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Tortured until proven innocent

Last year this article by Chris Vogel from the Houston Press won the Molly Award from the Texas Observer. It’s about teenagers locked in the Harris County (Houston), Texas jail system while awaiting a trial. They have not been convicted of any crime, or proven to pose a threat to any human being’s life or liberty; but if they are juveniles (14, 15, or 16 years old) who have been certified to be tried as adults, then they await their trial — often for over a year — in an isolation cage, with the lights on 24 hours a day, where they are held against their will apart from any human contact for 23 hours of every day. The 60 minutes they spend outside of the isolation torture cell is for recreation, where they are, very often, shackled. This is, of course, an extreme form of psychological torture. Like many of the most extreme forms of psychological torture, it is inflicted on kids who haven’t yet been convicted of any crime, but is inflicted on them For Their Own Good:

Harris County sheriff’s spokesman Lieutenant John Legg says the jail does not make special accommodations for juveniles.

They’re treated like any other inmate, he says.

Except for one glaring difference: isolation.

One reason for this, says Legg, is for their own safety. He says several years ago, teens were allowed into common areas with each other during the day, but they would fight and steal each other’s commissary items, so jail officials decided to keep them in their cells for a majority of the time. A choice, says Legg, which has had the desired result.

— Chris Vogel, For Their Own Good: Harris County juveniles certified as adults are jailed in isolation 23 hours a day–without being convicted of a crime, reprinted in the Texas Observer

The result desired by Lieutenant John Legg, no doubt. I wonder how much his prisoners desired the result of being tortured 23 hours a day for the sins of other prisoners they had no control over.

Like George, Diego [16 years old] says time drones on, blending into one seamless, never ending day. He is bored constantly. So bored, he says, that some days he can’t even concentrate to read. Occasionally, he catches himself talking to himself out loud. At times he’s thought he was hallucinating. Like many other teens in segregation, he’ll beat on his cell door and try to start a riot, sometimes because we didn’t get our full hour out of our cell and sometimes because there’s nothing else to do.

He says he can’t wait to turn 17 and get placed in with other inmates, or get convicted and go to prison, just so he can escape the isolation.

— Chris Vogel, For Their Own Good: Harris County juveniles certified as adults are jailed in isolation 23 hours a day–without being convicted of a crime, reprinted in the Texas Observer

Meanwhile, here’s Dennis McKnight, who used to do the same thing to presumed-innocent juveniles awaiting trial in Bexar County (San Antonio), on the trials and travails of jailing presumed-innocent teenagers:

To the adult jailors, though, it all comes down to a choice between the lesser of two evils: general population or segregation and isolation.

They shouldn’t be held in 23-hour lockdown, admits McKnight, but unfortunately that’s where we have to put them for their safety and for everyone else’s safety. It’s a trade-off that we are forced to make.

Well, no. It’s a trade-off that they force their prisoners to make. Or, more specifically, they make the trade and their prisoners are forced to take the goods. Even if they’d prefer being convicted if it just meant they could get out of the torture.

But I should be more sympathetic. It’s so hard, really, when you need a safe cage to lock all these presumptively innocent teenagers up in for years at a time.[1] Who knows where to put them all? Vogel quotes Liz Ryan of Youth Justice saying, It’s a Catch-22 … They don’t want the kid in isolation and they don’t want the kid in general population. They know it’s not safe either way. Well. I wonder if they’ve tried putting them, you know, not in prison?

  1. [1]It helps if you can revise the meaning of the word safe so that it includes things like being safely driven out of your mind over the course of years.↩

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School’s out forever

In Lakewood, Ohio, Stephanie Milligan, a 16 year old high school student, fell down a flight of stairs and hurt her back. She wanted to get back to school after Thanksgiving break, but the principal wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let her because she needs to wear loose clothing — sweat pants, in particular — because of her back injury, but the school’s dress code bans Oversize, saggy, baggy or tight fitting clothing. Her doctor wrote her a note asking that she be allowed to wear sweatpants. That a recommendation from a licensed physician is necessary to be allowed to wear sweatpants to school is obviously insane in and of itself, but the school’s principal, William Wagner, is both a medical expert and a scholar, and he questions the severity of Stephanie’s injury and her need to wear sweatpants.

Armetta Landrum wrote about it for the Lakewood Patch (2010-12-20). Here’s the headline and subtitle for the story:

Student on the Hot Seat for Wearing Sweatpants to School

Sophomore at odds with school’s dress code, missed nine days of school.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the school’s dress code is at odds with the sophomore’s health.

Here is Lakewood High School Principal William Wagner’s explanation as to why not even a doctor’s request is a good enough reason to consider making an exception to his interpretation of his saggy/baggy dress code clause:

They don’t understand what the dress code is all about or how it is imposed.

–Quoted by Armetta Landrum, Student on the Hot Seat for Wearing Sweatpants to School, Lakewood Patch (2010-12-20)

Indeed. A doctor’s advice is, usually, about helping people, and he no doubt wrote his note on the common, but mistaken, assumption that school policies exist to help students learn. But that assumption is a complete misunderstanding: the dress code is not about helping students; it’s all about controlling students, and a reasonable exception is the last thing you want to make if your aim is to ensure that you, as the controlling authority, will continue to be able to keep young people in line with even the most insane and petty of requirements.[1]

On a related note, Principal William Wagner is probably, like most high school administrators, a very stupid man, and intellectually negligent to the point of being functionally illiterate, especially when he is trying to defend his petty exercises of petty authority. I am fairly certain that what he meant to say is not that doctors don’t understand … how [the dress code] is imposed (as if that were some sort of mystery) but rather that they don’t understand how it is construed, or perhaps that they don’t understand the reasons by which it is justified. However, I will say that he has unwittingly highlighted the real issue here: how this sort of idiocy is imposed on perfectly innocent young people and well-meaning doctors and parents, because bellowing blowhard bullies like Principal William Wagner are appointed by politico-bureaucratic means, are supported by a political structure that crowds out any viable alternative and so insulates them from either popular voice or individual exit, and thus gives them the authority to insist on even the most insane policies, in the interest of protecting their disciplinary turf from any possible encroachment — even encroachment by minimal concern for innocent students’ education, comfort or good health.

See also:

  1. [1]To be fair, the original purpose of the saggy/baggy dress code requirement itself was, no doubt, not to impose an insane and petty requirement on students, just for the sake of making them comply with insane and petty requirements. Like most such dress code clauses, the original purpose was no doubt to uphold institutional racism by selectively targeting ghetto styles of dress. Sadistic authoritarianism is always spilling over its original boundaries, so in this case an idiotic policy written with the purpose of racist social regulation now is construed and applied in an especially rigid way, with no clear motive for the rigidity other than a general defense of turf and disciplinary command-and-control.↩

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