CHAPTER 5
ALLEN AND DURRELL
February 2004
I had just gotten out of law school. I was preparing to take the bar and would later find out that I passed . . . trouble was, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Thankfully, I was hired not as an attorney but as a community organizer—the same kind of work President Obama had done on the South Side of Chicago, as he describes in his memoir Dreams from My Father, which had just been reprinted that same year. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a great deal of organizing experience. I did have one skill, though: the ability to listen, which is required of all community organizers.
My supervisor, Lenore Anderson, was also an attorney, but a real one. She had finished law school two years before me. Lenore was supporting a small group of families with loved ones inside the notorious CYA youth prisons. CYA stood for California Youth Authority, but others ominously said that the other meaning of CYA—“cover your ass”—was more appropriate, given the rates of sexual abuse of young people within the system.
Our mission was to build a statewide network of families with loved ones in the CYA prison system. The idea was that if enough families came together and collaborated, they could change the system.
You know those sports team movies where a coach or a player has to recruit teammates to form an underdog team that no one believes in, but that will, against all odds, somehow win the championship? That was us: a handful of mothers and grandmothers sitting around a table, a group that decided to call itself Families for Books Not Bars. And me.
There were huge obstacles to overcome. The families were isolated from one another geographically, and even if they did see each other while visiting a prison, they were forbidden by the prison guards from interacting. Then there was the paralyzing shame associated with having a loved one in the justice system. Sometimes the loved one had to be reminded that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, even when they have made terrible mistakes.
I heard the stories of so many families that they started to blend together. The children and grandchildren of these families were locked in remote youth prisons across California, suffering unspeakable abuses. When they were allowed to visit, family members found those children bruised and abused. There was an utter lack of programming, nothing remotely qualifying as rehabilitation, only traumatization. Over and over I heard how young people were being isolated for twenty-three hours a day, for days and weeks, and sometimes months on end. Sometimes, I heard about a child who died in prison.
The first time I met Allen I was nervous, anxious, worried, and beginning to question whether I was cut out for my new job. Neither law school nor organizing training could have prepared me for this moment. What do you say to someone who’s just endured a horrific loss? Making matters worse, I was going to meet Allen at his place of work, a ritzy hotel called the St. Francis. It was just blocks from our small and windowless nonprofit office space in downtown San Francisco.
The walk over felt too quick. It was a windy day; I felt it on my back as if it were pushing me forward. The hotel’s giant opulent hallways and soaring ceilings reminded me that I had left school like yesterday. At the end of one of those long hallways was my destination: the shoeshine stand. I managed to put one foot in front of the other over ornate carpet designs until I arrived.
I had worried it would be even more difficult to talk to him while he was at work, but it turned out to be a relief. When I got there, Allen was already chatting with the man whose shoes he was caring for. (I would learn quickly that Allen did “shoe care”—he did not “shine shoes.”) All I had to do was listen. Tacked to the stand was a photo of Allen and a young man: proud father smiling from ear to ear, arm around his son. His hands moving effortlessly, Allen talked about his son’s love of baseball. He talked about what went on inside the CYA prison system. He would talk to anyone who would listen about the need for answers and for change. This is how I learned the details of Durrell Feaster’s story.
January 19, 2004
It was a holiday: Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Your average eighteen-year-old boy would spend the day hanging out with friends or holed up playing video games, or maybe sports. Maybe he’d screw around a little, drink some beers, or smoke some weed, take his dad’s car out for a joy-ride, make out with his current crush. When I was eighteen, I’m fairly certain that I spent MLK Day sleeping in. I would impress myself by how long I could sleep in on a weekend or holiday. I think my record was about 1 p.m.
In many ways, Durrell Feaster was your average eighteen-year-old. He was upbeat. He loved baseball. He had a thing for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He had been corresponding with college admission officials about starting school in the fall. After completing a course in installing sprinkler systems, and enjoying the work, he had begun dreaming of launching a landscaping business after college, maybe even going into the business with his dad. In the photo I’ve seen of Durrell, he looks like a biracial James Dean, his head tilted back, a slight challenge in his gaze, that classic cool look of youthful immortality.
But on Monday, January 19, 2004, Durrell took his own life. He managed to hang himself with his bedsheets, from the top bunk of his bunk bed. He was found too late to be revived, and the coroner declared the cause of death to be asphyxiation due to hanging.
