Posted by pancho (148.244.221.215) on November 24, 2001 at 12:25:50:
Daniel Barnes. That’s his real name. Some people aren’t afraid of who they are. He was one of the boys the State of Washington sent to prison. He came to live with me and the five other boys I had at The Group Home in Seattle, Washington in 1972. I started The Group Home…that was the unglamorous name I gave it, after working for a year as a volunteer investigator with the Juvenile Division of the Public Defenders. I was toying with the idea of becoming a lawyer and thought the best way to figure out if I wanted to do it was work with lawyers. They didn’t pay me money, I had a job pumping gas, but what I learned you couldn’t have bought anywhere.
Years later when I went back to school to get a degree in Sociology, a professor of mine from whom I took two classes, stopped me outside of class one day and said I needn’t bother coming to either class any more, he would give me an “A” in both…just stay away. That’s how good my education with the boys and girls I met and lived with was.
After working with the Public Defender for a year it dawned on me that the overwhelming majority of the children I had seen weren’t criminals at all…their parents were, but they couldn’t really be held accountable because their parents before them were the criminals, but even THEY weren’t to blame because their parents…you get the picture. Most of these children came from abusive homes, the parents of whom had come from the same background, and if anything the destructive and rebellious behavior all of them displayed, as children, was completely justified and normal, considering where and how theyd been raised. And what they did to their own children, when the time came, was about as logical a progression as it would be to expect good parenting to develop in people who’d seen the article as children themselves.
I couldn’t really pin the blame on any of them, any except the State of Washington and its Child Welfare Services, and Juvenile Courts, and District Attorneys Office, Detention Hall Supervisors and staff and the whole lot of them who made their living from the misery of a bunch kids who hadn’t a friend in the world that wasn’t paid to act like one. The children, unloved and uneducated as most of them were, had no way of knowing any better, the State should have. But for all of that, children were being hurt, children were being driven to cold fury which in time would result in a first minor crime, then another, until their rap sheets would justify the harsher treatment just waiting for them to earn it. Most children like these started out as wards of the court. That is, their living conditions were so bad they were placed in the custody of the State which spent as little as it could on them, maintaining their bleak existence until some minor infraction resulted in charges being brought and so on. These kids were in jails merely because they were minors…that is a crime of |”Status”. The Constitution stipulates that no one is to be discriminated against or treated differently, under the law, because of their age alone. But who gives a damn for the Constitution any more.
There are three categories a kid can fall under when his or her path crosses the Law. The easiest is “Dependent”, which means the kid has no resources, no home, parents etc and must become dependent on the State. That is not a criminal designation at all, sort of like losing your house to a flood and becoming dependent on the Red Cross and FEMA to get your life back together. The next category is “Incorrigible”. This signifies that the kid is behaving in ways the parents can’t control. That can be anything from terrorizing the neighborhood or having parents so drunk or uncaring that they teach nothing and discipline even worse…there is precious little Love to go around in any of these homes. Once a kid is tagged Incorrigible, everyone keeps an eye out for the first signs of criminal behavior…because they know it’s going to appear sooner or later, though they never see what they do to bring it on. The final category is “Delinquent”, they still wont come out and call the kid a criminal, but the treatment is the same, especially in recent years when America has stepped up its War on Everything.
The progression usually went from Dependent to Incorrigible to Delinquent, and you’d swear it was some sort of a school in which the teachers just passed you along till graduation day landed you in a State Correctional Facility, a prison by any other name. I saw ten year old boys and girls who’d been abused repeatedly in their homes by a succession of drunken and mean boyfriends of their mothers, come to the Detention Center’s Primary Unit…that’s for younger children… they’re the only ones allowed to see sunshine regularly, only to sit there for weeks because no foster home would take them, and there weren’t enough Group Homes to go around. Invariably that child would become despondent and surly, unloved as it had always been, and this would lead to behavioral problems which would only be aggravated by the uncaring and downright stupid treatment they received, that and the anger they felt inside over never understanding just where they’d screwed up so badly that they should land in jail, while the bastard who’d raped them in every way, and the mother who’d done nothing about it, remained free.
A few acts of incorrigibility, duly noted down on their records, after going unheeded, after not being seen for what they really were…a cry of a sparrow being ground into dust… and the first minor “delinquent” act would come next. Maybe the kid started stealing from others, or the child hit someone, or it tried to run away. Any of these acts, combined with the frustration the staff was feeling at not being able to find a home to take the kid…as the Law specified that no Dependent child could be held for more than 60 days without being sent somewhere else, UNLESS a new petition had been filed charging the kid with some new or added infraction…BINGO…the way out for an overworked staff with no resources, living in fear that they themselves might be out of luck soon and out on the street looking for another job. It wasn’t difficult to practice alchemy in those prisons, to take a perfectly normal and healthy child, a child whose every rational instinct told it to pull its hand from the fire or slap that rapist and run from the house, to turn that child from a sad Dependent, to a surly Incorrigible, to a cold Delinquent. Wasn’t hard at all…I saw it happen lots of times and it’s happening today.
