Inside the other prison system:
A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company.
On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.
The resulting photo-survey, Juvenile-In-Justice, documents 350 facilities in over 30 states. It’s more than a peek into unseen worlds — it is a call to action and care.
“I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don’t destroy a population,” says Ross. “To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with.”
The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention.
Ross thinks his images of juvenile lock-ups can, and should, be “ammunition” for the ongoing policy and funding debates between reformers, staff, management and law-makers.
Ross makes use of data visualizations and statistics on his site to engage viewers in the issue, but the images themselves must be compelling. He brings all his photography skills to bear in order to lure the viewer. “These flows of information are great little sound bites but how do you visualize them? How does a person see? All of good advertising seduces you in first and then you can analyze the message,” says Ross.
The pictures are hard to look at, but go take a look at his work anyway, and be hopeful, because it really is changing:
Following repeated abuse scandals in California Youth Authority (CYA) facilities in the ’90s, the Golden State carried out the largest program of decarceration in U.S. history. Reducing its total number of facilities from 11 to 3 and slashing the CYA population by nearly 90 percent, California simultaneously witnessed a precipitous drop in crime committed by under-18s. The AECF identifies this as a common trend.
“States which lowered juvenile confinement rates the most from 1997 to 2007 saw a greater decline in juvenile violent crime arrests than states which increased incarceration rates or reduced them more slowly,” says the report.
“In 2004, it was reported that over one thousand youth had been sexually assaulted by staff in the Texas juvenile justice system,” says Krisberg. “It was the emergence of legislation and scandals simultaneously that had people realizing these systems were unfixable.”
Cermet
Does anyone really believe that a fact like this:
will have any impact upon a thug voter? Please, black youth needs to speed time in jail to learn how to live in his proper place – under the heel of the white man … .
Matthew Reid Krell
I won’t talk about my experience with the juvenile justice system because it came during my internship with a federal judge, and I won’t violate the sanctity of chambers, but yeah. This.
Carol from CO
If the picture of the 12 year old boy doesn’t tear your heart out, you must be a republican.
El Cid
Plus, hopefully this will lead to adult felony convictions later, which perhaps might be needed in some states to help bar more and more minority youth from ever voting, which is our patriotic duty, I mean, to stop them from voting. For freedom.
muddy
$80,000 a year to keep them locked up, abused and raped. Gods forbid they give them a wee bit of cash and pay for some therapy. In fact for that kind of money, they could come and live at my house, altho as they would not be abused or raped, that really would not be as good, would it?
Fiscal conservative, a contradiction in terms.
burnspbesq
@muddy:
Actually, it’s not. The problem is that most who claim to be fiscal conservatives, aren’t. They’re quite happy to spend your money on their agenda. And leave a huge hole in the budget for your kids and grandkids to deal with.
Matthew Reid Krell
@El Cid: I support locking up more conservatives.
Derelict
Conservatives: BIG on punishment no matter the perp. Because, let’s face it, everyone who isn’t white and wealthy deserves to be punished.
Raven
I was a blink from juvenile detention in 66 and opted for 3 years in the Army when the judge gave me a choice. St Charles in Illinois was bad but because I spent my thug year summers in California I knew dudes who had been in “Juvy”. They worked their asses off and were bulked up and mean as snakes comin out of that joynt.
jl
@muddy: Originally it was supposed to save money. Conservative economists (Edit: and criminologists, political scientists and sociologists, in this one case, I think unfair to lay all the blame on economists, and they have enough sins on their heads already) cranked out some influential studies premised on the idea that there was a finite sized inherently criminal element in the population.
Rehabilitation would not work. Cheapest thing to do would be to lock them up and remove them from the population. The formula was simple: ID the ‘bad guys’, remove them, problem solved.
Didn’t turn out as planned, but the results are convenient to use for other purposes: crony capitalist privatization with no accountability, excuse to deny voting rights to groups that might not vote correctly.
