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CHAPTER 1
Ghosts from the Nursery
Do Lawd, come down here and walk amongst yo people And tek 'em by the hand and telt 'em That yo ain't hex wid 'em And do Lawd come yoself, Don't send yo son, Cause dis ain't no place for chillen.
— PRAYER FOLLOWING EARTHQUAKE OF 1866, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, COMPOSED BY SLAVES
In the middle of the night, on May 11, 1993, in the rural Northwest, an eighty-four-year-old man was bludgeoned to death. Three teenagers, high on drugs, had been on a joyride, which by morning included stealing a car, robbing a convenience store, and murder. The youths first knocked on the old man's door and then broke inside to use the bathroom. Jeffrey later confessed to striking the victim on the head with a flashlight that the man had given them to find their way in the dark. The man was then kicked by the youths as he lay on the floor. He was found unconscious the next afternoon by a neighbor, lying near the front door of the farmhouse where he had lived all of his life and where he had seen the raising of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He died several months after the attack without ever regaining consciousness.
The youths were identified by several witnesses as Jeffrey, age sixteen; Roger, age seventeen; and Roger's girlfriend, Crystal, age fourteen. Both Jeffrey and Roger had juvenile records. Crystal did not. Crystal was granted immunity and was not prosecuted. Roger was convicted of robbery with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to twenty years, nine of which he served. After the victim died, Roger was charged with accessory to first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years. He was released in January 2012, having served eleven years. Jeffrey pleaded guilty to the robbery and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After the victim's death, Jeffrey was charged with murder, tried by a jury, found guilty, and sentenced to death. His case was subsequently commuted to life without parole; he was removed from death row and has continued to live within prison walls for the last twenty years.
He looks like the kid next door. Unassuming, he greets you through the prison visitors' window with a shy but ready smile. He is nervous, speaks thoughtfully, and clearly appreciates your attention. His body and his mind move quickly. Anxious for approval, he pours out complete explanations of what he anticipates you came to ask, far more than you would comfortably request. You are a stranger to this boy, but you recognize your own kids' mannerisms, language, interests. He is just days past his eighteenth birthday. He likes to sing and write poetry, which he shares somewhat hesitantly, glancing up often to gauge your reaction. His light brown hair is clean and well kept. His eyes are hazel and clear. Insights unusual for one so young permeate his stories. He chooses to stand apart from his present peer group, hanging out mostly with his cellmate, with whom he shares an interest in self-education and social reform, particularly of the criminal justice system.
A few years ago Jeffrey seemed like just another kid living in the backwash of an unremarkable rural community. A casual observer might have easily overlooked the predictably explosive mixture of life circumstances that heralded disaster for Jeffrey — to say nothing of his victim. Jeffrey's story is one told hundreds of times daily in courtrooms across our nation. It is a story told by events, psychiatric reports, interviews with victims, witnesses, friends, and family. The quest for explanations in the aftermath of violence often delves into adolescence, into grade school and childhood. But the beginning of stories like Jeffrey's goes untold. One chapter is nearly always missing — the first chapter, encompassing gestation, birth, and infancy. And because it goes unseen and unacknowledged, it repeats itself over and over at a rate now growing in geometric proportions.
We overlook this period in our search for the causes of violence because we believe that it is irrelevant, not only to this particular crime, but to later experience generally. The popular belief in the United States is that the baby, let alone the fetus, is exempt from thought and the capacity to record enduring experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. This overlooked chapter of early growth sees the building of the capacities for focused thinking and for empathy — or the lack of these. From the time of late gestation and birth, we begin to develop a template of expectations about ourselves and other people, anticipating responsiveness or indifference, success or failure. This is when the foundation of who we become and how we relate to others and to the world around us is built.
So Jeffrey's story and others like his become ghost stories. Accompanying this convicted murderer is the ghost of the baby he once was and the echoes of the forces that transformed that baby. As is true of most ghosts, these aspects remain invisible, at least to the naked eye. And in that invisibility lies the power of these forces to continue to haunt us.
Though he was just sixteen at the time of his crime, many would argue that Jeffrey was an accountable adult. When faces like his appear in the news, we see the adult or adolescent criminal and place responsibility with the individual, holding him culpable for his actions. We can readily dismiss the Jeffreys as criminals who deserve to pay their debt to society. There are procedures and facilities in place to contain and punish adults. That these people are costly to taxpayers, that their contributions are lost to society, and that their numbers are growing at an alarming rate are all issues that concern us.
