Читать книгу Boy With A Knife - Jean Trounstine - Страница 8

INTRODUCTION

There is another Lady Justice, less well-known than the fair-minded goddess that adorns our courthouses. She is “Lady Justice Red,” a distortion of the icon in robes and blindfold. Lady Justice Red is not the impartial arbiter of cases that come before her.¹ Instead, she looks away from whatever she is judging. Her robes are blotted with blood. She “sees what she is paid to see,” her vision blurred behind bright red goggles.² Her sword lacks the acuity to cut through the evidence for and against those who appear before her. Rather than reason, Lady Justice Red relies on dice, cupped in one side of the Scales of Justice, which she rolls when judging the unfortunate.

And so it was, in a country ruled by Lady Justice Red, that sixteen-year-old Massachusetts high school sophomore Karter Kane Reed was charged with first-degree murder and ultimately sentenced to life in an adult prison. According to the Boston Herald, on April 12, 1993, Karter “stormed” into a high school classroom and stabbed an unarmed boy named Jason Robinson, also sixteen years old.³ The reasons why evolved for Karter as he understood more about himself, but the facts were distilled by many news sources into this: Karter Reed, along with two friends, arrived at a local high school to finish an earlier fight, and their actions set off a firestorm in the quiet town of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Something had, as Karter himself later professed, gone “horribly wrong” in his life.⁴

While Karter’s stabbing of Jason Robinson is not in dispute, the penalty for the crime is. Karter was tried and convicted as an adult, sent to prison for the rest of his life, with only the possibility of obtaining his freedom after serving fifteen years. At the time of Karter’s sentencing, the United States was a country that set controversial boundaries where childhood ended and adulthood began in terms of criminal responsibility.⁵ Until 2005, the US was the only nation that still sanctioned the death penalty for youth.⁶ Unlike 194 other countries, the United States, along with Somalia and South Sudan, were the only ones (and still are) not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty designed to protect children from a variety of abuses—including forbidding a life sentence without the possibility of parole.⁷

At the time of Karter’s arraignment, prosecutors could suggest, and even insist, that sixteen-year-olds were incapable of change, ignoring what science has since proved: that teenagers are not little adults, psychologically, physically, or socially.⁸ Teens who killed could be transferred to the adult system, where they would mix with the general prison population—that is, if they weren’t kept in solitary confinement, to protect them from rape and other bodily harm. Notably, these imprisoned youths were often refused the benefit of education or therapy, programs that are more available in the juvenile system; nor were they protected from psychological harm.

Today, more than twenty years later, we have learned that it is wrong to treat kids as if they were little adults, no matter what crime they may have committed. Yet many of the same policies that impacted Karter Reed back in the 1990s continue to affect incarcerated youth today. On average, approximately 250,000 youths are currently processed in adult courts each year, a large number for drugs, burglary, theft, and property crimes, as well as for violent acts.⁹ While the age of adulthood in all states but New York and North Carolina (as of 2015) is eighteen, juveniles as young as twelve in Colorado can be tried as adults for capital crimes.¹⁰ Of the 250,000 facing adult imprisonment, the Sentencing Project reported in 2013 that 10,000 had been convicted of crimes that occurred before they turned eighteen, and subsequently resulted in life sentences behind bars.¹¹ These are boys and girls, barely having earned their driver’s license, too young to vote, too young to legally buy alcohol or cigarettes, who are locked away with adult men and women. This, in spite of the fact that 90 percent of juveniles, even those convicted of murder, grow out of criminal behavior as they age.¹²

Part of what makes this practice unconscionable is that teens who are convicted and sentenced as adults actually have higher recidivism rates than those sentenced to juvenile jails; that is, they are rearrested and returned to prison more frequently.¹³ It is not that juvenile jails don’t have their problems too, but teens in adult prisons suffer dire consequences. They are thirty-six times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile detention facilities.¹⁴ They are one hundred percent more likely to face physical assault by staff than those in juvenile placements.¹⁵ They are often labelled “felons” for life, receive less support from families, and far less in the way of counseling, medical care, and education; and when they’re released, finding jobs is more difficult.¹⁶ Putting young people in state prisons essentially silences them, or as Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Jay Blitzman wrote, “Most committed juveniles do not have access to prisoner rights projects, institutionalized methods of legal redress, or other advocacy; their association with court appointed counsel, in most instances, ends when they are sentenced and the lawyer has filed for his/her reimbursement.”¹⁷

Karter Reed at sixteen was a pretty ordinary figure—slight build, dirty-blonde hair, meticulously groomed, wearing the style of the era in baggy pants and an oversized shirt. A skateboarder who often bombed with girls, he was being raised by his mother Sharon; his father, Derek, was in prison for dealing cocaine. In his own words, Karter was a “good kid.” He wrote in 2008, “I didn’t drink, smoke, sell, or use drugs. I’d never been suspended from school, wasn’t in a gang, and certainly wasn’t known for getting into fights. I occasionally made the honor roll, and usually had perfect attendance. I often babysat my two little sisters, and had been an altar boy, and was poised to become the first in my family to attend college.”

