Juvie

This book should be required reading for the 286 members of the House of Representatives who, in early May, voted to spend $1.5 billion more on punishment without rehabilitation for the serious offenders among the 2.7 million young people who are arrested every year.

Until recently, policymakers have focused primarily on adult criminals and worked feverishly to criminalize everything from recreational drug use to “aggressive panhandling,” to make state prison construction one of the few domestic growth industries and to cram the overcrowded local jails with the chronically unemployed, a practice similar to the way that the English Poor Laws filled workhouses with “sturdy beggars” about 400 years ago. When it comes to biggest and best, you can’t beat the American criminal justice system--14 million arrests annually; 1.7 million employees at a total cost of about $74 billion; more than 1.5 million incarcerated. Still, we have the most public insecurity about crime in the West, with no relief in sight.

Now the focus is shifting to harden our juvenile justice system with longer sentences, tougher punishments, boot camps and more transfers of young offenders to adult prisons, which already hold an estimated 6,500 teenagers. This book, ironically titled “A Kind and Just Parent,” is a chronicle of the author’s “immersion in [a] detention center school” and his investigation of how people living under the most restrictive conditions make meaning of their lives. William Ayers, professor of education at the University of Illinois, joins a fine tradition of Chicago writers whose goal is to bring to life the complex people who inhabit myths conjured up by demagogues and the mass media.

Ayers’ book does for incarcerated kids in “the largest juvenile jail in the world” what Studs Terkel has done for the city’s working folks, what Alex Kotlowitz has done for the residents of its housing projects and what Renny Golden has done for the disposable children in its welfare system. Ayers goes beyond “the blizzards of labels and stereotypes, tough exteriors and blaring deficiencies” to bring humanity to the “voiceless and faceless” juvenile delinquents who are on their way to dead ends.

The book is organized around a set of interconnected vignettes about the everyday lives of incarcerated youth and the staff of Juvenile Court. It focuses on the detention center’s teachers, who face the daunting task of working with illiterate kids, convicted murderers and pregnant teenagers in “temporary lock-down.”

Ayers has an ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for the day-to-day rhythms of an institution. Writing in a vivid and spare prose, he captures the scared and sullen kids shuffling into court “shackled one to another with leg irons”; the “grim parade” of poor families from waiting room to courtroom, “trudging back and forth continuously, trailing a volcano of resentment”; the ubiquitous feeling of “futility and despair”; and “the whiff of danger, always an alarming meeting of chaos and indifference.”

The author is best known as a leader of the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society. He spent a decade underground with Bernardine Dohrn and their children before surfacing to complete a doctorate in education at Columbia University in 1987. Ayers draws upon his personal knowledge of education: as a student at the exclusive Lake Forest Academy, whose annual fees are about $8,000 less than the $28,000 it costs the state to detain a juvenile delinquent in Chicago; as a teacher at the experimental Children’s Community School in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the 1960s; and as education secretary of Students for a Democratic Society.

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Ayers reflects throughout the book on his own and on his children’s general experiences and class-related benefits and contrasts them to the broken lives of his subjects. While his publisher promotes his revolutionary past, the author deliberately avoids it. He wants his readers to see beyond his celebrity status so that his usually anonymous subjects can take center stage.

The setting for Ayers’ investigation is one of the largest juvenile court systems in the country, with a staff of more than 600 and an annual budget that exceeds $20 million, where the cases are processed with robotic efficiency. At any moment, according to the author, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 cases pending on each judge’s docket, numbers which add up to about 75,000 delinquency, abuse and neglect cases awaiting disposition. Caseloads in Cook County are twice the national standard, and an average case is dispensed with every 12 minutes. Of the close to 13,000 kids who come through the detention center each year, the overwhelming majority are poor, African American (80%), Latino (15%) and male (90%).

Meanwhile, white suburban kids in serious trouble get routed to counselors, psychiatrists and private schools long before the cops are called. And on the rare occasion that they make it to Juvenile Court, high-priced attorneys try to make sure they don’t get held in detention while awaiting trial. Ayers’ book documents how juvenile justice in the United States is a system of apartheid: racist, separate and unequal.

Ayers paints sympathetic but not sentimental portraits of some of the child-adults doing time for murder, robbery and drug dealing. While he expresses clear opposition to right-wing criminologists and politicians who rush to punishment, he also recognizes the “culture of cynicism and despair” and the “toxic mixture of narcissism, narcotics and nihilism” that pervades the lives of kids in juvenile detention. The glimmer of optimism that persists through this book emanates from his philosophical assumption that even young thugs are “simultaneously pure and rotten, immaculate and corrupt, angels and brutes.”

A large part of the book is devoted to the teachers who do the unglamorous work of trying to reach their captive audience. But this is not the familiar cliche bequeathed to us by movie images of Edward James Olmos, Sidney Poitier and Michelle Pfeiffer successfully taming wild kids in the blackboard jungle. There are no happy endings or neat resolutions in these classrooms, where the work is slow and mostly frustrating. There’s William Baldwin, who expects his semi-illiterate students not only to read but also to appreciate the significance that August Wilson’s play, “The Piano Lesson,” has for their lives. Baldwin’s goals are modest: Provide a safe place and steady routine, build a relationship with each kid and “show even the toughest kid a different way to live over time.”

There’s Frank Tobin, who regards his work as a “kind of ministry” and tries to get his students to appreciate that “knowledge is power.” He teaches that “you make your own life by living it” and rewards his students by letting them work out their “bombastic” bodies in the weight room at the back of his class. “This gives them visible proof,” observes Ayers, “of their control over some aspect of their lives and selves and of changes they can effect over time.”

And there’s Cheryl Groves, a Juvenile Court lawyer, who holds a weekly rap session called Girl Talk, at which young women accused of murder, home invasion, prostitution and drug dealing can write poetry, compose songs and discuss sexuality. But without adequate government funding and public resources, as Ayers points out, the best of these teachers can’t go against the grain of a system that is designed for failure and defeat.

Ayers’ book is less successful when it turns to historical and policy analysis. He tends to romanticize the 19th century origins of Juvenile Court. “Children’s law was originally conceived,” he writes, “in an effort to place youth, not the offense, at center stage, to see the child as three-dimensional, moving forward, full of promise and possibility, worthy of a second chance.” Ayers characterizes the turn-of-the-century reform movement as engineered by “dauntless women,” who hoped to transform the legal system into a “safe haven, a space to protect, to rehabilitate and to heal children.”

While Ayers recognizes that the anti-delinquency reformers have “always been a movement against the poor,” he minimizes their class prejudices and disregard for civil rights. The child savers’ rhetoric of benevolence, “encircled in compassion and concern” to use Ayers’ phrase, was, in fact, backed up by an expansive system of social control and an interventionist, repressive state. The past, unfortunately, offers few positive lessons for the future.

This book doesn’t provide a deep analysis of the structural conditions that have produced this generation of lost kids; nor does Ayers have any particularly new ideas about what we can do differently. He makes a few modest, sensible suggestions: We need serious efforts to control access to guns; we need more dedicated teachers who know that “teaching well requires judgment, choice and possibility”; and we need government support for “a rich and varied continuum of community-based options for kids in trouble.” But this book should not be read as a policy manual. Ayers simply wants us to envision the complex people behind the label “delinquent,” to share his moral outrage at racism and throwaway lives and to stop and consider our folly before we commit another $1.5 billion to expanding the American gulag.