Isolation in Confinement

The New Yorker recently published an article by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer, about the phenomenon of solitary confinement in US prisons.  Gawande describes the extraordinarily negative psychological and physical symptoms that occur in individuals who have experienced solitary confinement, and the widespread use in prisons in the United States.  It is a compelling and devastating article.

What Gawande doesn’t talk about is the extent to which the process of solitary confinement, usually called ‘room confinement,’ is used in juvenile detention and residential facilities across the United States.  In the New York City jails, young people are locked up as much as 23 hours a day in ‘room confinement’ or in the ‘bing,’ which is the Rikers Island facility where youth who have commited an infraction are sent.  Though they are supposed to receive their school work in these facilities (which they don’t consistently receive), they have few other rights or opportunities afforded to them.  In these places where boredom already hampers their agency and impacts on their well-being, this experience of confinement — which could last for the entire time they are incarcerated — is soul destroying.

In a recent report released by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Programs, researchers found that 62% of juveniles who committed suicide in confinement had experienced room confinement, and half of those who committed suicides had been on room confinement at the time of their death.

It may be important to begin to document some of the uses and experiences of solitary confinement amongst young people, and whether the deleterious effects documented by Gawande may manifest themselves differently amongst young people, and may have longer-lasting consequences.

Malign neglect on Rikers Island

A small story was published in the New York Daily News last week which I’m sure went unnoticed by many.  It reads:

Teen found dead in Rikers cell

By Simone Weichselbaum and Alison Gendar
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Monday, October 20th 2008, 1:25 AM

The NYPD is investigating the murder of an 18-year-old inmate found dead in his Rikers Island jail cell, officials said Sunday. Christopher Robinson was discovered faceup in his cell Saturday morning, his body covered by welts and bruises, police sources said.

City Correction Department officials worked to revive him, but he was declared dead at 11:58 a.m., sources said.

Detectives were poring over Rikers’ security tapes for hints at what might have happened, a police source said.

“He was given a beatdown, a fatal one,” another police source said.

The city medical examiner will determine a cause of death, but detectives from the 41st Precinct in the Bronx are investigating Robinson’s death as a homicide, police sources said.

I had actually heard word about this story through someone at my old office, who represented a young man who was in the same facility where this teenager died.  According to the young man, Christopher Robinson was first badly beaten, then left by himself in a cell by staff.  Whatever the facts are, what seems clear to me is that this is a case of neglect, and one which sadly happens every day at Riker’s Island.  The city can easily blame the ‘gang culture’ at the youth facility, the dangerousness of other young men, their inherent violence, or any other cause, but the simple fact is that when a young person enters that facility, it should be the responsibility of the staff at that facility to keep him–and all of the other young men held there–safe.

According to the Daily News, an internal investigation is taking place, and two officers have been placed on modified duty as a result of the incident.  Additionally, three teenagers are being sought in the young men’s murder.  However, I wish that there could be a more systematic challenge made to the system’s perspective on care in general.  It is outrageous–and criminal–that such a heinous act takes place behind the prison doors in this city, and in particular with the consequences focused almost entirely on the boys who participated in the beating, rather than the system more broadly.

Challenging the image of the child solider

I heard a brilliant talk this week by David Rosen of Farleigh Dickinson University and Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom of Drew University.  They are interesting in problematizing some of the popular representations of child soldiers, and they do this by examining both the historical and contemporary representations of them.  Rosen has written a book called ‘Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism,’ which I haven’t yet read, but seems to encapsulate some of these argues.  The thrust of them is this:

1) If we re-examine the history of conflict in places like England and America in the last two hundred years, both through cultural representations and through the popular media, we can see many examples of young soldiers who were seen as heroes who made great sacrifices for their country–see Johnny Tremain and Gavroche in Les Miserables as examples.

2) The face of the contemporary ‘child soldier’ is almost inevitably black or brown, and is described as the manifestation of the horrors of third world life.

3) The change in this history may well coincide with changes in popular representations of childhood, shifts in discourses of imperialism to ‘development,’ and perhaps even some of the

3)  The discourse of development agencies interested in challenging the practice of child soldiers draws on the language of children’s ‘rights,’ yet imposes a peculiarly Western concept of childhood on these contexts, often neglecting to contextualize violence against children in a broader socio-structural context that has arisen in part because of Western structural adjustment policies.

I am not doing this work justice.  See here for a brief article by David Rosen that is a response to a book review of his work.  It encapsulates some of his arguments.

This work I think is an important problematization of an issue that seems to have unquestioned moral validity in Western human rights discourses.

Resource

This is an excellent review put together by the Task Force on Community Preventative Services of the Centers for Disease Control. It is a systematic review of scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of juvenile transfer laws on violence. The reviewers overwhelmingly found that the transfer of juveniles to adult systems has neither a systematic nor a general deterrent effect on youth violence.