But the truly terrifying and more complicated addition to this conversation is the wave of new young criminal faces in the news, such as the eighty-pound twelve-year-old whose chin barely rises above the table in a hearing room of the Wenatchee, Washington, courthouse. His thin wrists are cuffed and his ankles are bound with chains. As he sits listening to the prosecutor tell the story of his premeditated murder of a migrant farmworker, his legs barely touch the floor. Using handguns stolen earlier in the afternoon, this boy and several friends had strolled along the Columbia River firing at bottles and logs. When fifty-year-old Emilio Pruneda called from a nearby thicket to "chill out," the boys circled the thicket and fired. Pruneda threw a rock, hitting one boy in the face. The boys fired more shots and then ran to a bank and reloaded the guns. When they found Pruneda lying where he had been hit earlier, one boy emptied the rounds from a .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol and a .22 caliber revolver into Pruneda. There were eighteen bullet holes in his body.
In May 1995, headline news introduced the country to Robert Sandifer, nicknamed Yummy. Yummy was an eleven-year-old gang member who, having shot a fourteen-year-old girl, brought so much negative attention to his gang that he was executed by them. Yummy was found dead in a highway underpass, shot in the back of the head. His executioners were fourteen and sixteen years old. Yummy captured the nation's attention when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in June 1995. Later that month in an interview with Patrick Murphy, the Cook County public defender, Oprah Winfrey asked whether Yummy and others like him had "slipped through the cracks." Murphy responded emphatically:
There was no crack here. We knew — we should have known exactly what was going on ... What you saw in Sandifer wasn't a kid who fell between the cracks. You saw a kid that was born to a mom who had her first child when she was fifteen, who was welfare-dependent, who came from a family who is welfare dependent. ... The grandmother was in her younger thirties when Mom had the kid at fifteen. Robert's father ... was in and out of the picture at best. When he [Robert] came into the system at two years and ten months, he had cigarette burns on his arm, his neck, his butt. ... The sister was brought into the system when she was ten months old, about three months before Robert. ... She had second-degree burns in her vagina, and the mother said that she dropped her on the radiator.
Very young and generally undetected victims of trauma or chronic maltreatment who become very young perpetrators of violence are no longer rare news stories. And the growing percentage of the crimes being committed by these children are shocking in their cruelty and aggression: a ten-year-old who killed a nine-month-old baby by kicking and hitting her with shoes and a basketball until she stopped crying; a four-year-old who climbed into a crib in his grandmother's day care center and stomped an eight-week-old baby to death; a ten-year-old who killed an eighty-four-year-old neighbor by beating her with her cane and then slashing her throat with a knife from her kitchen; four second-grade boys who pinned a seven-year-old girl to the ground during recess and tried to kill her for "breaking up" with their eight-year-old gang leader.
As in Jeffrey's case, we don't see the ghosts from the nursery in these stories. Because of the tender age of these criminals, however, as we look for explanations, we may look more in depth at the childhoods they have not yet left behind. It is this group of offenders, children twelve and under with a history of chronic aggression, who are forcing us to look earlier. For the majority of these early offenders, the records are clear: By age four they show consistent patterns of aggression, bullying, tantrums, and coercive interactions with others.
The headline of a New York Times article on November 19, 1995, which reported a decline in the rate of adult crime, also warned of "coming storms of juvenile crime." Professor John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania said that we are experiencing "a lull before the crime storm." He cited the "40 million kids 10 years old and younger" who are about to become teenagers, the largest group of adolescents in a generation. He believes that there are more children now than ever before who are growing up without guidance, responsibility, or internalized social values.
Fortunately, the predicted crime storm failed to materialize. For juveniles, the arrest rate for violent offenses grew from approximately 300 to 500 per 100,000 between 1980 and 1994, dropped to 270 in 2004, and fell to fewer than 250 per 100,000 by 2010. Arrest rates generally fell for every age group and for all violent offenses between 1994 and 2004, especially among older juveniles (ages fifteen to seventeen) and young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-four). The declines in the rate of murder arrests involving juveniles and young adults completely reversed the increases seen prior to 1994, bringing murder arrest rates down to levels below those of 1980.
The murder rate for all age groups in the United States has dropped over 50 percent since 1991, going from 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 4.7 per 100,000 in 2011. Violent crime (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) has dropped to levels not seen since the 1960s. This precipitous drop is attributed to a combination of four main factors:
• increased incarceration and length of sentencing;
• improved law enforcement strategies and tactics that draw on new technologies and advances in computer analysis;
• the winding down of the crack epidemic, which plagued the United States from 1984 to 1990;
• the aging of the U.S. population.
