By The Editors

Don’t You Know
That It’s True,
That for me,
and for you,
The World is a ghetto

– War, 1972

In the past six months two separate bodies investigating New York State’s juvenile prisons – one a federal agency; the other, a state-appointed commission —  have produced scathing reports of a system beset by longstanding calamitous problems.

Both reports documented the existence of significant violence among the facilities’ youthful inmates, excessive use of force by guards against inmates, and a chronic lack of adequate funding and staffing of the facilities that has led to a seemingly complete inability to address even the most basic needs of the youths in their care.

For example, even though at least half of the 800 to 900 youths incarcerated in the state’s facilities have been diagnosed as suffering from at least one mental illness, the state agency charged with their care, the Office of Children and Family Services, has not had a full-time psychiatrist on its staff to ensure they receive proper treatment for years.

Currently, there are 17 psychiatrists employed by the system on a part-time and contract basis – but state officials acknowledge that their visits with the youths who need help are sporadic and the treatment haphazard.

In other words, the System works!

Yes, what else can one conclude from this recent documenting of a shameful, systemic malign neglect of society’s most vulnerable, most desperate youth – a neglect tolerated, if not actively promoted for decades by the state’s political structure and the public. You can’t construct a system this harmful to those it’s supposed to help by accident. You’ve got to work at it.

So, it has produced what it was meant to: institutions that are not centers of rehabilitation, but ones that set up its incarcerated residents for an existence full of danger on the inside and, once released, a likely descent into greater degradation.

The state commission, the Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, put it this way in its report: “It comes as no surprise then, that not only do youths leave facilities without having received the support they need to become law-abiding citizens, but many are also more angry, fearful or violent than they were when they entered.”

The systemic undermining of these individual youths’ chances to lead productive, not destructive, lives, in turn, compounds the social and economic problems that afflict many of the families and the communities they come from.

This is the ghetto dynamic at work.

We know what the ghetto dynamic is in relation to African Americans and Latino Americans (and the majority of the youths locked up in New York State’s juvenile facilities are black or Latino):

It is the mixing up in constantly shifting measures of a deliberate policy-driven callousness toward a minority – often accompanied by the majority’s deliberately-crafted ignorance of the effects of that policy on them – in order to confine them to a space of physical disrepair and psychological despair. And we know that this is usually done while continually spouting fervent expressions of good will and concern for the targets of the policy.

For far too many youths who have been consigned to the state’s juvenile facilities, the world has indeed been a ghetto.

But, now, there is reason to believe significant change is underway – from the concerted efforts of both child-welfare advocates and, even more importantly, government agencies as well. According to Child Welfare Watch, a publication of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, family court judges are increasingly choosing to send youths to alternative residential programs that have the capacity to offer proper guidance. And New York Governor David A. Paterson responded to the threat of a Justice Department takeover of the state system by appointing the blue-ribbon task force. That its mandate was to document the need for widespread reform is evident in the title of its report released in December: “Charting a New Course: A Blueprint for Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State.”

Its recommendations deserve the broadest discussion; for their point is that for those youths who have committed anti-social acts, the world of their future need not be a ghetto.