I don’t really say much because, honestly, nobody really cares, even if they say they do. I never really got the love I wanted from my own parents, but when I do my time, that’s the only time they tell me they love me.
Pinpointing the decisive moment or moments when our lives changed in a substantial way is always tricky. But I tend to credit that one blessed year of high school in the 1970s when I escaped the torpor of California public school by attending Elisabeth Irwin High School, part of the Little Red School House in New York City. This is the same high school Angela Davis has publicly credited with her political awakening. With its small classes and hip, young teachers, the school exposed me to the imperatives of social justice.
It was no accident, then, that I wound up decades later teaching at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. Crossroads has allowed me the liberty to offer classes that explore everything from the stigma of mental illness to the moral codes of animals. These classes have helped to sharpen my expertise in a real diversity of subjects. More than 20 years later and well established enough in my position as an English teacher, I committed to a very different kind of instruction that has changed me forever. I undertook teaching incarcerated girls at Central Juvenile Hall (CJH), in Boyle Heights, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles’s East Side.
CJH is one of the most overcrowded juvenile detention centers in Los Angeles County and the first facility of its kind here, built over a century ago. A ponderous collection of grim buildings, it squats in a dip across the bridge from Lincoln Heights, where poorly tuned cars belch plumes of smoke and murals animate scenes from ancient Aztec to hip hop culture. At CJH, inmates wear grey sweatshirts, grey sweatpants, and black canvas shoes. The girls’ hair is bunched up in rubber bands, their faces scrubbed clean of make-up. Despite their youth, the street life reflects in homemade tattoos, tired eyes, and for many of those with whom I work, the multiple self-inflicted scars that run along their arms. Crossing the bridge between the study of and the effects of violence, abuse, and criminality has become a regular part of my life.
As an English teacher working with these girls, I couldn’t help but think of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Shelly’s creation of the Monster is undoubtedly one of the most powerful examples in literature of what parental abandonment can do to a child. “What was I?” asks the Monster. “Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property…. When I looked around I saw and heard none like me…. I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me.”
His human side, that which can reason and therefore gives voice to the yearning for a sense of place in the world, informs him of his utter isolation. His monstrous side grows accordingly. Abandonment by his “father,” Dr. Frankenstein, forever dooms the Monster to walk that razor’s edge between two worlds: that of the Loved and Accepted and that of the Damned and Lost.
Not being asked to join in a game on the playground, being suspended in preschool (if you’re a student of color, you’re three times more likely to have this happen to you), finding yourself unable to comprehend a passage from a book as quickly as other students, and bullied every day on the way home from school. There are so many small and large reasons why outside forces cause my incarcerated students to feel alienated and abandoned.
In The Wounded Body: Remembering The Markings of Flesh, Dennis Patrick Slattery discusses the “myth-maps” left on the bodies of those characters who have suffered at the hands of their oppressors. He asserts that scarification (self-inflicted or not), tattoos, and any wounds to the flesh are indelibly part of our personal and collective history. But they also make people monstrous.
How much like the Monster are my incarcerated students?
I know it is an absurd notion, taboo even, for a teacher to refer to her students as “monstrous,” but this is what the cruelties they endure do to them.
Numbing themselves with drugs and alcohol, slicing their flesh, even the high of breaking the law — these are reactions, in part, to pain beyond what an adolescent can bear. OneRepublic’s popular song, “Counting Stars,” trumpets the following anthem: Everything that kills me makes me feel alive. Honestly, if I were a teen again facing the kind of abuse, ridicule, and neglect that Dolores or Felicia (not their real names) have had to deal with, I’d probably considering carving this line into my own arm. My own self-knowledge, the seed of which was planted at Elisabeth Irwin about the transformational experience of social exploration through writing, returns with a force that on some days leave me breathless.
One of the more common childhood experiences they share is bullying. One girl, Gina, describes daily bullying in elementary school because of her severe reading disability — undiagnosed, untreated — until she wound up in juvenile hall where, ironically, she is finally receiving medication and some remedial reading lessons. Another, Flora, shared with me how her foster parents beat her and deprived her of food, and so she hit the streets, becoming a prostitute (falling prey to commercial sexual exploitation) at 15 because she was hungry. When I return to Crossroads, where my students are well aware of the “other” place I teach, I try to reconcile the huge differences between these two groups. But they — my private (independent) school students and my incarcerated students — are, after all, teenagers with similar needs, insecurities, and urges. And who is to say I have to understand how these two worlds of privilege and neglect could exist side by side, within a half hour’s drive from one another? I have learned that one of the most important things I can do is to simply show up prepared to listen and suspend judgment. The rest somehow sorts itself out.
Much of my instruction in the classroom about the intersection of violence and compassion seemed mostly academic until I crossed through that first security check-point at CJH, relinquished my driver’s license for an ID badge, and ventured deeper into the bowels of an institution surrounded by razor wire. Here, rehabilitation is a dim concept. What I do know from my years of working with children and teens is that they trust implicitly those adults whom they naturally believe will care for them. When you deprive a child of love and attention, you set that child up for all kinds of trouble: anxiety, psychological disorders, a lifetime of suffering — which often turns outward to make others suffer. And when a child’s parents, first and foremost, reject their own offspring, the child has a Sisyphean task of growing up normally. Add to that juvenile justice and foster care systems that routinely disappoint children and teens and it’s no wonder the number of offenders and the rate of recidivism just keep rising.