This movement did not have a big splashy ‘Bell Curve’ but from what I have seen of the research, had same kind of flaws.
c u n d gulag
The more black people go to prison for felonies, the less there is for Conservatives to do to suppress their votes.
The states will gladly suppress their votes for them, since in most states, felons can’t vote.
Privatization is the greatest scam ever created to take tax-payer money, and give it to the politicians unaccountable family members, friends, and cronies, and their corporations, to move that tax money from the governments pockets, into their wallets.
Redshift
@Derelict:
And not just in criminal matters. Schools aren’t doing well enough? Punish them by cutting their funding! It’s their approach to pretty much ever problem — the Punishment Party.
jl
Only experience I have with the ‘bad guys’ approach to juvenile justice was when I was teaching community college in working class and poor areas around LA and Orange county. Several students had younger siblings who had been put on gang lists, basically from their stories, because they were guilty of being Hispanic or wrong kind of Vietnamese and not secluding themselves at home after school.
Edit: ‘wrong kind of Vietnamese’ means working class or poor, BTW.
Raven
“Gov. Nathan Deal on Monday signed off on Georgia’s proposal to drug-test parents who seek welfare, pushing the state towards a legal confrontation with opponents over the new law’s fairness.” Just for fun.
Linda Featheringill
You know, just plain giving a stipend to the families of these kids would have probably prevented half of the law-breaking.
Raven
@jl: Wrong kind of Vietnamese could mean a lot of different things depending on the situation.
Villago Delenda Est
This is a great way to insure that you’ve turned a kid into a criminal for life. Brilliant, in all respects.
PWL
Reminds me of what Hunter Thompson once said about America being hooked on what he called the Punishment Ethic. Not much has changed since the Puritan days….
gaz
@Villago Delenda Est: See also, our schools, post Columbine.
Because treating a generation of kids as potential mass-murderers will do so great for our long term welfare.
Fuckers.
Mark S.
@jl:
I once took a criminal justice class and one of the assigned readings was a book that looked at the declining crime rate. The first several chapters were for shooting down some of the leading theories as to why crime was declining and then it came to its conclusion: our insanely high incarceration rate! No analysis of why countries with lower incarceration rates also experienced a reduction of crime; no analysis of the costs of locking up so many people; no analysis of the stupidity of locking up non-violent drug offenders to long terms.
EconWatcher
When I was a teenager, we got into a couple of minor scrapes with the police. One of them commented, “You do this again, we’ll take you to juvey. And you know what’ll happen to you there.” He meant gang rape. I’m quite sure there was a factual basis for his threat.
Unbelievable what we allow to go on in this country.
Mark S.
@Linda Featheringill:
But you’ll create a culture of dependency!
jl
@Raven: As far as I could tell, from the half dozen or so stories I heard, ‘wrong kind’ meant not rich, not professional, not living in a ‘good’ neighborhood, at least in terms of ease of getting on a gang list and all the problems that created.
JGabriel
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OT, but Anders Breivik, killer of lefty children, pleads self-defense, essentially says he standing his ground against Islamic hordes:
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Anders Breivik is what every conservative aspires to.
.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Except for the getting caught and standing trial part.
Every conservative aspires to be George Zimmermann before the pesky family and the DFHs got involved.
Karl The Crap Blog Detective
@JGabriel: Unlike Florida, in Norway that’s not gonna fly.
Raven
@jl: I was being facetious.
lacp
@JGabriel: Damn. That really is “Stand Your Ground” carried to its logical conclusion.
Davis X. Machina
@Mark S.:
An old Jesuit professor of mine used to say “The only cause of poverty in America is not having enough money. To solve it, you give poor people money.”
His point — any other argument or discussion may or may not be worth having, but it’s no longer about the origins of poverty.
Emerald
Where is Charles Dickens when we need him?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
“Reducing its total number of facilities from 11 to 3 and slashing the CYA population by nearly 90 percent, California simultaneously witnessed a precipitous drop in crime committed by under-18s. The AECF identifies this as a common trend.”