However, it is unclear how long this downward trend will continue. The FBI's Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report shows a slight uptick of 1.9 percent in violent crime in the first six months of 2012. Property crimes also rose 1.5 percent overall. While two of the four offenses in the violent crime category actually showed overall decreases compared with data from the first six months of 2011 (murders dropped 1.7 percent and forcible rapes fell 1.4 percent), the number of robberies increased 2.0 percent and aggravated assaults 2.3 percent. At a regional level, the West saw the largest overall jump in violent crime — up 3.1 percent — followed by a rise of 2.5 percent in the Midwest and 1.1 percent each in the South and the Northeast. The only violent crime offense category that showed increases in all four regions of the country was aggravated assault, which was up 4.4 percent in the Midwest, 2.4 percent in the West, 1.7 percent in the South, and 0.8 percent in the Northeast.
As for property crimes, all three offense categories showed overall increases: 1.9 percent for larceny-theft, 1.7 percent for motor vehicle theft, and 0.1 percent for burglary. Regionally, the West saw the largest rise in property crime: up 4.7 percent, followed closely by the Northeast at 4.0 percent. The Midwest was up 1.3 percent, but the South actually showed a decrease of 1.4 percent.
While the first decade of this millennium saw a decrease in the crime rate (until 2012), the rate of incarceration in America continues to be unparalleled in world history. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the United States is responsible for 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. More than 10.1 million people throughout the world are held in penal institutions. Almost half of these individuals are in the United States. From an American perspective, many of the countries we view as run by violent dictators actually deprive far fewer of their citizens their freedom. At 730 persons per 100,000 behind bars in this country, the percentage of citizens we imprison places us far ahead of the next country that uses prison to control it's citizens — Rwanda, which locks up 595 per 100,000. Next is Russia, which imprisons 568 per 100,000, then Libya at 203 per 100,000; Iraq at 101 per 100,000; and Afghanistan at 62 per 100,000. More than half the countries and territories in the world have rates below 150 per 100,000.
The 2008 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts indicates that more than 1 in every 100 adults in our nation are confined in an American jail or prison. For people in their twenties, that figure moves to 1 in every 53 people. One in 30 men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four is behind bars — but for black men the proportion is 1 in 9. The racial disparities in the data are startling. Black men are seven times more likely than white men to be incarcerated. Currently 1 in 15 black men eighteen and older is in prison. For Hispanic men, the rate is 1 in 36 and for white men 1 in 106. When the number of people on probation and on parole in the United States is added to the number of those actually incarcerated, the amount of people living under the control of the criminal justice system is staggering. Adam Gopnik wrote in a New Yorker article entitled "The Caging of America" that more than half of all black men without a high school diploma will spend some part of their lives in prison. More black men are living under the control of the criminal justice system (in prison, on probation, or on parole) than the number of black men in slavery in the 1850s. Gopnik states that more people are currently under "correctional supervision" in America — over six million — than the amount of people in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
Change is likely to be slow and driven by economic necessity. The elephant in the room is that much of the penal system has become privatized and developed into a major industry, gaining Wall Street investors and generating a large union of vocal employees, whose living is derived from what is called the "prison-industrial complex." Human rights organizations are actively condemning this reality. A mostly black and Hispanic population is working for a pittance for huge corporations that make a great profit off their work.
The costs of our myopic incarceration strategy are rapidly escalating. The combined costs of corrections spending — prison, probation, and parole — have nearly quadrupled in the past decade, making it the fastest-growing budget for states after Medicaid. The economic consequences to education and human resources in many states are being dearly felt. State spending on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. As of 2007, five additional states joined California in spending more on prisons than higher education (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware).
Essentially, our response to the burgeoning rate of crime from the 1960s to the 1980s was to become "tough on crime" — relying heavily on imprisonment. While the crime rate fell, and state incarceration rates also went down, sentences have become longer and an increase of the rate of incarceration at the federal level has occurred, primarily due to drug and immigration cases. Now the costs of such a crisis-oriented approach exceed our ability to maintain that response and are forcing the policy makers to look deeper at what else can be done to maintain public safety while not creating the unaffordable and inhumane caging of a huge proportion of U.S. citizens. In a letter from the Office of the Assistant Attorney General written to the chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in July 2012, Lanny A. Breuer indicates that the AG's office and corresponding elements of the system are well aware of this need:
And as we said in our report to the Commission last year, prisons are essential for public safety. But maximizing public safety can be achieved without maximizing prison spending. In an era of governmental austerity maximizing public safety can only be achieved by finding a proper balance of outlays that allows, on the one hand, for sufficient numbers of police, investigative agents, prosecutors and judicial personnel to investigate, apprehend, prosecute and adjudicate those who commit federal crimes, and on the other hand, a sentencing policy that achieves public safety correctional goals and justice for victims, the community and the offender. The federal prison population — and prison expenditures-have been increasing for years. In this period of austerity, these increases are incompatible with a balanced crime policy and are unsustainable.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ghosts from the Nursery"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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