Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Soon thereafter, Marcella, the nine-year-old daughter of Jennifer’s best friend, Annie, told her mother that Pete had forcibly kissed her and had rubbed her chest through her shirt; she insinuated that he had done more to Sondra. Annie immediately called Jennifer. “I remember, vividly, throwing up right afterwards,” Jennifer said. That night, she asked Sondra about it. “Full-on sexual abuse, starting when she was six,” Jennifer said. “My baby brother, who I had taken care of, who I would have died for, had done this to my daughter.” She called the police immediately.

  Cora told Pete, “This is the absolute worst thing you could have possibly done. I couldn’t have imagined anything this bad, and I can’t imagine anything worse. But now I know. And I’m still your mother, and I still love you. So you know what? Now you know for sure that there’s nothing you can’t tell me.” She also gave him an ultimatum: he would have to get help and reform his behavior if he wanted to return to her house. Jennifer said, “My mom did everything she could. He wasn’t able to say what he needed, and we couldn’t read his mind.”

  The DA wanted Pete to be tried as an adult, even though he was only fifteen. Jennifer wrote a letter on his behalf, noting, “My brother needs to be punished, but even more, he needs help.” Pete was sentenced to a program for sex offenders, where he was to serve almost two years, and would then remain on extended juvenile jurisdiction (EJJ), which meant that any future offense would earn him twelve years in the penitentiary. While he was inside, he told his therapist that Sondra’s father had abused her sexually before he had done so; an abuse expert who interviewed Sondra said her knowledge was “far too detailed to be made up.” Jennifer said, “Incest. I feel like I should be in a trailer, married to my cousin, on Jerry Springer. It’s weird—I was abused by the babysitter, then Luke; and Sondra was abused by her father, then Pete. They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but that’s just not true.”

  Pete worked hard at the euphemistically named Hennepin County Home School, a facility for juvenile offenders in Minnetonka, Minnesota. While he was there, he cried about his father’s death for the first time. He also told Ethan that he loved him. “He would not have opened up like that if he hadn’t been forced to,” Cora said. Pete also became interested in creative writing and produced a collection of sonnets, a startling accomplishment for a boy with ADHD. Pete is physically intimidating, but in prison he achieved a gentle quietude. As his release date approached, Jennifer said, “I miss him so much. Yet I feel guilty for missing him, because it’s like I’m betraying my daughter.” She looked earnest. “My brother will never have the opportunity to be alone with any of my children. But I want him back—I do.”

  The Home School set up apology sessions for Pete to meet with his mother, Jennifer, and Mandy. He did not see the little girls because they were liable to be further traumatized by such an encounter; Annie chose to pass. “My daughter says if Jesus Christ can forgive the sinners on the cross next to him, she can forgive Pete,” Jennifer wrote to me. “I said, ‘Prove that my faith in you was justified.’ And he’s done everything I asked.” She worried, however, that the full consequences of Pete’s abuse might not surface until Sondra’s adolescence.

  A few weeks after Pete’s release, the family celebrated Christmas together at Cora’s, at Sondra’s suggestion. By the time I returned to Minnesota the following May, new dynamics were in place. It was one of the first real spring days, a Saturday. Pete, Mandy’s fiancé, and Sondra were playing football on the lawn, while the others cheered from the porch. Pete was seventeen; Sondra was eleven. I was momentarily shocked to see Pete tackle Sondra; one could sense no physical unease or emotional tension between them, which was unnerving. But the positive change in Pete was incontrovertible. “That sad kid who lived here is gone,” Jennifer said.

  Pete had made several visits to the Home School, and I asked why. “Inside, I got really close to this guy who vanished out of my life when he was released,” he said. “That hurt me, and I was determined not to do that to the other guys. So I stop in once a month to see the people who helped me.” Jennifer said, “He needed something more than we could give, and his way of crying out for help was through Sondra. It’s almost like it had to happen—to save him, you know? Like poor Sondra was the sacrificial lamb.” A year later, she wrote to me, “I was finally able to tell Pete this week that I forgive him. I couldn’t do that until I was able to see for myself that he has changed. He is truly dedicated to living a productive life. My brother, for all of his weaknesses, is an amazing young man. I’m so grateful that I’m able to see that.”

  Two years after I met Pete, Jennifer married. At the rehearsal dinner, she wore a T-shirt with the lyrics LET IT BE, which seemed like a reflection of the family mood. After we ate, we watched Pete play baseball. At a change of innings, he came over and accepted hugs all around; as he returned to the field, Cora turned to me and said, “I finally have the son I always wanted.”

  Jennifer’s matron of honor was Annie; Marcella and Sondra were the bridesmaids. Because Marcella was still uneasy about Pete, he had agreed to arrive at the reception late, when Marcella would be free to leave. But she chose not to do so. She and Sondra drew a chalk hopscotch court in the driveway, and after most of the guests had dispersed, the core group hopped through in wedding finery, including Pete. Pete had committed a crime of intimacy; his family had altered the nature of that closeness, but not its degree.

  • • •

  In a sweeping survey of over two million American teenagers, one in four had used, carried, or taken part in an episode involving a gun or a knife in the previous year. Other sources suggest that as many as one in ten has made a physical assault on at least one of his parents. About three million juveniles—a number greater than the entire population of Chicago—are taken into custody every year, and over two million of these are arrested. Juveniles are more likely to be caught than are adult criminals; like any beginners, they are somewhat incompetent. About 70 percent are referred to juvenile court; about a third receive probation, and 7 percent are incarcerated or placed outside their homes. Arrest has become what one critic called “an extension of the principal’s office.”

