another youth offered. He had short hair, and his confident manner signaled that he’d been around awhile.
“Why would that go to risky thinking?”
“Most people don’t think before they act,” the youth with glasses explained. “I think, but with that thinking I still try to justify what I’m going to do. I’m a little stubborn with my thinking.”
Lindsey nodded as if to say, Now we’re getting there.
“Risky thinking,” he said. “All of you are here for a reason, right? I’m going to say that all of you are here because of some risky thoughts you had. Maybe I shouldn’t have went to the store that night. Maybe I shouldn’t have jacked that guy that night. Maybe I shouldn’t have had a fight with that guy that night. Right? Maybe I shouldn’t have had that pistol on me that night. Right? Just sayin’.”
“Or is it because you didn’t think about it?” another kid suggested. He wore a black windbreaker and had a sardonic edge to him.
“It could be,” Lindsey agreed. “Other guys be under the influence. Not being fully aware of your surroundings can be risky thinking because you’re not in your right state of mind. How do you know it’s a risky thought?”
“Doubt,” said a youth whose hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, his eyes on Lindsey.
“Doubt,” Lindsey repeated. “Explain.”
“When your conscience tells you it’s bad, you know you ain’t supposed to do it.”
“Your conscience,” Lindsey said. “That little angel and that little devil.”
“And you listen to the bad one,” the ponytailed kid said. “The good one is the one you’re supposed to listen to. The good one is the one that’s basically—that’s you.”
“The good one is giving you that gut feeling,” offered the kid with the black-framed glasses.
“He’s saying, ‘You sure that’s the right thing to do?’” Lindsey agreed. “So you got a good dude and a bad dude, which one are you going to listen to?”
“I think I got two bad dudes,” said the boy in the black windbreaker. He grinned.
Lindsey laughed. “It’s different for everybody.” He handed out a sheet of paper listing different kinds of risky thinking. “‘Overgeneralizing.’ What’s that?”
“‘You always blame it on me,’” the kid with the glasses said, playing the role of the overgeneralizer. “‘Staff’s always trying to get me. You always give me negative checks.’”
Lindsey nodded. “There you go.” He ran through some other categories. “Catastrophizing”—that was one kid’s grandma, always sure the worst was going to happen. “Desperate and Deserving”?
“You’re like, ‘I need this,’ or ‘I have a right to this,’” somebody offered.
“Uh-oh,” Lindsey said.
“Sort of entitlement,” someone else suggested. “‘Man, why can’t I ever have this?’”
“Ah.” Lindsey raised his eyebrows, asking for more.
“‘Ain’t I a good person? Don’t I deserve to have this? Man, I’ve been working this job for five years. I still don’t have this?’”
A discussion ensued. Was “Desperate and Deserving” just a way that poor people thought?
“Rich people can’t be ‘Desperate and Deserving’—what are you talking about?” one kid scoffed.
“They can be hella rich and they can be like, ‘I deserve to have a wife’ and you start to feel hella bad for yourself,” the ponytailed kid said. “Like some people got so much money, but they don’t have nobody.”
“Yeah, but I’d rather be them than be here,” the sardonic kid said. He folded his arms across his chest.
Everybody nodded.
PROGRESS REPORT
Sasha stood in the hallway outside Department 11, wearing a vest, button-up shirt, and bow tie paired with a long skirt and ballet flats. Over their shoulder they had slung a canvas purse decorated with pins. LGBTQ class of 2018, read one. Another said simply: they/them/their. They’d cut their hair short and shaved it on one
side. The ends were dyed fluorescent pink.
Debbie and Karl stood beside Sasha. They too were dressed in their courtroom best: a purple jersey dress for Debbie; pleated slacks, a pink checkered shirt, and a tie for Karl. Karl had topped his outfit with his outback hat, the same one he’d used to cover Sasha the day Sasha was burned.
It was the last Friday in June 2015. The family had come to court for Richard’s second progress report—the one that would determine whether he was eligible for resentencing. Richard had passed the first hurdle with flying colors. He’d had no disciplinary violations and the staff at Chad had described him as motivated to participate in treatment programs and remorseful about his crime. If his second progress report was equally positive, he could be resentenced to five years instead of seven.