Daniel Barnes pulled off one of the neatest stunts in the history of the Washington State Correctional Department, or whatever it was called. Daniel was almost seventeen when I met him. I pleasant looking kid, a mop of hair, warm brown eyes he kept shaded…quiet, soft spoken, never raised his voice. He had a little boy in him that loved to laugh, loved to go fishing at the many creeks and streams of the wooded hills north of Seattle in the small town he came from. His father was an alcoholic and abusive. He was an only child, a lonely kid with a mother as cold as glaciers who didn’t have a drop of blood in her you couldn’t use for anti freeze. Like every presidential candidate for the last several years Daniel smoked dope. He never hurt anybody, just sit there fishing in the sunshine or leaning against a tree in the shade with a joint dangling from his lip. He had a job working, went to school, though it bored him silly. It was a small town he lived in, small people with small minds who demanded revenge when Daniel was caught smoking a joint and fishing one day, a day when he should have been at school. They arrested him, confiscated his unicycle, and he entered the jaws of the Juvenile Justice system. They have a quaint way with them, the State does. They give the most serene and bucolic names to the most gruesome blocks of concrete buildings and barbed fences imaginable. Daniel was found guilty of the marijuana charge, that was added to the other charges brought against him by his own mother cause she didn’t know how to raise an ant, let alone a breathing, thinking, human bean. It looked to the Courts like Daniel was on a steadily increasing roll right into perdition and they sentenced him to a year in prison.
Whenever a kid was sentenced to prison he was sent off to a place called Maple Lane Diagnostic Center where the sorriest bunch of psychologists you could imagine, evaluated each kid, just to show you all that the State had it’s heart in the right place…after all, they might have made a mistake, and before the last steel door closed on the kid, they wanted to be sure the sentencing judge hadn’t screwed up any worse then they usually did. No kid ever got out of there for there were no mistakes allowed.
At another time in America, Daniel would have been a character right out of a book. That was a time when they were building America and they needed kids like Daniel to skip the factory educations and the shoes too if need be…to just lean back against a warm tree trunk by a stream and watch your line trail out downstream…maybe a nasty butt end of a cigar in your lip, or a joint, thinking lazily of nothing particular, and hurting no one. But that couldn’t last long…a Revolution always swallows up its children and Daniel met the fate Huckleberry Finn would have if he’d been so unfortunate as to live in 1972.
When Daniel entered Maple Lane, with a brown bag of belongings they took away from him at the gate, he entered as near an approximation of Hell as a kid should ever know. It was a hell complete with a chapel and a resident staff of psychologists and what nots who were in prison themselves…a prison of their own mediocrity and bitterness at never having fulfilled any kind of a promise at all. These people were the dregs of the professional world… they knew it…and they labored mightily to crush any wayward sign of life out of any living human being…as it had been sucked out of them. Who else but an utter failure as a human being could sit there and “process” broken hearted children who had no other defense or protection in this world than their own frail bodies which they hurled repeatedly at the stony walls of a nation’s indifference. It is a major criminal offense to hurl that body at that indifference, if the kid does it. It is “Justice” when the nations throws that body away.
A staff psychologist began interviewing Daniel several times a day. The rest of the time he was locked down with a bunch of other boys, many of them in there for far more serious crimes. Daniel kept apart from the rest and dreamed of his fishing pole and the quiet forests of Washington. The psychologist, trained in a dime store sort of way with tag ends and bits and pieces of things he hardly understood, played a sort of a game with Daniel…just the thing for a kid looking forward to 365 days with no sunshine, no nothing that wasn’t regulated or allowed. He asked Daniel to take a seat opposite to him in a bare little room. Next to the psychologist was an empty chair. He asked Daniel to visualize his mother sitting on that empty chair…what would he like to say to her that he had never said before…things repressed and tucked away in his guilty unconscious, or wherever a person is supposed to keep his laundry.
The first several times this happened Daniel sat there mute, wouldn’t say a word. All that earned him was a quick trip back to his cell and a notation on his evaluation sheet that he was “uncooperative”. This went on for several days till one day the man noticed a tear working its way out the corner of Daniel’s eye…one tear, and the man was happy. He still wouldn’t say anything and went back to his cell, but now there was hope beginning to rise in the psychologist’s mind, and if there had been a sheet to evaluate him with you could have written down “Hopeful”, or Damn Fool just as easily.
After a few more sessions in which Daniel managed another tear and then one or two more, a “breakthrough” was reached. After days of silence during which he’d said not a word and only managed to bring out a trickle of tears, he burst forth into an uncontrollable rage…he shouted obscenities at his “mother” the chair…he walked about in an agitated state, stalked the corners of the room spewing out the kind of filth only a well trained psychologist would want to hear, longs and prays to hear. Then, without warning, he attacked his “mother”…kicked at her furiously, punched the varnished pine of his mother’s head and threw the damn woman into a corner where she broke her back leg. Overcome with remorse, he stooped over her, picked up the busted leg, collected the splinters, stood her up, she was shakey…and, to the sound of a furiously scribbling pencil in the background, he… KISSED HIS MOTHER.
How the hell he kept a straight face during that I never could understand. The psychologist, flattered beyond belief, vindicated at last for all the hours spent pouring over books written by the great luminaries of his trade…filed a report replete with his own praises, sung by himself, about how he had managed to get one kid, ONE KID…to admit his most repressed stuff…to play out and “release” the Primal Scream…I can’t go on with this part…makes me sick.
Anyway…Daniel Barnes became the first kid in the history of the State Correctional System, to walk out of Maple Lane Diagnostic Center without being sent on to State Prison…which is where everyone from the Judge on down said he belonged. He walked out of there in five weeks with his bag full of clothing and came directly to me…and I admired him and loved him for it.