Oliver Freudenreich, director of the First Episode and Early Psychosis Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, said, “If we could get people at an earlier stage, they would be less ill, and the disease would not yet have wreaked the damage to social, vocational and family life that often accumulates…. The illness strikes in the developmental years.”14 Loughner was a classic case of a severely mentally ill person who had no substantive contact with institutional therapy until he ended up as a ward of the criminal justice system.
Loughner went on his shooting spree while states were drastically downsizing their mental health programs in response to the Great Recession. The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors estimated that in 2008–11 states cut $3.4 billion in mental health services, while an additional 400,000 people sought help at public mental health facilities. “These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost sometimes their homes, they can’t provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed,” said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.15
Said Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, “It’s been horrible. Those that need it the most—the unemployed, those with tremendous family stress—have no insurance.”16 More than 70 percent of emergency department administrators said they have kept patients waiting for twenty-four hours, according to a 2010 survey of six hundred hospital emergency department administrators by the Schumacher Group, which manages emergency departments across the country.17 Ten percent said they had “boarded” patients for a week or more because the only alternative was to put them on the street. Social workers who deal with these unfortunates know that in many cases they’ll end up running afoul of the criminal justice system. That’s when they’re finally given a bed.
PART 5
Failed Vision
18
Legacy Inmates
Authority and obedience are not enough to hold social orders together.
Brenda Valencia, who served nearly a dozen years in federal penitentiaries after she gave a ride to a drug dealer, noticed that she kept meeting inmates whose parents were doing time in other prisons, often on drug charges.
These girls would be put in foster care and end up pregnant at thirteen. They’d meet an older guy who promises to take care of them and these boyfriends basically worked them into the system and they’d end up behind bars themselves, usually for drugs. But they just wanted to be loved. It happens over and over. I heard so many stories like that. It’s just crazy. Drugs are still easy to get. They’re still in the schools. What they’re doing hasn’t worked. It hasn’t helped. It’s just made more kids grow up without parents, and now to top it off they’re getting abused by older guys. How much better can that be? What it can do to you is just make you bitter and hate everybody. So I made a promise to myself. I wouldn’t allow the system to change who I was. Unfortunately, a lot of women did. It got the best of them. There’s a lot of resentment. They just didn’t understand that any wrong move can take ten years from their life.1
Valencia, working for a privately funded group, saw variations of the same story over and over in her job counseling girls in juvenile detention. “If these girls don’t want to be where they’re placed by the foster system,” she said, “they just go out there on the street.” And the next time the system encounters them, she said, it defines them not as victims but criminals.
In 1996 St. Louis cop Kevin Cunningham, who’d boxed in the army, created a makeshift boxing gym in the basement of an abandoned police station in a neighborhood that reeked of poverty, drugs, and gangs. The newly dubbed Hyde Park Boxing Club was his bid to get kids off street and “teach them self-respect,” a practically unknown commodity on his beat. He told Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports,
We were responding to so much gang violence and so many shootings and robberies and drive-bys and homicides. What really threw me for a loop was most of the time when we were responding, most of the time, the victims were 14-, 15-, 16-year-old young black males…. . You can’t even imagine how bad it was…. Of all the kids that have come through my program, I think I’ve met what, three, four of the fathers. It ain’t many. Most of these kids are from single-parent homes and, even with that, nobody paid them any attention. Nobody cared where they were, at any time of the day or night.2
Cunningham started the program with thirty kids. Not many years later he tallied names on the list, and at least twenty of the original thirty “were dead or in prison.”3 And those were youths that somebody (Cunningham) cared about and tried to help, as opposed to their neighborhood peers. One boy who beat the odds was Devon Alexander, who, with Cunningham still working his corner, would grow up to hold the IBF and World Boxing Council (WBC) light welterweight titles. His older brother, Vaughn, however, lost to the street. An equally gifted boxer, he was sentenced to eighteen years for robbery.
Just as members of elite families are reserved a special place within the most prestigious universities one generation after another, the children of the poorest Americans are practically guaranteed a ticket to poverty and incarceration. Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP, and Rod Paige, secretary of education during the George W. Bush administration, studied one zip code in the rough Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn—11216—and found that $16.6 million was being spent each year to incarcerate its residents.4 Among the neighborhood’s alumni was heavyweight champion and ex-con Mike Tyson. “Residents of 11216 suffer from a 53 percent unemployment rate,” they wrote, “and the local high school has a 50 percent graduation rate. A reformed criminal justice system, along with a renewed focus on education, would benefit this neighborhood immensely and produce immediate savings for New York.” But the political will to transform research findings into policy is minimal at best.
In January 2004 the Sentencing Project estimated that a black man had a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison at some point in his life.5 This makes it more difficult for African American men to find jobs, more difficult for black women to find suitable husbands, and less common for black children to grow up in stable families with black male role models. Drugs have certainly devastated black communities—but the remedy of wholesale criminal sentencing has made the situation worse.
Police tend to arrest people who look to them like people who get arrested. Blacks are arrested for minor drug possession at seven times the rate of whites, even though national surveys consistently show that whites smoke marijuana more than blacks or Hispanics.6 New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow concluded that one reason blacks have started to leave New York City en masse is “hyper-aggressive police tactics that have resulted in a concerted and directed campaign of harassment against the black citizens of this city.” He found that in 2009 there were a record 580,000 stop-and-frisks in New York. Most of those stopped (55 percent) were black, and many of the rest were Hispanic.7