It was about four years prior to that when things had begun to unravel for Durrell. His parents divorced, and he wound up living with his dad, Allen. Allen was a great dad, twenty years sober, taking great pride in his job providing shoe care at the prestigious St. Francis. Entire baseball teams would stay at the hotel. Once Allen brought home Boston Red Sox ace pitcher Pedro Martinez’s autograph for his baseball-crazy son. Father and son considered themselves each other’s best friends.
But even without your parents divorcing, being a fourteen-year-old boy has its own challenges, as your voice cracks and deepens, hair and acne sprout on your face, and your hormones go berserk. Durrell had ADHD on top of that. He started skipping class, skipping school altogether. Struggling to raise his teenage son alone, Allen sought assistance from the police to help with the truancy. Allen had survived a tough youth himself, having been born in the Bronx in 1954, with violence, abuse, and alcohol all present in his early life. He credited the Air Force with saving his life, and hoped for something similar when he turned to the police for help with Durrell.1
But instead of providing resources for support or guidance, the police sent Durrell to a group home six hours from his dad. It’s a common enough intervention strategy, removing a kid from his home and placing him in a boot camp, treatment center, or group home—to be yelled at by drill sergeant-like supervisors and to do group therapy with delinquent peers. It’s most often not an effective strategy. Even if there’s positive behavior change inside this kind of place, everything changes when the kids get back into “the real world.” Rates of recidivism, of getting tangled up in the criminal legal system again (or again and again) tend to be high.
Allen, who did not have a car, was unable to visit his son due to the distance and the cost of the trip. Miserable, Durrell ran away from the group home with another kid who stole a car in order to get back to his family. Durrell rode in the stolen vehicle with him. For this offense, fifteen-year-old Durrell was charged with grand theft auto and was placed in California’s youth prison system at the Preston Youth Correctional Facility. This time Durrell was two hours from his father, but still inaccessible, as there was no public transportation that would get Allen even close.
Preston was located in Ione, California, off of Highway 104 in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Originally known as the Preston School of Industry when it opened in 1894, it’s best known for its towering red brick “castle” . . . and for its reputation for more than a century of atrocious living conditions and extreme brutality by staff, and malnourishment and overwork of the youth imprisoned there.2 A series of reports in the 1980s condemned it for rampant sexual abuse, violent assaults, gang activity, suicide attempts, and appalling isolation cells, which were described like dungeons: “filthy, dank rooms coved with vermin, blood, and feces where youths were confined for 23-hours a day, with one hour spent shackled in a cage for exercise.”3
Durrell Feaster was one of those who spent the greater part of his days at Preston in solitary confinement—twenty-three hours a day.
With only a month left to serve of his three-year sentence, Durrell and his cellmate, seventeen-year-old Deon Whitfield, were found hanging by their bedsheets, side by side. They were in cell number 27 in the Ironwood unit, where cells measure about six feet by eight feet, like dank closets, just a slat in the metal door for a window.
Allegedly it was suicide. Allen did not believe that his son took his own life. Three days earlier, on January 16, he had spoken on the phone with Durrell, who was happy about his upcoming release and optimistic about his future.
“They killed my son,” Allen said. “They treated him like an animal. He was not a hardcore criminal. He was a child. They killed his joy.”
Things did not have to unfold like this, for Durrell or for so many youngsters like him.
It’s not difficult to imagine a different outcome for him and for Allen. There are at least three turning points in his story that could have led to a happier ending for father and son, and their community. While this hypothetical reflection on alternate realities won’t help Durrell, it can be valuable as we set about creating a new model of public safety and accountability. After all, part of what makes us uniquely human is our capacity to be self-reflective about our past and present, and imagine a different kind of future.
The first turning point for Durrell was in school. Like so many children today, Durrell had been diagnosed with ADHD. He had stopped showing up for classes and then for school altogether. What would have held his interest in school? I don’t believe there’s any student so hopeless or apathetic that they can’t be engaged in learning: it’s just a matter of figuring out what will hold their interest. We know for a fact that Durrell wasn’t apathetic; we know that before he died, Durrell discovered a passion for landscape design. Is it beyond the realm of imagining that Durrell’s school could have offered ways for him to learn about gardening and design?
