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Peace — It Takes Work
By jodifrank on 2010-10-12 12:03:06
Whether nations are using means of diplomacy to avoid a war or juvenile delinquents here at home are being rehabilitated so
that they can become citizens who are loved and needed in society, peace in far and near places takes work. On an individual
level, even if you and your spouse are best friends and have a pristine relationship, it takes a little effort to fend off the
negativity that life's turn of events can bring us. I received a stark reminder of this as I read excerpts from interviews
conducted in spring 2007 by an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney with teenage girls imprisoned in Texas
juvenile correctional facilities. The excerpts appeared in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. In 2008, the ACLU filed a
class action lawsuit against the Texas Youth Commission, which runs the state's juvenile prison system, initially on behalf of
five girls who said they were regularly placed in solitary confinement and were subjected to physical force on a regular basis
that included being chained and handcuffed. The suit was dismissed last October on procedural grounds. Public attention the
year before, in 2007, focused on the child sex abuse scandal in which boys were victimized by staff members at the West
Texas State School, part of the state juvenile correctional system. What a lifetime nightmare that these boys likely will go
through for years to come. Now, in reading the girls' excerpts about their experiences, which also included rape, I am
haunted by the violence perpetrated by staff members, whose job it is to help these children overcome anger and provide
them with some basic tools to help them succeed in the world at large. If the crimes alleged were not so heinous, I would
say what a joke it is to think a subculture that perpetuates demeaning violence can even begin to accomplish the task of
transforming troubled children into successful adults. Except that it is no joke. Honestly, the excerpts reminded me of the
Guantanamo Bay prisons, which is not so far off the mark, except that the youths were not exposed to the gnashing teeth of
dogs and none of them, to my knowledge, died as a result of such abuse. Consider what one girl said: Jn security, they have
the rooms freezing cold. If you get admitted, you wear an orange shirt and black shorts, and they don't care — they leave it
freezing. They say, if you don't want to get frozen, don't come down here. ... There's blood on the walls from students who cut
themselves. I remember I was very sick from drinking bleach, and I started throwing up and they made me sit in the room
with the throw-up for 24 hours. I was foaming at the mouth because they would not let me clean it up, and I kept throwing
up and there was nothing left to throw up. And another: I've seen a few times when people would get restrained, and it was
too rough, in my opinion. ... The last time I got restrained they put me on the floor and held their knee on the side of my head
into the linoleum floor, and I came out of it with a black eye. And a third: We used to wear our pants and our T-shirts off
campus, like, say, if we are going to the doctor. Now we have to wear oranges (sic), we have to wear shackles, and we have
to wear handcuffs. Say someone dies in your family: you have to wear oranges and shackles to their funeral. Besides being
a mechanism for control of power that does nothing to make a positive connection with someone (you beat him up; he still
does not like you), violence also results from laziness. It just takes too much time to create a structure that allows troubled
youths to really live and learn so the rest of us can continue to live in relative peace. What's even more disconcerting is that
it appears that people don't want this kind of nurturing environment to exist for such youngsters anyway. Consider the critics
who say that places such as the Ranch for Kids in Montana and other centers that focus on nature experiences as therapy
provide a distorted reality to troubled children (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/us/27ranch.html for the full story).
For some children — and for their parents — such therapeutic nature-oriented places are a last hope in finding some kind of
normalcy in the realities of life. What do the critics suggest as an alternative for these children — lock them away in an
isolated institution like what traditionally has been done? Apparently so. Because it's the easy way out. It's the same with
war. Not too long ago, my sister called in the middle of the day to tell me in an exasperated voice about the picture in Time
magazine of the Afghan woman who had her nose and ears sliced off. To her, that was a good enough reason for us to
continue the war in Afghanistan. What about the systematic raping in the Congo? Or the barbaric practice of stoning that
still takes place in various parts of the Middle East? Should we initiate a war in all those countries, too? If we did that,
chances are that the same victims would be ripped apart by bombs or grenades. That doesn't sound a whole lot better, I
intoned. She hesitantly agreed. What alternative could she offer? What did she even know — knowledge that she owned
herself — about the war in Afghanistan? What questions was she willing to ask? Why we are still in Afghanistan after 10
years, for instance? But, if you really think about it, the idea that we can liberate anyone from an oppressive tyranny through
war that kills people, destabilizes the country, destroys basic infrastructure for survival, and litters the countryside with
nuclear waste is reckless and arrogant. This same recklessness can be seen in how we treat our troubled youths, who are put
in shackles and handcuffs on a regular basis and thrown in what is essentially a dirty and dangerous dungeon. Even if they
come out of it in a few years, for many of these children, thrown in such correctional facilities turns into what amounts to a
life sentence, because they return to society as the walking dead who have the potential to do even more harm. Moreover,
once the forced lockdowns and assaults start occurring, when do the perpetuators say enough is enough? Or, perhaps they
simply don't know because they have never explored any other way. Consider the 18-year-old girl who was pregnant in one
of these Texas detention centers. When she went to the hospital to give birth, she was in shackles. The doctor couldn't
perform the necessary C-section with the chains on her. She said, "That's when the doctor told the officer to 'take the
shackles off or I'll cut them off." That's a good place to start in exploring a new solution.
