But one of us observed that when a kid is in detention, when he’s been locked up for a while and he sees his liberty subject to the whims of guards and judges and prosecutors, when his hope begins to fade, he comes to a point when the thought of tinting his stories to resemble a more reasonable truth becomes senseless. Who cares anymore? That’s when you start to see truth.




Our stories—those they share with us, and so like bread become not his, not hers or mine, but ours—often start with posturing or protest. Like a young man (not pictured) I interviewed during Mr Brett’s craft class yesterday. He complained about how they are treated (though he loved Mr Brett; they all love Mr. Brett) how infrequently they are allowed to flush their toilets, how they aren’t given enough water to drink, how they have to strip down before they go into their cells. In short, he vented.




(Have you ever vented? Just let your side of a story fly until it’s out of your system and you somehow feel better? It’s the same thing. There’s a reason for the toilet flushing regimen, for instance, that has to do with plumbing issues.)

And once the venting was done he became quiet, and he worked on his deft rendering of flaming words—literally words written in flame to celebrate Halloween—filling in a heavy orange outline that followed the line of the pre-printed coloring book image. And he shaded it inward, more lightly.

I sat and watched, and the camera ceased to be a platform. We exchanged insignificant words, the sort that construct the bridges in a conversation. And then he spoke of his family, of his mother who raised four siblings, and his brother who had died.

I let him continue shading in silence, uncertain of the sensitivity he might have about the death. And then I went out on a limb.

“How’d it happen.”

“Hospital killed him.”

“Recently?”

“No, he was a year older than me. I was just a baby and he was sick and the hospital gave him the wrong medicine and he died.”

And that was that. In fairness, I know nothing about what really happened with his brother, if it was a negligent death. But I do know he was telling the story as he knew it. He was recounting the lore of his family, the truth that he knew. Because he never knew this brother. He could not remember him. And although he was touched by his death, he was not touched with anger.

It’s an interesting thing, the way a camera fades. It’s remarkable how the truth avails itself when you listen quietly. Especially when you quietly listen to people unaccustomed to having an audience. Have patience and you can learn a lot from these people.

(As a fellow once noted: battered souls, if they persist, become wise souls.)

As he worked on his colored-pencil masterpiece this young man unburdened himself, just a little bit. That’s difficult to do when you spend all of your time around people with a desperate amount of unburdening to do.

He pushed his artwork across the table and observed it at arm’s length, then ran his long, feminine fingers across the colored pencils in his tin, took inventory and frowned.

“Damn,” he said. “Ain’t got no yellow.”

I’m sitting in Unit 13 of the DOC Facility for Girls in Indianapolis, waiting for the interview to end. Tiny cell, six adults, so I wait outside in the general population area. I sit alone on the floor with only a camera battery with which to occupy myself. A girl walks up and asks me if I would like a chair. Her hair is deftly braided. She’s white. I say, no thank you. I’m fine, and I smile.

The area where I sit is the common area onto which all of the cell doors open. This is the “day room” and it’s here that the girls spend most of their time when they aren’t in school. The tables are bolted to the floor and the chairs mounted on posts that extend from the center post of the table. One solid unit. The table top is laminated with the image of a checkers board.

Sunlight washes in from a row of windows at the far end of the room. Outside the window, chain link fence, razor wire, blue sky. Next to the window hangs a poster-sized piece of paper drafted with magic marker, sloppy handwriting, and it bears the Four Agreements as suggested by Don Miguel Ruiz in his charming book of the same name: Be impeccable with your word, Don’t take anything personally, Don’t make assumptions, Always do your best.

Having recently read this book myself, I melt a bit. She read the book and was compelled to share its powerful message, she asked permission, she took her time and drew up the poster. She asked to hang it in the day room and was obliged. And she was proud of her work . . . Whoever she is.

I’m outside the cell of Ruby Herrera. Another girl asks if I’d like a chair, and again I decline, smile. I was comfortable leaning on the wall, but what’s more it seemed strange to accept hospitality from someone whose only experience with hospitality is what the state affords her. In retrospect, I should have accepted. I should have shared that with her.

At the closest table to me several girls are playing Spades. Every now and then one of them gets up, walks away, leaving an empty seat. I tell myself that if they invite me to play I will accept. Enough of this polite refusal. Enough of this isolation. And moments later a seat opens up and one of the girls looks over and says “wanna play”. I say, “sure I’ll play”.

