A KIND AND JUST PARENT:
The Children of Juvenile Court
By William Ayers
Beacon Press, 206 pages, $22
Amid today’s alarming reports of juvenile crime, and political demands for youths to be tried as adults, calls for leniency and special reform-minded treatment for juvenile offenders seem like the stuff of another century. Indeed, it was almost a century ago when the world’s first juvenile court was formed, on July 1, 1899, in Chicago, at the behest of Jane Addams and the women of Hull House.
Their vision of a nurturing child-justice system provides the title of William Ayers’ latest book, “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court.” But as Ayers ironically demonstrates, the hope that the courts would treat their youthful charges “as a kind and just parent” might has long since been abandoned and replaced by a huge, stagnant bureaucracy and a system in which increasing numbers are incarcerated and warehoused, and in which teenage life is wasted and aspirations are expendable.
In the first two years of its existence, Cook County’s Juvenile Court reduced the number of children in the County Jail from 1,705 to 60. Today, however, the system has become a repository for some 75,000 cases that include not only delinquents but children who are neglected and abused. And, as Ayers points out, “Compared to the population as a whole, poor kids (95%), African-American (80%) and Latino (15%) kids, and boys (9O%) are grossly over-represented” in a system that costs more to incarcerate each inmate than it costs for room, board and tuition at the most elite prep schools in the U.S.
Ayers–a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as a teacher and observer in the Juvenile Court system–broke through these sad statistics by immersing himself in the daily life of the court’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (commonly known as the Audy Home), where he encountered some of these teenagers and their anger and disillusionment, as well as their hopes and dreams. He writes about them and about committed, unrelenting teachers at the Audy Home’s Nancy B. Jefferson School who, for many of the young men, were the only steady beacon in their lives. It is in these individuals that Ayers sees the slightest glimmer of what could be the surrogate “kind and just parent.”
But the kind of teachers he focuses on–like Willie Baldwin and Frank Tobin, or “Mr. B” and “Tobs” as they are known to the inmates–are few and far between, and tragically not enough for the many young men who pass through their classrooms between courts, incarceration or custody. A few of their captive students might find redemption and productivity, but most will be incarcerated for most of their lives, or be released to live in poverty or die a premature death.
Ayers also focuses on the hypnotic mix of naivete and horror represented by a half-dozen young inmates, such as Jeff (charged with first-degree murder in shooting a rival drug dealer eight times) and Jesus (an illiterate youth charged with the drive-by murder of a 13-year-old). Unfortunately, Ayers cannot delve deeply enough into each of these and other young men’s lives, so the reader does not get a real understanding of who they are as people. But this could be emblematic of the transient nature of their passage through the detention center.
Ayers is, however, able to get some insight into their personalities through his skill at documenting their banter–from the poignancy to the anger and occasional hopelessness that routinely occur in the classroom. In one of the most powerful chapters of the book, Ayers lets the tape recorder run as Alex Correa, a former, habitual Audy Home inmate who also served time in state prison for murder, returns to tell his story to a group of riveted teenagers:
” `You can get everything inside (prison) you can get outside–drugs, alcohol, sex, weapons. It’s set up for you to go on living the same life you’ve been living. . . . (At the Audy Home) Tobs told me not to sum up my life by one act. . . . “You’re not a killer Alex,” Frank would say. “You’re a human being. You’ve got a mind and you’ve got a heart. You’ve got a soul. Now you’ve got to make something of yourself.” ‘ “
It was that constant encouragement at Audy, along with his inner strength, that motivated Alex to get his life together during his years in the penitentiary. Today he is a successful physical-fitness instructor. But what made Alex strong and others not? As he has astutely put it, many of the young men face a system that pushes them to “go on living the same life you’ve been living.”
Ayers points out, as has been documented time and again, that the vast majority of those who end up in the juvenile-justice system nationwide are poor, alienated, abandoned by one or both parents, neglected and abused.
Ayers does not provide any easy solutions, nor should he be expected to. He methodically cites statistics showing how horribly the juvenile-justice system is failing locally and nationwide. And he deftly takes on alarmist scholars who broadbrush disenfranchised teenagers as “superpredators.” Ayers also criticizes “three-strikes” legislation aimed at repeat offenders, and intractable drug laws that have filled not only juvenile facilities but prisons all over the country with non-violent offenders whose lives spiral through a system that accelerates, rather than reforms, their erroneous behavior.
No one person can overhaul a system, but, as Jane Addams’ and other radical movements have demonstrated, many people can. There must continue to be thoughtful books like Ayers’ that illustrate the profound flaws of today’s juvenile-justice system and society’s abandonment of the young and poor. Ayers’ book provides a valuable step in understanding what is happening, and, with this, he has done his best to be one of our “kind and just parents.”