Recognizing the problems with the standardized “factory model of education”—a result of schooling intended originally to train factory workers during the industrial era—more affluent schools have devoted more and more resources to personalized and project-based learning. Underinvestment in public schools, however, meant fewer innovations in learning and education. A 2019 report revealed that “nonwhite school districts receive $23 billion less than white districts, despite serving the same number of students.”4 Most public schools constantly have to do more with fewer and fewer resources, resulting in the decimation of arts, physical education, libraries, and other “nonessentials,” even as they struggle to attract and retain good teachers.
At the same time, however, many of these schools are investing in security systems—everything from metal detectors to security cameras to armed guards—with negligible or even counterproductive effects. Through the federal 1033 program, school police agencies around the country obtained surplus military equipment, such as powerful rifles, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles. At least twenty-two districts in eight states used 1033 before President Obama implemented restrictions on the program in 2015, but President Trump rescinded the restrictions in mid-2017, clearing the way for schools to once again obtain military equipment.
So why not take that money and invest it instead in, for example, experiential learning programs, including landscaping and gardening, which would provide the kind of hands-on, project-based learning and problem-solving experiences that many believe will best prepare our children for the future?
We even have models for schools where this is already happening. One example is Orchard Gardens, a public school in Roxbury, Massachusetts. At the pilot school’s opening in 2003, the community had high expectations. The building was clad in panels the deep yellow color of a school bus, with pops of red around the windows and doors. Inside were art studios, a dance studio, even a theater with cushy seats. But the vision of a Fame-type school of arts never came to pass. There was so much violence that students were prohibited from wearing backpacks, out of fear that they would hide weapons in them. The school ranked in the bottom five of all public schools in the state of Massachusetts.5 In 2009, Boston Public Schools superintendent Carol Johnson announced that Orchard Gardens would be one of fourteen Boston “turnaround schools” and was slated for massive overhauls and reinvention due to its low test scores and the unrelenting turnover of principals.6
In 2010, Andrew Bott ignored the advice of his colleagues, who called the school a “career killer,” and became the school’s sixth principal in seven years. He fired the security guards and took the funding earmarked for security and used it for arts programs instead. The results in both safety and school scores were remarkable. Within the next four years, the school had one of the fastest student improvement rates of any school in the state, ranking in the top 10 percent as measured by growth in mathematics and English language arts of all schools in Massachusetts, while the percentage of students reading at grade level increased 250 percent.7
If Durrell had gone to such a school, he might have felt engaged enough to stay in class and graduate and go on to make his dream a reality. As it was, he lost interest and started skipping school, and it was up to Allen to hold the line.
One of the challenging things about adolescence is that at the precise time kids most need mentorship from adults (often parents) who care about them, they usually don’t want to hear anything those grown-ups have to say. During the time when they’re experimenting with becoming independent and self-sufficient, their relationships with their parents are often at their most fragile. Until recently, the prevailing mentality was that because most of the human brain has been formed by age six, older kids and teens were “a lost cause”—that it was “too late for them”—resulting in experts and policy mostly focusing on early childhood. But adolescent brain science has revealed that our brains are still developing until we reach the age of 25.8 Teenage brains are much more changeable than we once thought.
Because of this, schools can play an important role at a formative time. Unfortunately, especially in under-resourced schools, most teenagers have next to no relationships with adults. They are much more likely to find a police officer than a guidance counselor. A recent study by Californians for Justice (CFJ), a student-led organization working to improve public schools, found that one out of five students did not have a single teacher or staff member make eye contact or greet them by name. Nearly 50 percent of students were never asked how they were doing by a teacher or staff member at school.9 Based on those findings, CFJ is leading an initiative of “relationship-centered schools.” Instead of asking how we improve test scores, they ask: How do we build relationships as the foundation for student achievement? Even when he had zero interest in listening to his dad, if Durrell had had just one positive relationship with a teacher or counselor at school, things might have gone differently for him.
Adolescents are also hardwired to break the rules at the very time when the consequences for actions quickly grow in severity, especially in the context of zero-tolerance schools. Zero-tolerance policies grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado. The idea is that if a student is acting up and doesn’t stop when asked to do so, then the student needs to be removed from the classroom. When a student misbehaves repeatedly, the typical response is to kick them out, either temporarily (suspension) or permanently (expulsion).