Ah the irony that the conservatives douchbaggery with the budget forced something sane to happen.
David Koch
OMG!
This is horrible!
Why is it we never read about this wide spread abuse from Cole and his buddies who always love wank away about bradley manning’s pillow? !
Davis X. Machina
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The Law of Unintended Consequences isn’t quite as uni-directional as Murphy’s Law, lucky for us.
becca
@El Cid: This. This. This.
Roger Moore
@Derelict:
Those two sentences contradict each other. In reality, they’re very big on punishing anyone who doesn’t look like them and big on forgiving anyone who does. It’s just one more example of “Conservative” actually meaning “White Christian Tribalist”.
JGabriel
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lacp:
Yep. That’s what I think too.
.
jncc
I heard a story on satellite radio this weekend about a program in Texas where kids who don’t attend school are charged with truancy and taken to court and fined. One 17 year old who dropped out of school to work two jobs said he had been fined over $2K so far.
Oh, and if the fines aren’t paid, they lock up the “truants.”
Mark S.
@David Koch:
OMG!
I interpret everything as whether it could be pro-Obama or anti-Obama. I actually don’t give a shit about any of the issues raised in the post, and am every bit as stupid as John Hindraker.
JGabriel
@Roger Moore:
Just curious: does ‘tribalist’ have any meaning in that sentence that would differentiate it from ‘supremacist’?
I don’t see one, but I may be missing something.
.
Matthew Reid Krell
@JGabriel: I don’t know, but the only thing I can figure is that MAYBE, “tribalist” means “separatist” rather than “supremacist.” And while creating an enormous Bantustan in the United States is certainly repugnant and ripe for abuse…no, there’s no dependent clause in that sentence beginning with “but.”
So, yeah, you’re probably right.
Mike in NC
@c u n d gulag:
Let me put in a plug for Rachel Maddow’s excellent book, “Drift”, which reveals just how much the Pentagon has bought the idea of privatizing and outsourcing just about everything.
Roger Moore
@JGabriel:
The only way I think you can distinguish it is that the “Conservatives” seem to be willing to stretch their tribe to include some people who aren’t white or Christian provided they behave properly. For example, they seemed to be willing to accept Hermann Cain and forgive him for being a philandering, sexual harassing asshole. Similarly, they’re willing to accept Jews who are sufficiently Likudnik. I suspect those people would count as being on the fringe of the tribe, so they’d be thrown out for a less substantial transgression, but they do seem to be members in good standing.
scav
@JGabriel: One can be a tribalist, root for the tribe, without necessarily thinking that your tribe is necessarily and inherently better in all things than all other tribes for ever and ever amen. Think Cubs fans.
Mike in NC
Is “Anders Breivik” Norwegian for “Andrew Breitbart”?
Argive
Recently, PA Gov. Corbett (normally a crazy Teahadist) signed two new laws reforming the state’s juvenile justice system. The first mandates that juvenile court judges give on-the-record reasons for the terms of whatever sentence they hand down. The second requires unwaivable counsel for most juveniles.
It’s great that these laws are on the books. But it’s really tragic that the reason why these laws ever got passed was the largest judicial corruption scandal in American history, in which a couple of crooked judges sent over four thousand kids to private prisons on bullshit charges. Despite the fact that all of the convictions have been vacated, some of these kids won’t ever get their lives back.
Kay
@Argive:
There was a lawyer there. The prosecutor.
I think it’s great that they’re not allowing the kids to waive counsel, but that scandal implicates more than than the two judges, IMO. It’s difficult for me to believe any adult who was in that court day after day, week after week, year after year can claim they thought these 3 minute “hearings” were legit, particularly as they were also in front of other juvenile judges who were NOT sending kids to detention for cash. The whole juvenile court system in that county, every employee, should be reviewed.
