Juvenile Hall Is No Joke

“It’s kind of a shock to visit an actual prison—Juvenile Hall in downtown L.A., the first place they send minors who’ve committed a serious crime. Once you’re in there, your life is not your own. I went to see one of the dorms where the inmates stay. In the corridor, the guys were lined up, taking turns for the restroom. They held their hands behind their backs. That makes it harder to throw gang signs. They seemed sedated. Most of them were looking at the ground, like someone had sucked the life out of them.
There I met “Frank,” who’s 17. He was in his fourth year in the 10th grade.
He said us kids in high school don’t have much to complain about, describing the strict prison schedule where everything is dictated. “I think that if [teens would] come to jail, they’d appreciate school more,” he said. “People run your life here. They tell you how long to take in the shower, and the bathroom. You get to make a five-minute phone call—if you get to make a phone call, and it has to be collect.”
If you don’t do what they say, you lose privileges or you get locked down in the Box. The Box is a dim room with nothing but a bed. There you stay until they feel like taking you out.
The food is bad. Everything has gravy. Sometimes they call it “mystery meat” because they don’t know what it is. Frank had the menu planned for his first meal when he got out: a big burrito with carne asada and a large 7-Up.
This was the first time I had ever met anyone in prison, and I kind of expected him to be a punk with no remorse for anything he had done. But as he told me his story, I saw someone who did bad things but had a heart and intelligence, and who was struggling to make a better life.

It was his fourth time
He explained to me how he had ended up here for the fourth time. Cops first brought him in when he was 13 because he tagged a freeway overpass. His tagging crew kind of changed into a gang, and when he was 14, he decided to go shoot a rival who had jumped him. His homies were going with him.
“Come on, get up, let’s go,” he remembered saying, waving a gun in his friend’s face, playfully pulling the trigger. He thought the safety was on, but instead he blew his homey’s brains out. “It freaked me out. I called to him. I was like, damn… I picked him up and his brains came out. His eyes were rolled to the side, with a smirk on his face.”
He seemed very calm as he told me these things, almost like it was a routine that he’s seen too many times.
Frank felt so guilty about what he had done that he turned himself in the next day, fully expecting to serve hard time in the California Youth Authority. Instead his crime was classified as “involuntary manslaughter” and because he had been cooperative, he served only four months. His other two arrests were for ditching school and possession of a deadly weapon.
I was shocked and repulsed that this guy could commit such a horrible act. It now seemed real. I had never been face to face with a murderer before. My heart suddenly beat fast and I started to sweat. I looked around to see how far the security guard was. Why was I giving this guy my time? Why did I shake his hand at the beginning of the interview? The worst crime that I had heard of was getting bad grades or getting caught with marijuana.
And yet I still had some sympathy. He said he didn’t really have friends. The other members of his gang? “Homeboys, not friends,” he said. Just his mom and his girlfriend, who was pregnant. “She’s waiting, counting the days on the calendar” until his release, he said with a smile. “I’m a really jealous boyfriend—I’m too jealous. Usually everything I love, it goes away. And I don’t like to be alone.”
His future plans: Get a GED. Get a job. Marry his girlfriend. Try to stay away from his old neighborhood and gangs. Would he ever return to prison? “I might, I might not,” he said.
As I left Juvenile Hall, I started to wonder. What if my dad drank a lot and I grew up around gangs and drugs? Instead of plans for going to college, would I be planning on what I would do once I got out of Juvenile Hall?
I felt angry at the system. For one thing it seemed biased. The prison was made up of teenagers that were primarily black and Latino. If I ever committed a crime, would I get the same sentence? Would my race or my parents’ status affect my case?
People invest a lot of tax dollars that go to Juvenile Hall—why wasn’t it helping Frank more? Why wasn’t he sure that he wasn’t coming back?

What would
happen to him?
Frank seemed like he had good intentions, but he might not be able to follow through on them. Juvenile Hall was going to release him into a world that he wasn’t prepared for. What would happen to him if his girlfriend, “the only girl that he ever loved,” decided to leave him? Would his hopes leave with her? What if he really couldn’t find a job? If I had a business, would I hire someone with tattoos and a criminal record? What if a rival gang member were to find him at the wrong time?
Frank was alone in this world. Who’ll be there for Frank? And how many other Franks were there, and how many more will there be?”

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