The elevator opened and Jasmine stepped out, wearing jeans and high-tops and a black-and-white shawl-collared jacket. She hugged all three members of Sasha’s family and took a seat, exhaling sharply. The strain was gone from her face and she was smiling, but she was tired too, having recently taken on a second job. After completing her shift at the convalescent home, she now worked a four-hour shift at the supermarket, often not getting off work until one a.m. Every Sunday, she drove three hours round-trip to visit Richard.
Getting the time off to come to court hadn’t been easy. Her boss had turned down her request, but she had managed to quietly trade shifts with a co-worker. Now there was another problem. Richard’s court file had somehow been misplaced, which meant that the judge couldn’t review the record. The case would have to be continued until the following week. Jasmine’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t get more time off,” she whispered.
She kept talking for a moment, but then her voice trailed off. “I’m smiling, but I’m crying inside,” she admitted. She was cycling through the options in her mind—how could she get there? Who else could come?
The case file mishap wasn’t just a problem for Jasmine. Sasha’s family wanted to address the court, but they were leaving for vacation the next day. They wouldn’t be around next week.
After some discussion, Judge Delucchi agreed to let them make their statement. He beckoned Karl to the front of the room.
The parties now stood before the judge like a couple standing before the altar—Karl with deputy district attorney Scott Ford at his side, Richard with Bill Du Bois. In the year and a half since it all began, Richard had grown taller than Du Bois, his shoulders broader. He watched Karl, his expression neutral.
Karl cleared his throat and unfolded a sheet of paper.
“I am speaking on behalf of my wife, Debbie ____, and our child, Sasha ——. Thank you for the opportunity to have our voices heard,” he began. The courtroom fell silent.
“In the week following the fire on the bus, Richard ____ wrote two letters to Sasha, in which he took full responsibility for his actions, and asked for forgiveness. Unfortunately, it took fourteen months for those letters to reach us. When we finally read them, we were moved to tears. The letters gave us a clearer picture of who Richard is, and we wished we had been able to see them before Debbie spoke at the sentencing hearing.”
As he listened, Richard’s jaw worked, the muscles tensing and relaxing. His lips pulled to one side.
“I believe Richard when he says he meant no bodily harm to Sasha,” Karl continued. “But I also believe that Sasha would not have been a target if Sasha had been wearing jeans.” He described how other kids on the bus had laughed even as Sasha’s clothes went up in flames. “We wish for Richard and those other kids to learn empathy towards those who are different. We hope that there are programs in juvenile detention that can at least help Richard with this, and that he can become an ally who will stand up against the bullying and hatred of gay and trans people.”
It was so quiet in the courtroom that you could hear the flutter of Karl’s breath as he tried to steady his voice.
“From the start we have been opposed to Richard’s being tried as an adult,” he said. “His actions appear to have been impulsive, immature, and unpremeditated. He did make a big mistake and recognizes that. He asked for our forgiveness.” Karl’s voice broke. “Sasha, Debbie, and I have forgiven Richard,” he whispered. “We hope the state will focus more on preparing him for the world beyond incarceration than on punishing him.”
When Karl raised his eyes from the paper clenched in his hands, he saw Richard watching him.
Thank you, Richard mouthed.
At the back of the courtroom, the Ladies were red-eyed and sniffling.
“Given that the sentence allows the court a pretty fair amount of discretion, I do not take your words lightly,” Judge Delucchi said. Then he continued the case to the following Tuesday.
A LEVEL OF MATURITY
“The record should reflect that the court has read the fairly voluminous records that have been provided,” Judge Delucchi said when Richard returned to court the next week.
It was a positive report, the judge noted. Richard was attending school, participating in treatment, and had expressed interest in getting a job at the facility. He hadn’t had any disciplinary actions. The staff noted that he was reserved and quiet and tended to keep to himself, but they commended him for limiting his interactions “so that he is not drawn into too much negativity.”