I’ve never handled cards so tired, so in need of replacement. They felt like they were made of cloth and a traditional shuffling style was out of the question. You had to sort of hold the two halves of the deck together, tip them to the side, and wait patiently while you jiggled your hands and let them fall together.

The girls are not chatty. The game is the focus, and the game is casual. They don’t keep score. We play a hand before any casual conversation occurs. They ask where our show was going to air, and when.  One of the girls has the face of one who’s seen to much, she doesn’t smile, but when she looks you in the eye you know right away whether or not she accepts you. And she makes you feel as if her acceptance is important. She’s my partner and she fills in the gaps in my memory about the rules of Spades with curt pointers.

The white girls drum up the casual chatter and I learn that two of the four girls nearby are in for truancy, for not going to school. Indiana has a reputation for being tough on truancy. Having missed my share of days my senior year in high school, I wonder how much school one would have to miss to wind up in the Department of Corrections.

“The whole year. I didn’t go,” says the girl to my right.

I ask what the toughest part of being locked up and get the same two answers around the table: the other girls and being away from family. Apparently the girls are hardly ever physically violent, but boy, can they bicker. A DO tells me later that their biggest problem is with the relationships that form among the girls, romantic and otherwise.

We take the first hand, nine trumps to four (I think that’s the terminology) and they take the second. If my partner begrudged my novice play she didn’t let it be known.

After the second hand the door of Ruby’s cell opens and the tiny room drains like a clown car drains: camera operator, Karen, the PIO of the facility (public information officers manage the press and such), a DO and Ruby. All in a 6 by 10 cell, half consumed by furniture.

I thank them for the game and we were off to our next shoot.

I wondered if they begrudged me for being able to just get up and leave the facility, but I reckon not. There seemed among them a general sense of resignation about their situation. It wasn’t so bad. Watching movies and playing cards. Going to school. Doing each others’ hair, griping. All of the trappings of home.

I’ve made my share of bad choices.  At one point or another in my life I’ve lied, I’ve cheated, I’ve broken and stolen.  I’ve never killed nor raped.  But I have been incarcerated and I’ve sat in my share of police cruisers with arrest being a viable option.  If you ever have been in a schoolyard tussle, you could have found yourself in Juvie on a battery charge. Taken the parents’ car for a joy ride? You could wind up in jail for conversion. Sounds serious, right?

I was guilty of such things in my teenage years.  I was no angel, but nor was I a demon.  I was learning.

I’ve been lucky in my life.  I’m not talking about the fortunes of the middle class.  I’m lucky because I’ve been able to consider all of those bad things on my terms and come to my own conclusions about why I don’t want to do such things regularly or ever.  I’ve been able to grow into a better person by learning about consequences, without the lessons being imposed upon me, without getting caught in the flypaper of the juvenile justice system.

It’s the difference between reading a book for school, because you have to, and reading one for pleasure.

In the late 80s I spent a weekend in detention for a late-night mischievous happenstance that unfolded on the highway from North to South Lake Tahoe.  The net effect was one night in a cold cell in the Incline Village police station, a dawn transfer to the Reno Juvenile Detention Center, and another night there. 

In retrospect, it seemed like some concocted scenario designed to give me a taste for what it’s like being locked up, because in the end I was never charged with anything, never went before a judge. I never knew exactly why I was being held or exactly what I’d done to net the charge. I knew I was riding in the back seat of a friend’s Volvo while and instance of road rage and chicken played out between he and another driver. I knew I had consumed a few beers, but was not wildly drunk, and in my mind that was enough to get me in trouble, but I didn’t know what my charge was all about. Had I pulled my own rights of habeus corpus, I would have seen that I was being held on erroneous assault charges based on a fraudulent police report. That’s another story, altogether, but suffice to say that the experience of detention was incredibly similar to what I see in LCJC.

But this ain’t about me (if you want to know more, email me) so I’ll leave the details at that.  I just felt it important to disclose the fact that when I say things like:

Far more holds us in common with these kids than separates us.

In my case anyway, I really mean it.

Kenneth is more aware than his brother and it becomes apparent that Kentrell has never been more than Kenneth’s shadow.  Their mischief is real and it flirts with violence.  Kenneth:

Make no mistake, their transgressions are real, but these are not gun-toting, liquor store robbing, car jacking thugs.  Could they become that?  Absolutely.

