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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (July 24, 2009)
» 7 G £Z,EBRA TX!V 6 A D E C A D E Street roots Education * Dialogue ? Independence '•"’/"V» '•Si , -i, ,„z„ NATIONAL Violence Violence Author Jerome Gold serves up an intimate portrait o f youths behind bars in “Paranoia and Heartbreak” ■ * - BY ADAM HYLA STREET NEWS SERVICE SEATTLE, Wash. — boy or girl brutally beats a friend, robs a store at gunpoint, violates . someone smaller than himself, shoots a stranger for reasons that, months later, they still can’tsay. What are we to . do with this person? Locking up minors, of course, does not shut in the questions their actions present How should we regard young offenders? How might we reconsider our ideas of yduth/innocence, corruption, guilt and rehabilitation? Ate child criminals easier to reform than adults? Do young offenders represent a kind of evil, or are their crimes a rational responses to the arbitrary violence of the world they’re growing into? Jerome Gold has engaged with these questions and more day to day, person to person, at a juvenile detention center 37 miles east of Seattle. For a good chunk of his adult life he was part counselor, part, takes to spring young peoplefrom the guard for juveniles serving out their prison of their own lives. ; sentences for a range of criihes. To process — to understand his engagement with the Adam Hyla:I was surprised at how workplace’s potent brew of neglect, minutely you journaled at certain parts in this despondency, tear and danger — he kept a . experience. ' journal. The result is “Paranoia and Heartbreak: | Jerom e Gold: I journal when I’m Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility” (Seven troubled, or under stress or trying to figure Stories Press), a devastatingly intimate something o u t Especially when I’m trying portrait of a class of people who can inspire to figure something out, I force myself to be pity and contempt like no other. Gold tells as purely descriptive as possible and as their stories soberly, refusing to impose tidy inclusive as possible. That’s where the detail endings where none exist. Cumulatively, the comes from. I do that in order to try to get more than 200 youths presented here force some distance between myself and whatever us to consider how we lock people in the I’m trying to deal with. And then afterward j darkest cabinets of American society, and I can allow my emotions to play. Usually, how our own freedom might be tied up with just by describing something, thatreduces theirs. whatever’s troubling me, and it does help Gold? who- fictionalized his years in me figure something out — it abstracts it Vietnam with the U.S. Army Special Forces just a little bit so I can see a pattern. I’m | in his book “Sergeant Dickinson,” is the always amazed when it works. . publisher of Black Heron Press, which has After a while (at Ash Meadow) it became published Seattle writers like Matt Briggs more important to me to see what was and Judith Roche. Of “Sergeant Dickinson,” going on with particular kids. I could start the New York Times wrote that “few novels seeing what ways a kid was being self- . in any genre are as lucid, or as memorably destructive, for example. That was really spooky.... (I)t belongs on the high, narrow common. A lot of those kids are, really self shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield destructive, but didn’t know that about experience.” Vietnam, Gold writes in thepiselves. Well, adults are like that too. “Paranoia & Heartbreak,” enriched his relationship to the kids he called his “little A.H.: These young kids were victimized first soldiers” at Ash Meadow. in their lives, and you notice that they’re Gold spoke recently with Real Change - acting out their own victimization bn other about the legacy of violence, the upside of - people. post-traumatic stress disorder, and what it ■ 7 . ' PHOTO BY RUETERS/JESSICA RINALDI Above, a suspected gang member waits to be booked on posession of marijuana chargesin Edinburg, Texas. Author Jerome, Gold, left, says American needs to reconsider why - and how - we lock up our next generation. J.G.: It’s actually a rule of trauma: If somebody has been traumatized you expect them to do that, and also not to know that they’re doing i't/iiomatter how smart they are or how insightful they are. A.H.: And the administrators do that themselves, is what you also suggest. That they were victimized at one Point and it affects their decisions. J.G.: I had a kid when I worked in a boys’ unit that was around a treatment group called Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse, and this boy was not in it. And yet I knew, just by watching him, that something had happened; Don’t ask me how. I couldn’t describe it in words so that you could take those words and apply it to somebody else. It’s just I knew it of him. For one thing he was amazingly pretty, and I knew it’d be really hard for a pedophile to keep his hands off him. , I asked his case manager whether he should be in my group or not, and she said noi She said something had happened to him hut he didn’t want to talk about i t So I let some time go by. And yet there was something about i t And so I asked her again, and she said no, he doesn’t want to deaTwith it. So finally I just asked him, and , told him what thè group was about, and he just jumped at it. I thinkhis case manager said no because she didn’t want td deal with it: If she’s dealing, with his problems and they’re similar to her problems, she has to deal with herself. That could be an advantage, if you’re willing to deal with yourself. We had one cottage there for a drug and alcohol rehab . treatment three-month program, and the staff there had had their own problems; And the kids respected them for that, too. A.H.: What kind of people should be in the role that you were in? J.G.: It’s a matter of personality rather than education. Now the administrators would disagree with me — they think everybody should be a psychologist I don’t think having everybody be a psychologist or trained in the same way is good; I think that’s bad. The problem with the type of psychology in maximum security was that they wanted the kid to adapt to what they called his milieu, bis environment But his environment was prisonM'didn’t want the kid adapt to prison. I wanted thekid to get out and-not reoffend. They weren’t interested in whether he reoffended ornot. What we want to do is train them so that they don’t'w antlo do that anymore and can resist the temptation to do it. That’s the hard thing. Because when they get out, they’re going to go back where they came from, and the same kids that they associated with before, they’re going to associate with again. Or maybe it’s their families; A chaplain would invite volunteers from outside in from the various churches, and they would talk about doing what your mother and father tell you to do, but geez, I had a case whose mother forced her to kill somebody. A.H.: Were all these kids from troubled environments? J.G.: Almost all. I had one boy — his mom, a single mom, had a good job, but her job took her outside the house when he'Was in the house. The big thing was that he was smoking marijuana in the morning and not going to school. She didn’t know that. But also, smoking marijuana put him in bad company, He, was a really unusual kid in a lot of other ways. Other kids like sweets;’ he liked vegetables. Every evening he’d ask if he could have more salad. And he loved S lus mom. He wasn’t a gang kid, but he hung out with gang kids. So it was easy to turn him around. , Another occasion we’d get someone who had both parents. I was always amazed: “How’d you get both parents?” That’s good. If a kid has both parents in the household, if .they’re Working together, there’s a good chance that he can break loose from whatever. A.H.: I f you had to design a way to prevent gang violence, what would you suggest? J.G.: I’d restructure society. () I think most of the staff I’ve talked Toat Ash See VIOLENCE, page 8
