According to Nell Bernstein’s new book, Burning Down![2014.8.12.BookCover.Main[1]](http://humaneexposures.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2014.8.12.BookCover.Main1_.jpg)
the House, 66,332 young people currently are confined in juvenile facilities, two-thirds of them in long-term placement. Her book focuses on the criminalization of American young people, from the mid-80s when the trend first exploded, to the present day when the United States incarcerates more of its kids than any other industrialized nation.
Bernstein argues that juvenile facilities wouldn’t be able to stay open if it weren’t for a massive, media-induced misconception of youth violence. Beginning in the mid-1980s, stories of youth criminalization ran rampant through US newswires. A 1996 study conducted by the Berkeley Media Studies Group found that more than half of local news stories about young people at the time focused on violence.
The number of incarcerated children has decreased greatly since that study came out – 41% since the rate of juvenile incarceration hit its peak in 1995 – and the common misconception now is that the issue of youth confinement has been dealt with, but the stench of garbage reporting from decades past still lingers. Certain kids (read “black,” “brown,” “homeless,” “drug addicted,” “LGBT”) are still violent outliers who most people and many media believe belong behind bars. If this narrative isn’t corrected, there’s no reason why things won’t get worse instead of better.
Bernstein writes:
As things stand, the recent drop in juvenile incarceration looks more like a stock market correction than a revolution: the current number of youth in confinement is almost identical to that in the mid-1980s, right before that era’s pendulum swing swept thousands more youth behind bars.
“Racism drives the juvenile justice system at every level, from legislation to policing to sentencing to conditions of confinement and enforcement to parole.
Police arrest nearly 2 million juveniles every year, and Black teenagers are arrested at five times the rate of white teenagers, Latino teenagers two to three times more often than white teenagers.
The myth that young people are imprisoned almost exclusively for violent crimes bolsters the argument that children of color deserve to be ripped from their communities and placed in detention centers. Actually, while juvenile violent crime has decreased over the past 15 years, locking up kids for minor offenses has become much more prevalent, thanks to longer sentencing, three-strikes laws, electronic monitoring, drug testing and other harsh tactics of the criminal justice system.
In 2010, only one-in-four incarcerated youngsters were charged for violent crimes, while 40% were doing time for low-level offenses like drug possession, violation of probation and public-order offenses. This category of child offenders also includes those charged with crimes that only kids can be charged for, like alcohol possession and truancy.
The statistic Bernstein believes should outrage every person in this country: African-American youth with no prior convictions are 48 times more likely than white youth with similar histories to be incarcerated for drug offenses! Given that incarcerating a child is the best predictor of whether he or she will be imprisoned as an adult, such facilities are not only complicit in institutional racism, but they use the bodies of children to perpetuate it. You’ve got to break more than a few good eggs to keep the prison-industrial complex fed.
Bernstein’s book is also hard-hitting and heartbreaking in its exploration of child abuse within juvenile facilities. In 2010, The Department of Justice’s Review Panel on Prison Rape found that 12% of juvenile inmates had been sexually abused at least once while in prison – and that rate of sexual abuse is higher in juvenile facilities than in adult prisons. The vast majority of girls in juvenile detention – 73% – have a history of physical and sexual violence before they disappear behind the prison walls.
Solitary confinement is widely used in juvenile facilities nationwide, although it sometimes goes by other names like “protective custody” and “reflection cottages.” Incredibly, stripping children naked and hog-tying them before throwing them in administrative segregation is still practiced in some places. Also is not uncommon for a child to be administered psychotropic drugs, often to deal with mental maladies that tend to arise when a young mind spends days, weeks or months in complete isolation.
Bernstein truly believes in the abolition of juvenile facilities, exhorting us:
Raze the buildings, free the children and begin anew!
Bernstein also has harsh words for so-called “treatment-based models” such as Red Wing in Minnesota and OH Close Youth Correctional Facility in California. Althiugh undeniably nicer than the average juvenile facility, these treatment centers still use solitary confinement frequently and are still in fact prisons, despite throwing the word “boutique” around with some abandon. Bernstein instead advocates for a combination of therapeutic methods in which kids either work with their families and therapists at their own home or in their therapist’s office or are placed with trained foster families for a period of up to nine months.