But for now they are petty thieves, they are thuggish among their own, and they are territorialists, proud animals.  They run with gang members in a place and time when every neighborhood, the prosecutor tells me, has its own gang.

At one point in the trial the prosecutor questions their probation officer about a situation that landed Kentrell  in LCJC on another occasion.  It was told that Kentrell had thrown cinder block fragments at another young man.  Kentrell:

No details are shared about what really transpired, just that Kentrell assailed this individual with a broken cinder block.  That’s an ugly scene, but it’s just a glimpse.  It may have been worse than it sounds.  It may not have been.  In the tapestry of startling stories coming from the inner city, I’m not sure how it stacks up.

In any case, as soon as mention is made of Kentrell’s involvement in this incident, Kenneth puts his hands over his face and weeps.

I see the responsibility he feels for his brother.  I see that he feels responsible for that incident, and later when I ask him about that he says, “I should have taught him better.”

And the weeping doesn’t stop, though it hides behind grimaces of anguish until the Probation Officer testifies that home is no place for Kenneth and Kentrell, that he believes they need to be detained until further psychological evaluations can be performed in order that their issues can be better explored.

He was probably right and shortly thereafter the judge agreed, ruling that the boys stay in detention pending these evaluations.  Both boys break down, sob, swear, and mother gets up without looking at them and hurriedly leaves the courtroom.

2. Others chat idly, smile and wave at passersby, familiar faces. This could be a church social.

3. Mother studies paperwork that explains procedures, status, rights, and consequences. She speaks to, listens to, a counselor who eyes her with kind determination, then leaves her alone. Mother fingers the stapled corner of the papers, lifts her head, eyes the room, frets.

4. Heavy-set woman occupies a toddler, a sibling to the one being shackled backstage for the walk to court. Little one giggles. Oblivious. This might be a physician’s office or the department of motor vehicles.

5. Attorneys milll about, dark suits, flip-phones and leather-bound portfolios bulging with yellow legal pads, paper, paper, paper. History. They seem direct, purposeful, confident.

6. The bailiff calls a family name over the PA. One family among the crowd rises, approaches the desk and is given the courtroom assignment for their child’s case. They pass through the metal detector, are cleared to face the judge, their children, themselves.

Juveniles end up in DOC three ways:

1—they turn 18, repeat offend and enter the adult system ‘across the street’,
2—a judge will elect to try them as an adult if the charge and their age warrants it, or

3—they are sent to ‘Boys’ School’ or ‘Girls’ School’. Let the perception of those institutions as educational institutions fall here. The schools are the most feared result for most juveniles.

With Girls’ School in her future, Ruby was afraid of assault, physical and sexual. Some who know the system have suggested to me that both are likely, but one never knows.

Ruby is at a sort of triage center in Logansport, Indiana where juveniles are assessed and sent to the appropriate facility based on that assessment. There’s only one place Ruby can go, the State Girls’ School in Indianapolis.

We plan to catch up with here there. Details to follow.

When I first saw Kenneth Gant in the intake area of LCJC two weeks ago, I was compelled by the structure of his face. He is too beautiful to be a repeat offender from the Midwestern capital of urban blight. He was handcuffed to a teenage runaway, and with them was another handcuffed pair, Kenneth’s 14-year-old brother Kentrell and a clownishly goofy looking accomplice. They were cuffed in pairs so that the four could be managed by a single police officer.

Kenneth and Kentrell were facing charges of vandalism and criminal mischief, having been picked up for breaking into cars at the Gary train station. A local resident snapped photographs of Kenneth and crew in action, called the police.

Kenneth and his brother are the most hopeless pair to have crossed through here while I’ve been here, and the most seasoned of the facility’s staff look upon them with sympathy. Last night, one of the residential supervisors (LCJC’s version of a prison guard) delivered Kenneth’s meal last night, on the eve of his court hearing, and admonished him for showing up so many times in LCJC—this is Kenneth’s seventh visit—and he shared with Kenneth words of hope, and he told him that he loved him.

Kenneth and Kentrell are two years apart, brothers in a family of ten children, father is in prison for narcotics, mother is a mother of ten who did time two years ago for dealing crack cocaine. A woman with her own demons, to be sure, demons that follow bloodlines upstream.