Both my sister and mother are teachers, so I am not unsympathetic to the idea that for the good of the rest of the students and their learning, the disruptive one has to be removed from the class. There are between fifteen and thirty or more other kids in a classroom, depending on the school district. The logic of zero tolerance is that, from a greater good perspective, the needs of the majority should be prioritized.
Yet, zero-tolerance policies have been proven to cause more harm than good. The majority of students who have been arrested on school grounds have been accused of minor nonviolent infractions, like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti; however, there are many instances in which such policies resulted in children being suspended or expelled and sent through the criminal legal system for completely harmless actions, like talking on cellphones or watching a fight between other students. A twelve-year-old girl was arrested after doodling on her desk.10 A seven-year-old boy was suspended for taking bites out of a Pop-Tart until it was gun-shaped.11 A ten-year-old boy was suspended for playing with an imaginary bow and arrow, even though no one was harmed.12
“We’ve become reliant on distancing as a way to manage conflict. That’s what a suspension is—I can’t manage you, so I move you away,” says Barbara McClung, the director of behavioral health initiatives for Oakland Unified School District.13
Zero-tolerance policies in school discipline were supposed to reduce bias and level the playing field by having standard predetermined consequences for misbehavior, but studies, including a landmark report from the American Psychological Association, have proven that disabled children, African American children, and Latinx children are being disciplined more severely and expelled or suspended at disproportionately higher rates. More than 70 percent of students involved in school-related arrests are black or Latinx.14
The measures that schools have implemented include controlling access to school buildings by locking or monitoring doors during school hours, installing security cameras and metal detectors, requiring staff to wear ID badges, using random dog sniffs to check for drugs, and stationing security guards or police officers on school grounds.
Research has shown that instead of effectively preventing threats, fighting, and perceptions of violence and disorder, the presence of metal detectors, security cameras, or armed guards in schools is counterproductive, decreasing students’ sense of safety, and often increasing fear and mistrust. In some schools, attendance has worsened when metal detectors were employed. Many people argue the hours students lose standing in line for metal detectors would be much better spent studying or engaging in the classroom.
Security or law enforcement personnel who work on school campuses do not generally receive any specialized training tailored to the policing of youth. This lack of training results in the over-usage of punitive measures like arrests, thereby deterring vulnerable students from receiving support resources. Suspended and expelled children often wind up home alone or out on the street, falling behind academically. This winds up being the first stop on the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” for many children, resulting in arrest records and low academic achievement, and high dropout rates. Those arrested face the stigma of having criminal records, which have a lifelong effect on chances of getting a job, financial aid, or a home. An arrest doubles the likelihood that a student will drop out or be pushed out of school. Moreover, just coming into contact with police as a youth is linked to involvement with the criminal justice system as an adult.
What would it take to create school environments that were capable of supporting children through adolescence? Is it possible to imagine a school environment that would have been supportive of Durrell without detracting from other students’ experiences, and even enhancing their experiences? One thing we could do is recognize that part of being an adolescent is breaking rules. It is as normal as a toddler dropping their food on the ground to see what happens. Why can’t we create middle and high school environments where certain rules are set up with the intention that they be broken, in order to stimulate and engage young people?
These more humane and engaging kinds of school environments were not in place. So when Durrell ignored his attempts at discipline, Allen sought an intervention. He knew that Durrell might be removed from home if he continued to miss school. Truancy is a crime that impacts both children and their parents, who can be fined, arrested, or imprisoned, or have their custody revoked because of their child’s repeated unexcused absences. Allen called the police out of utter desperation. As an African American, Allen had to be familiar with the reputation of police as it relates to the treatment of young African American men. Yet he held out hope that, much like the armed forces had created an opportunity for him to become more disciplined and successful, the police might help his son. Ultimately, by calling the police, Allen set in motion precisely what he feared: his child being removed from the home and entangled in the juvenile justice system.
The juvenile justice system doesn’t do a good job of supporting parents partly because it sees the parents as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The background assumption of the juvenile justice system is parens patriae—Latin for “we can take your kids.” The state can step in and assume responsibility for a child when it deems this necessary. The problem is that the United States has a long and flawed track record when it comes to the use of this power, a record particularly troubling when it comes to children of color. Since the inception of the juvenile justice and foster care systems, youth of color have been treated badly, unnecessarily separated from their parents and disproportionately subjected to harsh and cruel treatment.15 Unfortunately, these trends continue into the present day.
