Reflections from the Inside
- Enya Kamadolli
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
We cannot rehabilitate children without nurturing them.
You know you can ring the bell to let them know you’re here, right? A perceptive teenager in a black hoodie waiting with his mother and sister saves us from our awkward pacing as we wait to be let into the probation facility. He’s escorted back into the facility about ten minutes before us.
San Mateo County Probation is built to mimic a high school. A smiling correctional officer gives us an informal tour as she escorts us to the cafeteria where we’ll be teaching for a few hours. This is the administrative office. This is the health center. All the youth get health check-ins, she tells us with pride. She’s clearly experienced at this performance, and the subtext is clear: don’t worry, we’re humane. But it’s telling that she refers to those detained by the facility—many as young as 12 or 13—as youth rather than children. There’s not much childhood to be found here, in this humane facility.
A series of paintings, presumably done by the youth, line the walls. An attempt to make outside visitors slightly more comfortable in the otherwise clinical, double-locked, 24-hour surveillance space. We walk through an outdoor area of “the campus” and enter a reception area with lockers. The correctional officer encourages us to bring a jacket (you might get cold) and softly reminds me to keep an eye on my pen (they’re hot here). This interaction would stick in my mind later— the officers are clearly capable of speaking gently, with warmth and kindness. When they do not, it is a choice.
The dominant perception of youth in probation—many of whom have admittedly committed felonies, often violent—is that they must, first and foremost, be taught how to respect order and authority. The ‘rehabilitative’ project upholds a rigid conception of social order and presumes that these youth will spur disorder unless acted on by a restraining force. The youth, especially the boys, require an environment defined by militaristic structure and discipline. You’re prepared for a particularly disruptive class, right, warned the correctional officer who briefed us upon entry.
But the boys that I spent two hours with—who called us all “ma’am” without ever being told to do so, who kept each other in check (don’t speak like that, there’s a girl present), followed instructions and only needed gentle encouragement to participate in our creative writing lesson—were far from disruptive.
Juvenile detention facilities focus on transforming ‘troubled’ youth into law-abiding good citizens. They derive their legitimacy partially from their rehabilitative mission. The State has a public interest in creating good citizens, but in this environment, they’re also de-facto occupying a role that we typically relegate to the private sphere—parenting children into adults. This latter duty, that of child-rearing, goes direly neglected in the average American juvenile detention facility.
I should note that San Mateo’s correctional officers were far from the worst I’ve seen or read about, at least in front of us. They did not unnecessarily assert their dominance just to put the youth in their ‘place.’ Although they were generally cold and indifferent with the youth, they were not aggressive nor rude. While certain officers had established rapport with the youth, they seemed to do it to garner grudging respect, not to foster emotional comfort. While many of them were perhaps benevolent wardens, they were far from parents or caring guardians.
We don’t often think about juvenile detention facilities as places where parenting occurs or should occur—rather, we tend to think first of education, reform, and punishment. Certainly, not much parenting occurs within these facilities. But these children are perhaps the most in need of good parenting.
Children who commit horrible crimes don’t relinquish their right to being nurtured and loved, nor is it in the public interest to deny them the critical emotional development that caring parents help foster.
In most cases, it is not the youth that are intrinsically dangerous, but rather the environments in which they were raised. Which begs the question: is this environment any less deficient?
In many ways, the detention facilities they find themselves in are no less defined by violence than the neighborhoods that they come from, just violence of a different kind. There may be fewer fights here, but there are also no hugs. Denying children the ability to form emotional bonds with adults that care for them is state-sanctioned emotional violence.
The creative work and reflections that our students produced (which they gave me permission to share) during our two-hour writing classes are profound. I share them because empathy starts with true understanding.
As a patchwork quilt, they tell a common story of material deprivation and desire, wanting to step up for their families, missing their homes and home countries dearly, and painful recognition of the unfreedom of their status quo. They remind us that the youth we are talking about are first and foremost children.
Their answers to creative writing prompts often jarringly paralleled the hands they had been dealt in real life. What would you ask a genie (who turns out to be bad at granting wishes) for, and what would you actually get?
“I asked for a house and I got a cardboard box”
“I ask the genie for a million dollars but he gives me a few quarters”
“I asked for designer clothes and he gave me baby clothes”
These are boys that love their families—and miss them dearly—and want to be providers.
“[This picture is me] stacking up my money to buy some stuff like a car or something for my mom.”
“I found a time capsule in a random field filled with 1 billion dollars. After I bought a couple houses, cars and some more stuff, I also gave some to my family.”
“I want to go home and open my present and give some to my family.”
Some of them are already fathers and want to support the mothers of their children. One confided in me that his one-and-a-half-year-old nephew is who he misses most. This is me and him playing in the park, he tells me, describing his ‘future self-portrait’ drawing.
These are boys that dream of being rich, going to Hawaii, starting businesses, traveling the world. They tell their future selves that “once you’re outside get your life straight, don’t mess up and keep your family safe.” They dream big, and they dream realistically. One writes “I wanna be a[n] elect[rician] and wanna get my permit and get a job and focus on my career and not come back to this place.”
But these are also children who are struggling deeply.
One student writes and illustrates a comic about alien abduction, centering himself as a protagonist. The boys are taken from their cells by aliens, and eventually join alien families. “We eat, and then we get adopted,” is how it ends.
It feels obvious that these boys should be treated with love and kindness. That they clearly have so much good within them, and that they should be told that they can amount to something in this world.
But the tragedy is that the way we currently treat these children becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you deny a child a consistent source of love, they struggle to emotionally regulate for the rest of their lives. When children are only surrounded by adults that presume the worst of them, they begin to assume the worst of themselves.
One student drew Xs over his eyes in his ‘future self-portrait.’ He doesn’t think he has a future, let alone a better one than his past.
We will continue to fail our highest-need children unless we bring parenting into juvenile detention facilities, or take children out of them.