When Kenneth was eleven years old, he was handling a firearm and accidentally shot his brother in the stomach. He hoisted his brother into his arms, frantic at his mistake, and carried him to get help. Picture it: a shocked eleven-year-old carrying his nine-year-old brother, the latter bleeding from the gut. Kentrell lived and now lives in his brother’s image, a repeat offender at 14.

Kentrell is also an attractive young man, though he seems simple with his slight overbite and constant giggle. When he responds to questions he responds unintelligibly, communicating more with a shake or tilt of his head than with his utterances. This is true whether the questioner is a documentary interviewer or a judge. Some have concluded that this demeanor is a clever ruse, while others believe he is mildly retarded.

Kenneth responds to questions with the sincerity of grade school student giving an oral book report. His responses to general question seem like rehearsed, stock answers. But they seem like answers he believes to be true, the only answers one could give. Hidden in his vague and simple responses is a desire for them to be more profound, more convincing.

The brothers have been in and out of detention for a third of their life. Their mother has been likewise. Same for the father. Same for their uncles. Their childhoods have been spent in Gary, Indiana. The photographs speak volumes. They have been plague to their community, from the perspective of the system, and their community is rife with plague.

I don’t excuse this kids for the choices they make, I simply cannot imagine them making different choices. I can imagine very little for Kenneth and Kentrell, they seem to be very appropriate products of their family and community. They could be guilty of far more egregious crimes and still seem thus.

Kenneth and Kentrell’s mother declined to show up to their detention hearing, citing heart palpitations and recently diagnosed cancer. In her stead, their 24-year-old sister Octavia came to court to speak on their mother’s behalf. Octavia is dipped from the same forgiving gene pool as her brothers.

There is little hope for the brothers to be sent home in their sisters care, and for as much time as they’ve spent in the system you might think they would guess as much. Kenneth takes the stand to speak on his own behalf. When he responds to his attorney’s questions, Kenneth repeats the question as a school boy might recite his teacher’s query.

“Kenneth, considering how many times you’ve been where you are now, what can you say to convince the court that you’ve learned a lesson this time?”

When Kenneth listens to his attorney, a kind and attractive man of roughly my age named Don Wruck, he looks him in the eye, concerned, and when he respond his eyes track to a vacant place in the middle of the courtroom floor and he focuses on some distance only he recognizes.

“Why do I think I’ve learned my lesson this time? Because this time is more serious. Bein’ in here’s made me think about what I did, and the seriousness of it . . . . . . and he recited the admonition that he’s been hearing for years from a first person perspective, until. . . . . . . and that’s why I think I’ve learned my lesson this time.”

And he lifts his eyes from the place on the floor, looks back to his attorney who nods and finishes his questioning. Don elects not to call Kentrell to the stand, for the boy’s bewildered simplicity will do nothing to sway the court one way or the other.

Octavia takes the stand, and her role too seems familiar, almost rehearsed. She reports her mother’s illness, cites her father and an older brother who are incarcerated, leaving Kenneth as the man of the house. She says his siblings miss him, and they look up to him, and Kenneth begins to cry.

He covers his face with his slender, feminine hands and rubs the tears into his cheeks. She continues and he looks at her, attempts composure, but when tears slip out and fall to the glass top table he looks down and sweeps them away, dries the table with his sleeve.

The judge has little choice but to detain the boys until their initial hearing. As she reads her decision Kentrell seems dumbstruck and Kenneth drops his head in deeper sobs that continue as the brothers are led from the court.

You cannot help but be saddened by these two, and the judge is no exception. But what home life can she send them home to? Detention is the only safe place for Kenneth and his brother until the court decides their most promising path to rehabilitation two weeks hence. And at that hearing, their mother shows up.

We see them come in—handcuffed, police escort, trapped—and we brand them DELINQUENT, TRUANT, RUNAWAY, MENACE. We see them first for the choices they’ve made, but not so much for the apartment they woke up in that morning, for the streets they walk everyday, for people that make up their neighborhood. All of these things shape who I think I am, and there have been times in my life when some may have branded me DELINQUENT, TRUANT, MENACE and I was living the good life in the California hills. Things are more complicated than they appear on the surface.

ATTENTION: This is not a roundabout way of suggesting the oft-chimed notion that “if you’d grown up in such an environment you’d be a hoodlum, too.”