Who has a much better track record of helping children thrive? Parents and grandparents, whenever they themselves have sufficient resources to thrive. As they announce every time you travel on an airplane, it is hard to take care of your child’s oxygen mask if your own mask isn’t in place. The oxygen mask for the grown-ups can be interpreted as having basic needs fulfilled, in the form of dignified steady work, decent housing, healthcare, clean air and water and food—the fundamental tenets of human existence.
Beyond that, for more challenging circumstances, the oxygen mask may be represented by so-called “intensive in-home therapy.”16 These interventions typically include the support of a psychologist who provides counseling sessions in the home and in the family’s community over a period of three to five months. Despite the “intensive” part, these programs have actually proven less costly and more effective than youth detention and incarceration. Costs average between $6,000 to $9,500 per youth, compared with a typical stay in a juvenile corrections facility, at $66,000 to $88,000; meanwhile, arrest rates for young people who received this type of service were 25 to 70 percent lower.17 Allen could have benefited greatly from the support of a trained social worker providing him with advice and resources for Durrell.
Every parent needs help. I love my daughters. But on my worst days, the challenges of work and life can mean that I don’t show it the best way I could. If I were out of work or sick, or had a job but couldn’t afford rising rents, the stresses of those situations would compound quickly, making it that much harder to be the parent I want to be. Surviving in the United States is becoming increasingly difficult. Rather than punishing parents, especially poor parents, we should be investing in ways to support them. As Bessel van der Kolk explains:
We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids. Nearly every industrialized nation, with the exception of the United States, recognizes this and provides some form of guaranteed support to families. . . . Quality early-childhood programs that involve parents and promote basic skills in disadvantaged children more than pay for themselves in improved outcomes.18
Government systems intended to serve youth should be designed not to supplant parents but to supplement and support them. Making such support universal, guaranteed, and unconditional (rather than based on elaborate applications or assessments) would help to eliminate the perception that families whose kids are struggling are less capable and less deserving. The US differs from most developed countries in failing to offer universal child benefits, also known as “child allowances,” which are paid to every family with children whether the parents work or not, and can be used for whatever the family deems necessary: food, rent, childcare, lessons, etc. The evidence says that not only are parents less stressed and more able to engage in parenting as a result of government allowances, but over a lifetime, a child whose parents received supports got higher test scores and higher earnings, and was healthier. A 2018 report in the Cornell Policy Review concluded:
The United States already recognizes the value of assisting its citizens with childcare via the child tax exemption and Child Tax Credit. . . . The United States currently uses a patchwork system of subsidies to help cover the costs of childcare that is administered through the federal tax system. The Child Tax Credit offers a refund of $1,000 per child per year, and the Child Tax Exemption offers $4,000 per child per year. . . . While these programs have been helpful to middle-income families, they have systematically omitted low-income families, and their once-yearly payment schedule is not designed to address the growing epidemic of family income instability throughout the year. By replacing these two tax-based programs with a universal child allowance, the United States would provide an income floor for all families with children and formally recognize the notion that the well-being of future generations is worth a significant social investment.19
It’s hard to imagine how different Allen’s and Durrell’s story might have turned out had they received an allowance of $250 to $300 per month. But that didn’t come to pass.
Even though nothing changed at two intervention points—Durrell didn’t get support at school and Allen got no support at home—there was still an opportunity for a different outcome when Durrell was caught in the act of stealing a car to get back home.
What if instead of being sent to a remote youth prison as punishment, Durrell and the car’s owner had sat down together and talked? A plan might have been developed so that Durrell could make amends and pay the owner back for any damage, loss of income, and other negative outcomes associated with the crime. It wouldn’t have been an easy conversation for Durrell, facing that person’s anger and disappointment, and being confronted directly with his own shame and responsibility. But Durrell would have learned a lot from it, and it might have been the encounter that made him take responsibility for the rest of his life. This would have been the path of restorative justice. Durrell would have been held accountable, while still being held in community. Upon completing the program, Durrell could have connected to an earn-while-you-learn program, essentially an apprenticeship under a professional that would have him gaining qualifications and building skills while earning around $15 per hour.20
Sending young people to remote youth prisons is often described as being “tough on crime.” In reality, this is the opposite of hardcore accountability. Real accountability comes when a person has to face what they have done, when they have to own up to it, and have to work to make it right. Accountability should be a cornerstone of our system. Yet far too often youth (and adults) are never faced with the person(s) they have harmed (except possibly in a courtroom), and an enormous opportunity for learning, growth, and transformation is lost.