Effects on violence of transfer laws

Juvenile Justice in Africa

I’ve recently been interested in exploring the tensions between the enactment in 1989 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and the decline in the conditions of children worldwide that have occurred as a result of the structural adjustment policies that began with neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s.  I was perplexed by the fact that though all but two nations ratified the Convention (Somalia and the United States were the exceptions), and many states proclaimed interest in protecting the rights of the child, few states in practice actual follow the terms of the Convention, particularly with respect to children’s rights in legal procedures.

While researching the Convention, I learned that government officials in Mozambique adopted the terms of the Convention fully into their national laws, recognizing that the stated claims of the Convention could be used to eradicate child poverty.  The rights of children could be interpreted as the rights to live happy and healthy lives, free of poverty.

Assuming that Mozambique’s unique interpretation of the Convention might result in unique juvenile justice practices, I began to look for information about their juvenile justice system.  Sadly, the results of my search were depressing.  I found this article from The New York Times which looked at the conditions of young offenders in a number of African nations, and found that despite the fact that many of these nations had ostensibly strict allegiance to the tenets of the Convention, young offenders suffer terribly in these nations.

Though I am reluctant to generalize about African nations, I write about this issue more broadly to try to suggest that the disjuncture between several of these nations’ stated desires to eradicate child poverty and their inability–as a result of structural dependence on global bodies like the World Bank–to resolve the problems of poverty.  The negative side-effects of structural adjustment policies, which withdraw money from public institutions and focus on private investment, among other things, is to pull money away from institutions that serve women and children in particular, like schools, hospitals, and, as we see, prisons.  Though I don’t want to suggest that prisons should benefit from public spending entirely–in fact, I believe that public investment in resolving social inequality may have a kind of ‘trickle-down’ impact on crime–I do think that global economic policies propagated by developed nations prevent countries like Mozambique from acting autonomously to develop policies consonant with their goals.

To read more about child justice in Africa, see here.

Resource

The following is testimony from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children opposing proposed changes to the rules on restraint in Secure Training Centres for young people in England.  The proposed changes would grant staff members a wider berth in using restraints against young people.  This testimony is a provocative indictment against the use of restraint against young people, and includes young people’s testimony about the dangers of restraint.

The Use of Restraint in Secure Training Centres

Important Op-ed

December 8, 2007
The New York Times

Editorial: Harsh Treatment for Youthful Offenders

The Justice Department has the authority to sue juvenile detention systems
that allow detainees to be abused or that fail to provide safe conditions. The
department, which has invoked this authority many times in the past, should
take a hard look at Texas’s notoriously troubled juvenile justice system.

The Texas Youth Commission attracted the national spotlight earlier this year,
when allegations of brutality, neglect and sexual abuse by detention center
staff members made headlines. The state cleaned house and passed an ambitious
reform package.

In a worrying sign that the right lessons have not been learned, the
commission’s new leadership is proposing a rule change so it can make more
frequent use of pepper spray against unruly detainees. Juvenile justice
experts, the federal courts and the Justice Department have all condemned
excessive use of pepper spray.

Pepper spray is a caustic substance that produces burning and respiratory
distress and can also cause nerve damage. In addition to being inhumane, the
policy is counterproductive. It undermines institutional discipline, further
angering and alienating young detainees.

The agency claims that the new policy is necessary to help understaffed
institutions maintain control. It also insists that the spray will be
judiciously used. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, however, Texas child
welfare advocates charged that the system was using pepper spray excessively,
including on mentally ill detainees who were supposed to be exempted. Among
the cases cited in court documents was that of a mentally ill 15-year-old who
was said to have been sprayed three times while attempting to harm himself.

These accounts are reminiscent of the heart-wrenching cases in Los Angeles
County, Calif., where authorities were called to account for pepper-spraying
pregnant girls, suicidal youth and detainees whom doctors had ordered exempted
because of respiratory problems. Faced with the threat of a federal lawsuit,
Los Angeles County reformed its disciplinary practices. According to a recent
analysis by the Washington-based Center for Children’s Law and Policy, the
county achieved its improvements by retraining its staff, improving mental
health services and embracing less violent systems of crisis management.

Texas needs to follow the same course. If it will not, the Justice Department
should ensure that it does.

Becoming Famous

“I’m a piece of shit, but I’m going to be famous now,” Robert Hawkins, 20, Omaha, Nebraska, December 2007 in a suicide note written before he killed eight people then himself.