All in all, Delucchi told Richard, the report indicated “a level of maturity that you didn’t exhibit on the day of the offense.” In addition, he continued, “[Sasha’s] family has made it clear what their position is, and that should be considered.”
With that, he modified Richard’s sentence from seven years to five years. With credit for time served, he would be out just before his twenty-first birthday. It was his recommendation that Richard serve the totality of that time in the juvenile system.
Jasmine’s boss had given her the day off to attend the hearing. When it was over, she stood smiling in the hallway, looking slightly dazed.
“It’s still a long time,” she said. “Three years.”
She had spent the weekend with her cousin Regis, attending the San Francisco LGBT Pride celebration. Now she was planning to take advantage of the rare day off and do some errands. First on the list: wash her car.
“It’s such a release,” she said in the elevator. She leaned her head back against the wall and raised her eyes to the ceiling before correcting herself. “Relief.”
ANDREW AND THE BINARY
Five months after Richard was sentenced, Andrew and Sasha got together for dinner at a Latin American café in Berkeley. They hadn’t seen each other much over the previous couple years, but now Sasha was in town for winter break and they were getting together for the second time in as many weeks. They’d already had that initial “What are you up to these days?” conversation, and over dinner they just talked, the way they used to, about the world and what it was and what it should be. They talked about revolution vs. reform and anarchism vs. socialism, and Andrew was struck, as he always had been, by the way Sasha carefully considered things instead of just echoing the opinions of other people.
Andrew was eighteen now. His glasses were rimless at the bottom; his nose pierced at the septum. He identified as a gay man. Few people knew his trans status—he kept it on the down low.
Yet when straight men treated him like a bro, he felt a familiar sense of disorientation. “For how vehemently I felt like I wasn’t a girl, I have to say, being a boy isn’t super great either,” he admitted. “Both sides have such bullshit baggage attached to them.”
If being a man meant always having to act confident and never being able to admit feeling sadness or self-doubt, it was just as much of a trap as being a woman was. He was happier now than he’d been before he transitioned, but he still yearned for something else, some place outside of gender.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m starting to identify a little bit as—I don’t even know the word I want to use yet. I like androgynous. I like genderqueer.”
What held him back? Fear. Fear
of other people’s judgments, their questions, their hostility, their fascination.
“Because I fall neatly within the binary, I feel comfortable right now,” he explained. “But if I were to radically shift my appearance in a way that was more androgynous, I don’t know how comfortable that would be for me. I mean, I’ve already been asked enough questions about my genitals. I’m just done with that.”
BIRTHDAYS
Richard turned eighteen in Alameda County Juvenile Hall, just before being transferred back to Chad. Individual birthdays aren’t celebrated in Juvenile Hall, so it was a day exactly like any other day. Richard was used to that by now. He hadn’t spent a birthday at home since he’d turned fourteen. His fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and now eighteenth birthdays had all been spent locked up.
Back at Chad, Richard earned his high school diploma and then began taking vocational classes, earning certificates in programs like Irrigation Design and Forklift Driving. He worked in the barbershop for a while, then got a job working for Free Venture, an environmentally certified nonprofit that refurbishes and recycles e-waste on-site. At Free Venture he earned $9.70 an hour, which allowed him to start paying off the $2,100 he’d been fined as part of his plea bargain, and also deposit money into a savings account for his eventual release. It was one of the best jobs at the facility, and one of the hardest to get, but Richard was doing exceptionally well. He had already attained Incentive Level A, the highest incentive level a young inmate could achieve, and he was housed among other low-risk youths in a hall where the atmosphere was generally relaxed. In the evenings kids watched TV or played Ping-Pong and dominoes in the dayroom, or settled in to make phone calls at one of the two pay phones.
Richard held himself a bit aloof—slow to trust, slow to warm. He didn’t smile much. Each night, he returned to a six-by-eight-foot cell with a metal sink and toilet. On his desk, he kept a Bible, some folded paper crafts, and a television he had purchased with money he’d earned at Free Venture. Neat rows of family snapshots were taped to the wall. All the people he loved the most, bright-eyed, grinning, frozen in time.
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