Even though it is not possible to turn back the clock for Durrell and Allen, we do have potential moving forward to support families like them and hopefully turn a new page in the history of our system.
After hearing the story of Durrell’s death, I asked Allen if he would join the work we were doing. He was all in. He became a founding member of Families for Books Not Bars. Allen was not alone. Over a span of just a couple of years, five different young people had lost their lives in California youth prisons. Five different families not only mourned their deaths but also wanted answers. These families demanded answers. How many would have to die inside these youth prisons before things would change?
Kids who were fortunate enough to make it out of the youth prisons alive often turned right around and went back in. Three out of four young people coming out of the system were being rearrested within two years.21 The state was spending $150,000 per year per young person on this failing system.22
Faced with these facts, the families didn’t say, “We want to change things a little bit.” No—they wanted to close the youth prisons down, once and for all. Privately, I had my doubts that we could accomplish that goal. Close all the youth prisons? But mothers and grandmothers like Lanita Mitchell, Lourdes Duarte, Ruth Whitmore, and Joyce Cook insisted: Yes, we can, and we will. Our children and grandchildren are not safe inside of these institutions. There’s a different way to do this.
It is not the case, as often is claimed, that most families abandon loved ones who are locked up. Most struggle to stay connected and to find out whether their child is even safe. Families frequently incur significant expenses when they visit their children, given that many youth corrections facilities are located in remote rural regions. Indeed, when I began working with families of incarcerated children in California, I found that none of the stereotypes held true. “These are youths neglected by parents, whose parents deny any responsibility for them”—that’s a common one. Or, “The families that were supposed to raise these kids into law-abiding citizens have failed.” The parents and families I met dispelled all the myths. The overwhelming majority of them care deeply about their children. They are hardworking individuals with deep ties to and concern for their communities.
The families I worked with were driving 250 miles on average just to visit their kids, only to be subjected to intimidating searches by armed guards and dogs upon arrival. The treatment these grandmothers, mothers, and other family members received from guards and administrators often ran on a spectrum from rude to verbally abusive. Frequently, they were told their children and grandchildren would never amount to anything. Families were denied visits because they were wearing the wrong color pants—really—or an underwire bra, or because their child was on lockdown. In a 2010 survey conducted by Justice for Families, a national network of families with loved ones in the criminal legal system, 86 percent of family members surveyed said that they would like to be more involved in their children’s treatment while they are confined in a correctional facility or other residential placement. Seventy percent of families responded that they were not able to reach their children by phone as often as they would have liked while they were in these facilities.23
Families who share the fate of enduring the incarceration of loved ones ought to be able to support each other with everything from legal resources, to carpooling for visits, to having a knowing shoulder to cry on. An obvious place they could make such connections is where they visit or wait to visit their incarcerated children. Yet families involved with the CYA were routinely told that they could not talk to each other while standing in visiting lines.
So most families struggle desperately to support their loved ones, yet are met with obstacles and barriers at every turn. As a result, every step further into the US juvenile justice system drives a child like Durrell further from the very support he most needs from his family and community.
Families for Books Not Bars began by doing what was prohibited at the youth prisons: talking to one another. We talked about the conditions inside. We wrote letters and we strategized about what could be done to immediately address some of the worst conditions inside. We held vigils for young people outside of the youth prisons where young people were losing their lives. Every time we returned, our numbers were greater, and our black T-shirts—emblazoned with “Close CYA Youth Prisons” on the front and “Open Youth Opportunities” on the back—became more ubiquitous.
What started as a handful of families grew to a couple of dozen and then a couple hundred and then over a thousand families across the state. Our allies—the Prison Law Office (which sued the CYA over conditions inside the youth prisons), the Youth Justice Coalition (a membership-based organization of young people who had been through the criminal legal system), the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice (an advocacy organization), among others—were instrumental in turning the tide. Those same legislators who first laughed at us and slammed doors on us started to listen. They saw that families did care about their kids. They saw the multiple paths that had led young people into the youth prison system and began to be disabused of the perception that these young people were the “superpredator” boogeymen described in the news. They also saw the cost and wondered why the state would continue to spend so many resources on such a failing system.