Because of his youth, Karter Reed at age sixteen was not so different from many of the other 250,000 young people who today face adult courts. Their criminal responsibility is real, but it must be framed by age, as well as how race and class have impacted the US punishment system. In The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, scholars Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western, give us insight into Karter’s crime, writing that such acts must be “embedded in the context of social and economic disadvantage.”¹⁸ However, the kind of harsh sentencing that Karter faced as a young white man—in his case, a life sentence—has been meted out most unfairly to youth of color across the US.¹⁹ At every step of the process, beginning with arrest and ending with whether or not a juvenile will be held in an adult state prison, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans receive harsher treatment than whites. Black youth comprise 62 percent of those sent to adult courts, and are nine times more likely to receive an adult prison sentence than white defendants.²⁰ In spite of the fact that states have been collecting data on these inequities since 1974 through the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, most have still not taken the important extra step to address preventing racial injustice in our punishment system.²¹

Although Karter is not a person of color, his story is still important, as it is deeply rooted in the landscape of juveniles facing harsh sentencing and punishment. The researcher and activist Nell Bernstein found that “between 80% and 90% of all American teenagers in confidential interviews acknowledge[d] having committed a delinquent act serious enough under the law to get them incarcerated.”²² Karter’s crime was no simple delinquent act, but his story shows the universality of young people swept up in the madness called “tough on crime.” Karter faced a justice system where a Massachusetts juvenile judge once said: “You ask why detention is so high. Some judges would say they use it as a teaching tool for kids.”²³ However, as studies have shown, such “lessons” have backfired: sending juveniles to adult prisons doesn’t make us safer.²⁴

Karter’s trial occurred almost twenty years before Miller v. Alabama, the 2012 decision in which the Supreme Court declared that sentencing juvenile murderers to life behind bars with no possibility of parole violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The importance of Miller to Karter’s case—and to many others—is that juveniles often take plea bargains so they won’t end up in prison for life, or face jury trials where the prosecutor seeks a first-degree murder conviction. Under Miller, the mandatory sentence of life without parole is no longer required by law for juvenile first-degree murder.²⁵ In spite of this ruling, as of 2015, fourteen states still set no minimum age in their bylaws for trying and sentencing children as adults.²⁶

Joshua Rovner, State Advocacy Associate at the Sentencing Project, has pointed out that of the fourteen states that allow the sentence of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP), not all use it, including New York, Maine, and Rhode Island.²⁷ But some states changed their laws after Miller, adding many years before parole eligibility, and could be seen as out of compliance with a ruling that inferred that young people have the capacity to change.²⁸ Requiring a boy or girl to serve a minimum of forty years before they become parole-eligible hardly seems in the spirit of giving juveniles a serious chance at release.²⁹ This is the case in Texas and Nebraska. Almost as bad are the thirty-five years required by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana. (The international standard for incarceration of juveniles for the most serious crimes is ten or fifteen years prior to parole eligibility.³⁰) Thirty-five or forty years prohibits a meaningful opportunity for review to those youth who demonstrate that they have earned parole.³¹

There has been some positive change in this country’s attitude towards harsh policies for youth since Karter went to prison. The inhumanity of juveniles serving time in solitary confinement is an example. Solitary, where one can spend at least twenty-two out of twenty-four hours a day locked up, gained particular attention after the case of Kalief Browder shocked the nation. Browder was arrested at age sixteen for robbery, a crime he said he never committed.³² He spent two years in solitary confinement during his three years at New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex, where he tried to hang himself twice; he had been abused by guards and other prisoners, not to mention the agony he suffered from isolation—all this despite the fact that he had never been convicted of a crime.³³ After his release from Rikers in 2013, he wrestled with all of the scars suffered from being a youth incarcerated with adults, and he hung himself less than two years later.³⁴ While California passed a bill to limit youth solitary in 2015, as of this writing, only seven other states limit its use.³⁵ Likewise, as policymakers struggle with how to treat juveniles in light of recent Supreme Court rulings, the use of practices designed for adults (e.g. shackling kids when they are transported to or appear in court) have come into question.³⁶

By November 2007, Karter had served nearly fifteen years of his life sentence and was someone who Robert Kinscherff, a psychologist who testified on Karter’s behalf during his trial, called “a poster boy for success.”³⁷ While behind bars, Karter had educated himself, read hundreds of books, stayed away from the troublemakers and sexual predators, and succeeded in every program he could participate in, from barbering to emotional awareness. He dreamed of what he would do if he earned parole: become a sociologist, help his stepbrother grow up, find someone to love and start a family with. And, every day, he thought of the boy he had killed. A few weeks before his parole hearing in 2008, he wrote, “I am torn between the dreams I have for myself and my family, and the thoughts of dreams I’ve stolen from another family.”

