The New York Times has an  editorial about children who are placed in adult prisons being 36 times more likely to commit suicide than when held in youth facilities.  This is really a two part post, the first being the what and the second being the why.

A while back, I was doing legal commentary for MSNBC about the criminal justice system treating youths like adults.  My “opposition” focused, naturally, on the outcome.  The harm caused to another by a person under 18 is not different than the harm caused by an adult.  Dead is dead, of course.  So naturally, the rhetoric was about “child predators” that was designed to create an image of packs of amoral youths roaming the streets for prey.  My message lacked such a vivid image.

Even worse than adults, the sense was that when a youth has gone bad, there was no hope of redemption or rehabilitation.  While adults waited until later in life to become violent or vicious, suggesting they lived some portion of their lives as law-abiding citizens, the criminal youth were bred for crime.  There was no hope for them.

The image was fantasy, of course, crafted to create a new object of hatred so that we could all be afraid of something and pray at the alter of law enforcement to save us from this plague.  Without something to fear, how could we be controlled?  Even as the  Central Park Jogger theory of a band of roving predators fell apart, revealing the fiction that gave rise to this phenomenon, not to mention the newly coined term “wilding”, the myth had already become part of our culture.

But the offshoot of this perception of children as smaller, more evil versions of adults caused a systemic breakdown in the treatment of youth in the court system and correctional (there’s a misnomer for you) system.  Walls were broken down to keep youth and adults separate, since the system no longer felt any particular sympathy toward children, saw them as unworthy of special concern and refused to acknowledge what would happen to children in adult prison company.

So now we know.  Put children into adult prisons and the likelihood that they would rather kill themselves increases 36 times.  They don’t belong there.  The entire myth of the evil child predator is nothing more than another bogeyman set up to increase our fear and justify the excesses that we would never stand for if not for some extraordinarily effective political marketing.  And who cares if these children kill themselves anyway, right?

But why do they kill themselves?  According to the Times, it’s because they are mentally ill.

Why do so many young people kill themselves in jail? Probably because the majority of them suffer from mental illnesses that go untreated behind bars. Indeed, according to the study, as many as two-thirds of the young male detainees and three-quarters of young women detainees meet the criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders.

That youth who commit crimes, or that youth who commit suicide, are mentally ill seems almost too obvious for words.  Neither reflects the conduct of a sound and healthy mind.  It begs some questions, such as why no one noticed they suffered from psychiatric disorders before they did whatever they did to wind up in prison.  Where were the schools and teachers?  What went wrong at home that their parents saw nothing (this begs other questions, such as whether there were parents at home, or whether mommy was a junkie, etc.)?  Why didn’t the criminal defense lawyer identify a problem and deal with it?  This reflects a breakdown at every turn, leaving a child with mental illness to suffer.  None of this is acceptable.

But the mental illness answer to the suicide probability strikes me as overly facile.  It may well present the fertile ground for suicide, but doesn’t explain the trigger.  Was suicide the response to the generalized situation, or was there an event or series of events that caused such despair that suicide seemed like the only reasonable alternative?

This is where my view of life in prison may differ from the official view in which New York Times editorial board members want to believe.  These children in adult prisons are at the bottom of the food chain.  There is no nurturing (obviously) or mental health care, but there is plenty of violence and sexual abuse to go around.  Why mess with grown men when you can have a youth, physically immature and incapable of self-protection, whenever the “urge strikes.”  There ae bad people in prison, and they do bad things, especially when they are stuck in a place with only people of their own gender for as long as their minds can grasp.

There’s no one to protect children from adults in prison.  There is a society in there that develops like any other, with a pecking order based upon strength and alliances.  Survival requires people to learn how to navigate these most dangerous waters.  Children don’t stand a chance.  When we put them into adult prisons, we throw them to the sharks to be eaten alive.

While more vivid descriptions might help to convey the depth of despair this would cause a youth, I think the point is sufficiently clear.  This is a disastrous practice that is one of the most disgraceful lies that we abide in our acceptance of the belief that our system works.  The shame is that we don’t seem to care or think about it because it isn’t our child involved.  But these are still children.  Every child needs to be nurtured, and every child is capable of redemption.  They aren’t born bad.  We make them that way.