Legislators initially said we would never close a single youth prison. By 2012, when we suspended the campaign, we had closed five of eight youth prisons across the state and helped reduce the youth prison population in California by over 80 percent, with no increase in youth crime. Our victory had ongoing ripple effects across the country. In recent years, the governors of Virginia, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and New Jersey have ordered the closure of all youth prisons, replacing them with community-based rehabilitation programs, while in California, Governor Newsom has moved oversight of youth prisons from the agency that oversees adult prisons to the state’s Health and Human Services Agency.24 In April 2019, leaders representing dozens of juvenile justice organizations launched a national campaign—which has revived our Families for Books Not Bars campaign—to close all youth prisons across the country.25
Our victory demonstrated the importance of relationships and collective agency in overcoming dehumanization and isolation. These families coming together in the context of a campaign to close youth prisons was a visible example of how, as Bessel van der Kolk says, “traumatized human beings recover in the context of relationships.”
When I visited Allen again in 2018 to fill in more details of Durrell’s story, he reminisced about the Families for Books Not Bars campaigns: “I wouldn’t trade anything for those days when we were working so hard to expose the system and speak up for the parents and the kids and what they were going through inside those institutions. Looking back, I just appreciate the conviction of all the folks involved in our campaign to shut down youth prisons.”26 Even after we suspended our campaign to close youth prisons, Allen devoted his off hours to publishing opinion pieces in newspapers and testifying before the state senate (three times) for general reform in the CYA (renamed the Division of Juvenile Justice in 2005).27
“I’m a fighter. I gave all I could to the Families for Books Not Bars movement, and I feel the same will help me beat the situation I’m in now.”
His new situation in 2018 was daunting. The latest round of chemotherapy to fight his pancreatic cancer had left him exhausted, with his voice hoarse and his hands trembling.
The cancer was discovered during a routine medical checkup. In a follow-up biopsy the doctors discovered multiple tumors and gave him a devastating diagnosis of inoperable stage IV metastatic pancreatic cancer. One of the most deadly, most aggressive fast-growing cancers, pancreatic cancer is often found only in later stages because of the location, hidden behind the major large organs. Many people show no symptoms, as was the case with Allen.
When Allen and his new wife, Terry—the love of his life, his “queen”—heard the shocking news from the oncologist, they slumped to the floor, crying and reaching for each other’s hands. They were determined to fight it, and Allen immediately started chemotherapy. The harsh treatments caused Allen intense pain, swollen hands and feet, debilitating stomach flu-like symptoms, exhaustion, and major weight loss. He had to give up his beloved shoe care business at the St. Francis.
The couple struggled to pay for their health insurance policy with Kaiser Permanente, along with the hundreds of dollars each week for doctor and pharmacy copayments. At the time of my visit, they had recently launched a crowdfunding campaign with GoFundMe because Kaiser refused to cover immunotherapy treatments and other proven breakthrough integrative treatments that were the best chance of saving Allen’s life. The immediate out-of-pocket costs they faced came to $15,000 just to qualify for the treatment, and for the required doctor visits, tests, consultation fees, hospital stays, medications, and travel costs.
I supported the campaign personally and shared it as widely as I could. Allen passed away October 26, 2018, at the age of sixty-four.
Since Allen’s death I’ve been more attuned to the number of fundraising requests I receive to support people’s medical costs. How many people are crowdfunding their healthcare? I looked it up and found that one in three GoFundMe campaigns are for medical costs—250,000 campaigns per year—and they raise some $650 million per year.28 And GoFundMe is only one of the crowdfunding platforms available. It actually made me cry, thinking about how, despite the fact that one in three Americans live near the poverty line, they’re still giving to their families and friends, and even strangers. Two words came to mind: failed state. Typically, we as Americans use that term to refer to other countries, but for me stats like this one are indicators that we should look in the mirror. Jennifer Siebel Newsom calls the American Dream “the great American lie” in her documentary of the same name. This statistic is a sign of our failure as a country to take care of one another and to keep each other safe from harm.
This should be unacceptable.
Between 33 and 80 percent of cancer survivors exhaust their savings to pay for treatment. Up to 34 percent borrow money from friends and family to make payments. Bankruptcy goes up 260 percent compared to similarly situated households, and the bankruptcies are associated with a higher mortality among survivors.29 So if the cancer doesn’t kill you, the debt might.