How is it that parents, coaches, religious leaders, foster-care case workers, lawyers, judges, and teachers — all adults whose jobs it is to raise children, to teach them right from wrong, and to provide them with a sense of safety and support — fail some (so many) children time and again?
As an English teacher, I have grown to love Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest, whom Prospero enslaves. Caliban growls to his Master, “You have taught me language/and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/For learning me your language!”
Although he’s not literally pieced together from different body parts like Frankenstein’s Monster, Caliban is just as profoundly divided between what makes him human (language, table manners even) and what keeps him animal (sexual aggression, strong survival instincts). He is unable to feel part of the human world, but he has just enough language to articulate his misery. Where Caliban plots against Prospero and Frankenstein’s Monster threatens his Maker with revenge for being so mistreated, so too do my students in detention, fueled by years of neglect and abuse. Most of them usually leave detention with little more than better criminal skills instead of socially appropriate ways of coping with life on the Outz. While I will not make excuses for adolescent aggression, it’s incumbent upon us to understand its origins and help teenagers handle their impulses in a way that supports peaceful self-expression.
As for me, I credit my drama teacher, Rick Mokler, in the public high school I attended in California with recognizing my true character and bringing out the best in me. Mr. Mokler always made me feel seen and heard. He didn’t rush me as I tried to explain myself, no matter how much I fumbled for the right words. My sense of “otherness” (being foreign-born, speaking with an indecipherably strange accent) was put to good use as he guided me through Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and other plays.
To be an adolescent is to be sorely aware of everything that makes you different. It doesn’t matter that much of what causes such acute self-conscientiousness is either inconsequential or altogether imaginary by adult standards. It really doesn’t. Although I was fortunate enough to have Rick as my mentor and guide, imagine anticipating the taunts, teasing, and outright violence of every school day for those unlucky enough to have no one to protect and guide them. While there are anti-bullying campaigns aplenty, they don’t seem to protect those targeted children enough to keep them out of juvenile hall once they decide to strike back. Without the language to articulate their frustration, my students only have their closed fists.
The Discipline Disparities Collaborative, a research group at Indiana University, independent of the U.S. Department of Education’s similar findings, discovered that although black children comprise 18 percent of those in preschool programs, they make up more than half of those children suspended more than once. The reason why children of color predominate in the juvenile justice system is far more complicated than bullying and suspension. Simply living in poverty — with a lack of access to healthy food, good schools, health care, and stable homes — makes life far more challenging for these children. Add to this the enormous financial incentive for keeping our detention halls and prisons full to bursting. In a keynote speech at the Progressive Education Network conference in fall 2013, Angela Davis described the school-to-prison pipeline in which students of color are targeted at a very young age. What may be considered in the scope of normal adolescent behavior often lands these students in the hands of school police. From there, it becomes increasingly difficult for those students to shake that stigma of troublemaker. Prisons employ people, sometimes whole towns. Taken from a purely pragmatic perspective, it’s far cheaper to offer birth control and sex education classes to young people, as well as decent neonatal care and education for pregnant teens than it is to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical attention to the more than 61,000 incarcerated minors in the United States, as estimated by the Office of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in 2011. Even so, there are some days when I walk into my class at CJH and there aren’t enough cold metal seats for all the kids.
If youthful offenders are somewhat unstable going in, they most certainly are coming out. The estimates for recidivism range from 70 percent to 74 percent — with a staggeringly poor 30 percent who actually manage to stay out. One administrator, who works for a nonprofit organization that brings writing programs into juvenile halls and detention camps around Los Angeles County, noted that one particular juvenile was in and out of the halls 10 times. Ten times. There is so much that’s broken in our system of justice, but I cling to the absolute knowledge that, given an opportunity to write, something shakes loose — and where there was utter despair, now there is a glimmer of hope.
As I was cleaning up after a CJH writing class not too long ago, one of my girls addressed a nearby probation officer (guard) as “Mama.” I thought I had heard incorrectly, but then the girl said again, “Mama, mother!” The staff member (guard) turned, and smiling, replied, “What, child?” Not what you would expect from a relationship where the “Mama” has the power to pepper spray her young if they get out of hand, but sometimes this is the closest a teenager will get to having a caring mother. I have seen some heroic and some questionable treatment of detained minors. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, but who, indeed, is truly watching?
When I visit Bethany, a former student in a psychiatric facility for teens, she puts her head on my shoulder and weeps. I don’t need more treatment, she cries, I need a mother. Instead of being crushed under the weight of such anguish, I must be satisfied for the moment that listening is, in and of itself, restorative. Allowing a space in the midst of teaching to hold their sorrow without being overwhelmed by it has instructed me in surprising ways.
As a progressive educator, I discover anew that what makes us monstrous is not only apparent on the outside — our deformities, our scars, our self-inflicted wounds — but the despair, anger, and frustration that burn on the inside. The voices of those teachers who reached out to me as a teenager return when I am most of need of their guidance. And moving between privilege and poverty, an elite education and an education on the streets, I hear them — and do what I can to help others hear.