Argive
@Kay:
The prosecutors, for the most part, said nothing. Ciavarella would often shout down public defenders and deny them them a chance to speak. The head public defender did nothing and has now gone into private practice. Juvenile detention/probation officials were curiously OK with having parents of juveniles sign waiver of counsel forms without a whole lot of consideration. The local cops didn’t seem to care how tough Ciavarella was. And why should they? He was making cases for them. Don’t even get me started on school administrators.
This was a corrupt system in general. The PA Interbranch Commission (an independent group set up to investigate the whole scandal) published their final report in 2010. It’s pretty interesting, although the prose gets a little florid from time to time. More info may be found here.
Kay
@Argive:
Yeah, I thought about them, too. Thanks so much for all the info.
One of the things that happened as a result of the photographs in the post was, the administrator of a juvenile detention facility was able to show school administrators where they were sending these kids. He asked them if kids who misbehave at school really need to be referred to a cell block.
I think that’s part of the problem. The administrators had never been inside these places, so they were sending ten year olds off to jail.
I like the “no shackles” thing too, in PA. I think they (originally) used the shackles for “scared straight” purposes (and it’s belly chains, the whole 9 yards: they’re shackled)
“Scared straight” has been completely discredited, but the shackles remain.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I’m sure this is a case of “common sense” trumping actual research and facts and stuff. If you assume that kids are basically rational, have complete freedom of action, and are only getting involved in crime because they don’t fully appreciate the consequences of what they’re doing, scared straight ought to work. Or if you believe that the kids are basically evil and the harshest possible punishment is the only thing that might possibly reform them, it makes sense, too. The people who believe that way just aren’t willing to change their minds, no matter how many contrary facts they’re presented with.
pseudonymous in nc
The comparative graph showing the number of juveniles incarcerated in the US per 100k population is shocking.
I have a personal connection to the juvenile correction system, and it is on one hand (as I say repeatedly) the youth welfare system that America is collectively most happy to pay for, and on the other hand the best way to maintain the prison-industrial complex and generational social dysfunction.
Argive
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, research shows, at best, no connection or correlation between scared straight programs and juvenile crime. Some studies indicate that scared straight programs have actually made the problem worse. But you’re right. No amount of studies by them gubbermint eggheads will convince “law-and-order” types that scared straight doesn’t work.
kay
@Roger Moore:
They’re fads, basically, but they’re so hard to undo once they take hold.
Bill Clinton was a huge fan of “boot camps” and they still linger, although they were a huge failure.
I always thought he signed on because he was in love with his image as the youngest state AG ever; tough on crime!
Then all those kids started to die of dehydration, and boot camps fell out of fashion.
What is it with kids and wacky fads? You see the same thing in education. Dealing with kids seems to make normal people go completely insane.
David Koch
@Mark S.:
rageahol
dear everyone here:
please watch this. it’s good. it”ll take a few minutes, but it’s worth it if you’re a fan of all-American things like justice, mom, apple pie, and eliminating racial disparities in sentencing.
Bryan Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative
Mike G
And big on punishment for its own sake, even if it costs a shitload of money and does nothing to reduce crime. Because these sadists love to punish.
You could see this in spades in the Chimp/Cheney assministration. Bush would stumble and mumble through his press conferences, but when he talked about punishing someone (Saddam, “terrists”, etc.) he was sharp and alert.
“Beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong” – Nietsche
Kyle
@kay:
You see the same with management fads in the corporate world. It’s a sure sign of incompetent management thrashing around desperately for something to hide their incompetence.
Greyjoy
You can see it in the “War on Women” too. What possible other logic could there be in a drive to kill sex education, birth control, health care access for low-income women, abortion AND welfare? It’s simply not logical, since in order to get rid of things like abortion and welfare, you need greater access to sex education and birth control and health care. But they don’t want to *prevent* pregnancy. They just want to make it really easy for women to fall into a trap and then really hard for them to get out of it.