Have you ever visited a prison? It's quite an experience. A few months ago I went on a prison tour with some of my classmates. The prison houses inmates of different security levels: some max, some min, some in betweens. Some of the people (men… it's a men's prison) whose death sentences were commuted several years back are there. All of the sex offenders in the state pass through there (there's a program they're required to go through: assessment type stuff, anger management, that sort of thing, before they get sent on to wherever they'll be going). Also there: the vast majority of the juveniles in the state who have been tried as adults.
Why is it the vast majority of those juveniles and not all of them? Well, you know, they can't all play well together. There are gang problems, who told on who problems, way too devious together problems. So some are shipped off to other prisons. I don’t know how they're housed in the other prisons though. I don't know how they'd keep them segregated. Because there aren't enough anywhere else to fill up a whole dorm of their own.
If you ever have a chance to go on such a tour, I highly recommend it. Not because it's a barrel of laughs. No. But because I think we should all know. But if your average everyday citizens don't want to go, that's fine. However, it should really be a requirement for law students. I felt it strongly beforehand and feel it even more strongly now.
It was a fairly surreal experience. One image that I think is forever burned into my store of mental images is the juvie who was in solitary and "enjoying" his outside time. See, he was in solitary so outside time for him was in a cage. Literally. Picture the zoo. You know the houses (cat houses oftentimes) where the animals have an inside and an outside to their particular "habitat"? The outside is just a big cage? Yup. That was it. I saw these cages in the yard, projecting from the side of one of the dorms (I'd lost track of where we were on this huge "campus" and wasn't sure which dorm it even was), and couldn't figure out what they were. So I asked. That's where the juveniles in solitary get their yard time.
Kids in cages.
Well aren't we proud.
Since there are so many juveniles there, they have a school. Which we did of course visit. And really, it's just like a school. A mixture of tough-looking aged beyond their years types… and those sweet faced, haven't lost the baby boy roundness to their faces types. Those are the faces I noticed. Those sweet ones. Those are the faces that have stuck with me. Will stick with me. Because remember where I was: a state prison. These sweet faced boys had committed crimes that were serious enough to get them tried as adults and then sentenced to time in prison. The youngest? He'd just turned 14. We're talking murderers. We're talking bad boys. These boys will become men and prison will be what they know. Granted they are not allowed to have any interaction at all with the adult inmates in the prison. If the juveniles are in the yard, then the adult inmates are not. They do not eat together, they do not even walk across the yard at the same time. They are kept isolated from one another.
But still. These boys are in prison. This is what they know now. They will turn into men (hell, given what they've seen and done, it's really not right to call them "boys" anymore anyway) and most will spend the majority of their lives behind bars. Some of those who escape that fate will escape it through death. Not many of them are going to go on to be senators or judges or engineers. Oh certainly some will turn things around. They will go on to live the "normal" lives the rest of us lead. Maybe help save some other kid some other time in some other place. And though some will struggle mightily, they'll remain on the right side of the law. But most of them? Well. Their futures are bleak.
Aren't we proud.
Because we did this. More precisely, we allowed it to happen. Because Hillary had it right: it takes a village. And when the parents aren't around or are incredibly bad influences and the village looks the other way rather than get involved, the village must share in the blame. These kids, in one way or another, have been abandoned by everyone. We failed. We failed in a big, bad, ugly way. We claim to be all about the children and yet we failed these children.
Certainly the same is true of most of the adults in prison, too. Many started out as these boys. Whether they were caught or not, whether their crimes at that age were slightly less severe or just more well hidden, many of the men there started out as these boys. And when they were boys, we failed them, too. We didn't watch out for them, we didn't mentor them, we didn't help them with their homework, we didn't make sure they were going to school and getting dinner and living someplace safe. We didn't love them enough. Shoot, we didn't love them at all. No, much easier to pretend they weren't there.
Aren't we proud.
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