“I thought that an opportunity had come for me to raise myself, that my name would make some noise in the world, that by my death I should cover myself with glory, and that in time to come my ideas would be adopted and I should be vindicated.” Pierre Riviere, 20, France 1835, in a memoir written at the request of the chief magistrate in a case in which Riviere is charged with killing his mother, his sister and his brother (from ‘I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century,’ edited by Michel Foucault)

I was struck this week by these two statements, 172 years apart, but echoing one another, reflecting perhaps uniquely modern values, constructions and sentiments. Both young men, moving past adolescence into adulthood in societies and contexts–middle America, rural France–where hegemonic masculinity prevails, yet where it is being chipped at the edge. They participate in uniquely violent and brutal acts. Both young men aspire to greatness, yet perhaps that greatness is understood in the context of models from their time–for Riviere (like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) the memory of Napoleon the ubermensch, the man who has the ability to violate certain rules that common men cannot, may cast a shadow over his young life. Perhaps for Hawkins, being ‘famous’ means placing himself in the context of other young men of his age who have committed parallel acts–the Virginia Tech killer, the Columbine shooters. All have not only achieved fame, but they have also immensely impacted policy and rhetoric about youth crime, causes, and explanations.

A headline in the New York Times today struck me: ‘Searching for Clues to a Young Killer’s Motivation.’ Though Hawkins is dead and the violence and harm he committed atrocious, the search for causes, explanations, whys and hows continues unabated. It seems that this search is not necessarily a search that is conducted in an attempt to prevent further crimes, for there seems to be a kind of hidden consensus that these crimes are random, sporadic, vicious and unpredictable, but there seems to be a need to find out why in order to gain some sense of control over risk–a reaching out for ontological security, perhaps. I was struck by this line from the Times article: “Jessica Reeder, who lives in Bellevue and remembered seeing Mr. Hawkins at McDonald’s, said he never looked troubled. But, Ms. Reeder added, “you never know who lives next door.”” Ms Reeder’s statement suggests that she is not looking for a solution to whatever problem may have existed which led to Hawkins’ crime. Rather, the article implies that there may actually be no explanation, and that perhaps the only thing to do is to exercise more caution, more fear about others around you.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who discovered Riviere’s memoir and court papers, suggests that the question ‘What is this individual who has committed this crime?’ is a relatively new one and one that emerged out of a need to transform the individuals entering the medico-legal establishment after the 18th century…it became a ‘technique’ of jurisprudence (Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, p. 49). Hawkins is dead, yet perhaps there exists a residual desire to draw his case into the folds of this system, to think about the ‘what ifs’ and the possibilities for justice, public vengeance perhaps. It is perhaps a way of expelling the anger and fear that has arisen from this incident.

Throwing Rocks

I was nearly brought to tears yesterday when I read an article in the Baltimore Sun about the criminalization and punishment of young Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the article, more than 5,000 young Palestinians under the age of 18 have been arrested and detained by the Israeli authorities. They are tried in military courts and are given limited access to lawyers and human rights organizations. Their interrogations and trials are secret. These young people are increasingly seen as a threat to the Jewish state — because they are young, they are seen as the most vulnerable to radicalization. According to Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, there is a “deliberate strategy by extremist jihadist groups to exploit young people and to manipulate them in a terrorist war against us.” What is sadly familiar to me is the rhetoric that young people are malleable and vulnerable–capable of great harm without even knowing it. These Palestianian youths are perceived to be capable of horrific crimes against humanity, and images of these youths abound in the national media. They have become familiar, like this one:

What seem less familiar are images like this:

But the politics of representation are tense, particularly in the midst of conflict. According to the Sun article, “a 2006 report conducted by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, found that 90 percent of cases involving settler violence against Palestinians are never prosecuted because authorities claim a lack of evidence or that they cannot identify a suspect.” Violent acts perpetrated by some settlers against Palestinians is underreported, and some suggest that the Israeli state tolerates this violence to a certain extent. (For more on the human rights violations that have emerged as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on both sides of the fence, see here).

Stone-throwing, the kind of archetypal crime of conflict that we see so often represented in the media, seems to be the crime that captures Palestinians in this net of penality. According to the Sun article, Israeli authorities believe that stone-throwing has been one way that young people participate in Palestinian militancy. Yet, as shown above, throwing stones happens in both directions, and perhaps becomes emblematic of the complex and horrific violence that young people are exposed to on a daily basis in Israel and Palestine. It is strange that on the surface rock-throwing looks a bit like child’s play, but is in fact far from it, and is a deeply violent act of conflict that seems to have no end.

For me, sadly, I’m not surprised that young people are netted into this conflict. As documented by countless human rights groups, Palestinians have faced serious structural and symbolic violence as a result of the conflict–their access to water is limited, their movement restricted, and poverty runs rampant.  For me, these are the conditions that lead to retaliative violence against the dominant state.   Or, as the Sun article suggests, some young Palestinians who get arrested simply to “find a better life than they face at home.”

I know that I tread in dangerous waters when I speak about this conflict, and I must admit ignorance about the depth, weight and complexity of it. I also know that the violence perpetrated on both sides of the conflict has been horrific. But I also feel that the incarceration of so many young Palestinians in this conflict is a sad statement about the fears and insecurities made manifest in this conflict.