Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Why is it so hard for politicians to understand that kids in juvenile detention need treatment not punishment?
Nov 14, 2005 | It's always the toughest kids who surprise you. The loud ones, the ones dancing on the balls of their feet, strutting their stuff to impress the others. This girl was tiny, wiry, with muscled arms and narrow, broomstick wrists. Her ears were crumpled up against her head, no more than tufts of cartilage and skin. And though she'd tried to tug down a few of her matted dreadlocks to cover this defect, most of her hair grew every which way. She would not shut up.
Not that the other girls in the Juvenile Hall classroom were particularly quiet. There were a few girls so sunk in their misery that they could not even be bothered to lob insults across the aisle. But the loud ones made enough noise for everyone. Still, considering everything, they were remarkably restrained, even respectful of the nervous white lady standing up in front of the class, holding a copy of her book and trying to get them excited about doing some "writing exercises."
Except for that one girl. The only thing that worked with her was lying.
I borrowed an exercise from "What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers," by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, and told the girls three stories. "Two of these stories are lies," I told them. "One of them is true. My job is to make all three so convincing that you can't tell the difference. Your job is to figure it out."
I told them a story of sashaying down the street in a new dress, thinking I was the bomb, and only figuring out when I got into my car and burned myself on the baking leather seat that I'd tucked my skirt up into my panties and walked three blocks with my rear end hanging out for everyone to see. The second story was about pushing my son over speed bumps in his stroller, and accidentally sending him crashing onto the asphalt, where he broke one of his perfect lower teeth. The third story was more their style. It described a night at Au Bar in New York, when I danced the night away with Heavy D.
The girls in Juvie loved those stories. It cracked them up to imagine my big butt hanging out there in the wind. They were disgusted to hear I had compromised my child's safety. The only story they didn't believe was the one about Heavy D, the one story that was true.
Now it was their turn. Some of their stories were incredibly sweet -- one girl told us how her brother spent his own money to buy her SpongeBob bedsheets. Others had a quality of longing -- another girl described a trip she took to visit her mother in Las Vegas and meeting an Elvis impersonator. Others were frightening -- a number of girls wrote with intense vividness about gang fights.
Instead of writing just a sentence or two, as I'd asked, the girl who had been the loudest filled two pages with dense, cramped script. She wrote about her childhood as a "good girl" before she began smoking weed and stealing. When she read her piece out loud, the other girls began to jeer and laugh. They couldn't believe that this girl had ever done well in school, had ever been obedient and tractable. After a few moments she crumpled her paper into a ball and tossed it into the trash. "Yeah, that's a lie," she said. "That's just a lie." But I knew it wasn't.
Even in the grim San Francisco Juvenile Hall it was remarkably easy to catch these girls' attention, to give them a tool to access something other than their bravado. They are so raw, but so ready to talk -- and even to listen.
Some studies place the recidivism rate for youth offenders in California as high as 91 percent. Why are my home state's rates so much higher than, for example, Texas'? Because even in red state Texas they offer treatment to their youthful offenders. But not in California, a state with one of the largest populations of incarcerated youth.
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