To hell with nature or nurture. That’s pedantic, pedagogical nonsense. It’s scholarly rhetoric that rings from an ivory tower so lofty that by the time it reaches the ground it’s a brittle cliche.

I wanted to know. When the Gary police bring in the next kid from Gary—and he will arrive—I don’t want to imagine the world he’s coming from, I want to recall it. Somehow that will help me when I have to sit down to probe him with interview questions.

And I share this exploration, and my wily thoughts, because I DO NOT advocate that anyone inspired to know more, to do more, get in their car and drive to the closest desperate neighborhood. That would be bad…

Alas,

You hear people say that the wonderful thing about this country is that EVERYONE HAS THE SAME OPPORTUNITIES available to them. But when a young woman from the South Side makes it to an Olympic podium we say she has OVERCOME INSURMOUNTABLE ODDS.

Both statements are true, but can we not agree that when you come from Gary, Indiana the odds are stacked against you?

I was scared. Make no mistake, as I crossed Interstate 80/94 on Broadway, the wasteland of Gary decaying before me, my left foot was grinding into the floorboard and my fingers were kneading the steering wheel.

The guardian of my lily white comfort zone was making his appeal:

You ought not be here! You stand out like a sore thumb in your rented 2008 PT Cruiser. The rules you are accustomed to do not apply here.

And I drove on. Within the first two blocks I saw that the epithets that had been attributed to Gary in casual conversation—a wasteland, concrete ruin, an arm pit—were all warranted.

I’ve traveled in third world countries, regions torn by war, and I’ve spent lots of sidewalk time in the roughest neighborhoods of New York City during my tenure with their welfare agency.

This tied East New York, Brooklyn for being the worst. For being the sort of place where a cavalier attitude bolstered by the odds against mishap or tragedy dissolves into the sort of naiveté that gets cavalier white boys in trouble.

I swallowed my ‘good sense’ and stopped to take photographs of a derelict BBQ joint. The only person in my midst was a young man at a bus stop half a block away. I pull to the curb. And I wait to see if I am noticed. After a beat, he turns and stares squarely at the PT Cruiser. I decline to succumb to the prejudiced thought that he is concerned with me at all.

He’s just a guy at a bus stop. Perhaps turning to the north to check oncoming traffic, timing the oncoming buses—here comes the A13, the B7 will pull up soon—and I wait for traffic to abate so I can disembark.

When it does, I step out. I close my door. He opens his cell phone, makes a call and walks in my direction. I have an expensive camera slung around my neck. I feel foolish, vulnerable. And yet I admonish myself again for the thoughts that I might be somehow a target, an attraction, an opportunity. Is that common sense, or common prejudice?

I have to cross the street to get the photograph I’m after, but I’m reluctant to leave the side of the car. I use the keychain remote to set the alarm and the car’s horn barks conspicuously, the headlights flash. And he keeps walking toward me until he is on the sidewalk just on the other side of the car.

To hell with this. I unlock the car, get back in the driver’s seat. He’s on the phone now, talking, and when I start the car, pull away from the curb, he pauses. Seems to chat idly, and I don’t see whether or not he returns to the bus stop.

My guardian assures me I’ve done the right thing. My censor admonishes me for supporting the stereotype, for abiding my fear and for the assumptions based therein, that this man noticed me at all, meant me harm or disregard…

When I worked for the HRA in New York, we often strolled neighborhoods not-quite-as-bad as this one, comforted by the fact that most of the people we met thought we were detectives. They assumed it and addressed us, “Afternoon Detective,” and we let the misconception live. We enjoyed the erroneous status and protection it gave us.

Here, in Gary, I had no such protection and nothing concrete with which to dissuade my guardian except the desire to not acknowledge the fact that I stand out differently among these desperately impoverished people than I do among my peers, among those who look like I do.

It’s difficult to deny that walking around alone, with my camera, in this neighborhood, might not be the most sensible thing to do. So all of these photographs were taken from the safety of my PT Cruiser. Still, writing that makes me feel like a little bit of a coward, a little it of a bigot . . . but I reckon that’s a fine line down a slippery slope . . .

But that just is.

Full size pics are up on my Flickr account

Our call time got pushed back and I have two hours to kill, so I decided to drive up to one of the most affected communities, whence many of our offenders come, Gary Indiana.

I’m intimidated, a little scared, and would probably chicken out if I didn’t bind myself to the task with this public notice.

Photos to follow.