Karter’s story itself makes the argument why we must stop incarcerating juveniles in adult prisons. Kids are hardly incapable of change. This has led many activists, families, prisoners, and organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation to ask if our society will ever give up its incarceration model for youth and embrace “a more constructive, humane, and cost effective paradigm for how we treat, educate, and punish youth who break the law.”³⁸

The trend has been mixed in many states, which have continued to pass bad laws in response to brutal crimes.³⁹ This is, in part, because a horrendous crime draws outrage from the press and an outcry from the public, and then we tend to legislate by anecdote.⁴⁰ Stories can be used for political advantage by the powers that be, and before we know it, the need for change, and in some cases, vengeance, turns too quickly into ill-conceived laws.⁴¹ For example, in 2014, Massachusetts passed harsher juvenile sentencing laws for first-degree lifers, setting parole eligibility between twenty and thirty years, allowing that a youth as young as fourteen could receive thirty years before parole eligibility if he was found guilty of a heinous murder.⁴² This was a reaction to the Diatchenko v. District Attorney ruling, the groundbreaking 2013 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which struck down all sentences of life without parole for juveniles.⁴³

In 2014, Karter went with me to see State Senator William Brownsberger, then head of the Judiciary Committee, to protest the impending changes in the law. Karter told Brownsberger that many of those youths sentenced to JLWOP will grow up and age out of criminal behavior while others will dramatically change behind bars. He spoke out for second chances. But he was unable to stop the punitive attitude that still has hold all across this country.

I first met Karter Reed by mail in November 2007. He’d come across a book I’d written, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison, and wanted to know if I could help a friend, a female prisoner who wanted information about parole.⁴⁴ I was no longer working at the women’s prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, where I taught and directed plays for almost ten years, but Karter could not have known that. He was merely reaching out to a name on a book jacket. Although he did not say so, when I received that first letter, I thought that perhaps Karter wanted help for himself, too.

For more than twenty years I’d worked with women in the criminal justice system and believed the theory of the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who coined the phrase “a woman behind bars is not a dangerous man.”⁴⁵ I was suspicious of male prisoners, imagining them to be stereotypically brutal and aggressive, i.e. dangerous.⁴⁶ I had never received a letter from a young man sentenced to prison for second-degree murder. I thought long and hard about whether to answer someone who said he had recreated himself in prison but who in news articles had been condemned as a “monster,” carrying out a “methodical crime.”⁴⁷

Perhaps I would send just one reply. But then another letter followed, and soon another. Pulled in by his language, a little awed by the quality of the books he’d read, and genuinely shocked that a sixteen-year-old could be sentenced to life with only the possibility of ever getting out of prison, I began to correspond with Karter. We each wrote more than one hundred letters after that first one in November 2007. The content of Karter’s letters inform much of this book, and his thoughts and insights helped me understand what a person sentenced as a child goes through behind bars. The discrepancy between the man I saw in his letters and the boy described by prosecutors, the press, and school officials in the town of Dartmouth urged me to reconsider how I thought about juveniles who kill.⁴⁸

While writing this book, I met Karter in person five times. The first was in January 2008, when I took students to the state prison for men in Shirley, Massachusetts, to hear Karter and several other convicted murderers talk about their botched lives, what brought them to crime, and the difficulty of change behind bars. It was that meeting, and the swirl of questions about justice that resulted from it, that drew me in to writing Boy with a Knife. I wondered: Would these once-juvenile murderers ever get out of prison? Or would they face parole boards that felt pressured to respond to victims’ rights advocates who resisted paroling prisoners, and to the communities who wanted no part in their return? And: Would these prisoners ultimately end up living behind bars for the rest of their lives, even if they had not been sentenced to life without parole? What would it mean to take on a system that insisted on keeping young people locked up in spite of personal transformation?

But it was the doggedness of Karter Reed, the way he kept at his own case, his self-development, and his belief that everyone deserves a second chance, which persuaded me to share his story, and show how it connects to our country’s harsh policies for juveniles who commit violent crimes. Karter refused to settle for anything less than what he felt was justice. He had the support and inner strength to face the consequences of his actions and was not crushed by unjust punishment. In some circles, one might call him just plain lucky. But those who know Karter and the criminal justice system would argue that he is an example of overcoming the odds. He floundered and failed along the way, but eventually he was able to beat Lady Justice Red at her own game.