To his credit, President Obama made healthcare coverage his signature domestic priority. But I think it’s time to admit that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Attempts to repeal the ACA have further undermined its effectiveness. As of the end of 2018, 13.7 percent of Americans still have no health insurance.30 That is not as many people as had been the case before implementation of the ACA, but it is still tens of millions. And even people with coverage struggle to pay their medical bills in our system. According to a 2015 survey, 20 percent of Americans with insurance reported problems paying their medical bills.31
The ACA sought to change healthcare while prioritizing the well-being of insurance companies. But that’s a conflict of interest. The idea that the market can solve healthcare is wrong, and too often has fatal consequences. Economists have long noted that markets and healthcare are a mismatch. “Consumers”—i.e., people—undervalue the regular care that would keep them healthy. Or they simply can’t prioritize it, given the other compelling demands in their lives (where the social contract has further failed them). If you are a single parent, working long hours, finding time to take yourself to the doctor regularly often falls off the radar. Then when disaster strikes and you become seriously ill, you are in no position to then comparison shop for the best coverage and care. At that point, you just get the bill.
In fact, as an African American man who smoked cigarettes during his lifetime, Allen was at higher risk for pancreatic cancer, and any real healthcare system would have mandated regular screenings for it. Had it been caught earlier, Allen might have survived, and never run up those medical bills that he did.
Advocates of privatized health insurance contend that it spurs innovation and helps to advance medical research, which ensures the best care possible. If you are among the 1 percent of people who can afford $750,000 that may make some sense. If you are among the 99 percent of us who can’t, then it doesn’t. So, direct public provision of health insurance is essential. Providing universal healthcare not only allows for universal access to care, but actually lowers total healthcare costs and keeps us more secure as a society. When people go to the doctor as part of regular check-ups, it prevents more costly emergency room visits. When the government pays for insurers to provide care, it can influence those providers. The government can help ensure that doctors and hospitals provide care at a reasonable cost.
The last time I saw Allen, his selfless spirit still radiated through his pain. “I don’t dwell on my situation. I keep fighting, I don’t give up. My prayers are with the folks at the Ella Baker Center who are continuing the work and fighting against a system that destroys our youth,” he told me. For Allen’s memorial, Terry wrote: “Allen could fly. But that was never enough for him—he wanted us all to fly with him. So he lifted up everyone he touched with his magnificent, warm smile and encouragement. . . . His spirit soars on, flying above us, forever pulling us up.”
Here is a summary of my recommendations:
• We need a federal program of child benefit payments that provides universal, guaranteed, and unconditional support for parents. The models for this program might be Kindergeld in Germany, the family tax benefit in Australia, or the family allowance in Sweden. We should replace the current child tax exemption and child tax credit with monthly allowances that reflect our societal commitment to providing security for the next generation.
• In times of crisis, we need to provide parents and other care-givers with intensive in-home therapy that includes support from social workers and counseling sessions with a psychologist. These alternative interventions cost approximately one-tenth of a typical stay in a youth prison.
• We need to improve teacher-to-student ratios and counselor-to-student ratios in all of our schools, which will improve safety in our schools along with student achievement.
• Our public schools need to provide hands-on, project-based, and personalized learning opportunities—programs that engage different kinds of learners and kids with different interests and needs. These serve as the best preparation for the evolving future of work that the current century-old factory model of education doesn’t support.
• Especially for adolescent years, our schools should experiment with rules made to be broken and adapted, as learning experiences for youth, rather than zero tolerance policies which criminalize students without giving them the breathing room they need to mature.
• We must stop criminally charging youth for incidents that merit school discipline.
• We should be developing relationship-centered schools that ensure that children have meaningful connections with adults other than parents and families.
• Families with loved ones behind bars need networks of support for sharing their emotions, strategies, and resources. Instead of keeping these families apart, we should be facilitating their connections, in order to share burdens (like travel and communications) and support each other.
• We must close all youth prisons and replace them with community safety centers that house restorative justice programs, earn-while-you-learn work opportunities, and wraparound services. The goal of these institutions should be to support youth and their families, not to punish them; to help them find new paths rather than put them on the path to adult prison.
• Youth under the age of twenty-one should never be tried in adult courts.
• Government (public) provision of universal healthcare is essential. All people should be ensured access to quality healthcare. The system should focus on affordable prevention—more effective for patients, and usually less expensive—as opposed to emergency treatment.