  Despite these high numbers, the rate of violent juvenile crime has gone down fairly steadily since 1994; the per capita rate of arrest for violent juvenile crime is about half of what it was then, and the rate of arrest for murder in this population is down by about 75 percent. The many competing explanations for this shift include the economic growth through the earlier part of the new millennium; the end of the crack epidemic; the expansion of imprisonment, which keeps many would-be violent criminals off the streets; and changing methods of policing. It is impossible to amass reliable statistics on crime except inferentially from statistics on arrests. At times the police are under social pressure to arrest for every crime, with other periods of relative leniency. If people believe there is more crime, more police are hired, which leads to more arrests, which lead to statistics that seem to confirm that suspicion.

  Kids who have committed crimes together reap different sentences according to the engagement of family. One judge told me that she would always give less time to an offender whose parents appeared to be positive influences, because “those kids might be able to learn, as opposed to destroying lives again.” One young man I met was sentenced to ten months, while his cohort, at least in part because he had no family support, got five years. The thinking is sound, but the irony is inescapable: the deprivation that encouraged the child’s criminality now lengthens his sentence. Juvenile crime results from the interplay of the genetics, personality, and inclinations of the juvenile himself; the behavior and attitudes of his family; and his larger social environment. The idea of the bad seed seems outmoded, but some people seem to be born without a moral center, much as some people are born without a thumb. The genetics of decency are well beyond our primitive science, but despite boundless love and support, some people are geared toward violence and destruction,
lack all powers of empathy, or have a blurry sense of truth. In most people, though, the criminal potential requires external stimulus to be activated; the intense, internally determined psychopath of the movies is unusual.

  Yet much of the law is organized around the notion that young criminals are intractably malign. Waivers, for example—which are issued by prosecutors or judges to allow a case to be moved from the juvenile system to an adult criminal court that can issue heavier sentences—have become increasingly popular. Ironically, most juveniles who are waived are not in for murder or assault; they have committed crimes against property or been picked up on drug charges. Judges in overburdened adult courts often dismiss these cases, but sometimes they use adult sentencing guidelines; punishment therefore tends to be either negligible or far too severe. Further, judges may be more likely to direct into adult courts the cases of juveniles who are members of racial minorities, who do not present themselves well, or who appear not to have supportive families. These circumstances do not justify heavier prosecution. In the 1990s, every state except Nebraska enacted legislation making it easier to try juveniles in adult criminal courts; the number of juveniles in adult prisons skyrocketed. In 2001, before the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence someone to death for a crime committed before the age of eighteen, some 12 percent of the population on death row were nineteen or younger.

  The waiver problem is only the latest manifestation of our nation’s confused attitude toward juvenile punishment and reform. The first American juvenile to be executed was Thomas Granger, killed in 1642 at sixteen for sodomizing a horse, a cow, and several other animals. Since then, more than three hundred juveniles have been executed; the youngest was a ten-year-old, in 1850. An 1819 report from the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism lamented, “Here is one great school of vice and desperation with confirmed and unrepentant criminals. And is this the place for reform?” In 1825, that same organization sought to create an ideal rehabilitative environment where “simple labor” would equip inmates with skills so that the society at large would gladly receive them back. The first court specifically for juveniles was established in Illinois at the end of the nineteenth century, based on a subjective system of judging the character of young offenders. One of Chicago’s earliest juvenile court judges said, “The problem for determination by the judge is not, Has this boy or girl committed a specific wrong, but, What is he, how has he become what he is, and what had best be done in his interest and in the interest of the state to save him from a downward career.” In 1910, Judge Benjamin Lindsey wrote, “Our laws against crime are as inapplicable to children as they would be to idiots.” Through the early twentieth century, the courts’ discretion was a version of parens patraie—the government as parent—with an all-powerful state acting outside the adult system of checks and balances.

  By the 1960s, reformers had begun to rise up against a capricious system. In 1967, in In re Gault, the Supreme Court examined the case of a young man convicted of making offensive sexual phone calls to a neighbor. The juvenile court judge committed the youth to a state school for up to six years—even though an adult found guilty of a similar offense would have gotten off with a fine of no more than $50 or two months in jail. In overturning the youth’s sentence, the Supreme Court granted juvenile offenders the rights to a notice of charges, to counsel, to confront and cross-examine witnesses, and to invoke the privilege against self-incrimination; writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas declared, “The condition of being a boy does not justify a Kangaroo Court.” The 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act limited the time that juveniles could be detained without trial and stipulated that they should be separated from adult offenders by sight and sound. The Reagan administration pushed for a reversion to “get tough” policies; the head of delinquency prevention in the Justice Department complained that the courts had listened to the “psychobabble of social workers.” States began using the waivers system, enforced the death penalty for some juveniles, and saw a significant increase in juveniles in jail; by the late 1990s, almost half of committed juveniles were locked up rather than in community or treatment programs.

  Juvenile justice remains paternalistic. Police officers have discretion to dismiss detained youths, and many kids are remanded to their parents with a warning. Over the past twenty years or so, the Left, led by the ACLU and similar organizations, has sought more due process and better-defined rights for young offenders, but the resulting formalization has deprived the system of its leniency; one recent survey showed that only a third of juveniles felt their attorney had helped them. The Right has, meanwhile, pushed for harsher sentencing. The Left wants children to have the rights of adults but not the responsibilities; the Right pushes for exactly the opposite. The processing of cases is terribly slow, and juveniles may languish in detention for as much as a year pretrial, vastly upsetting their social and academic development. Though juveniles have their Miranda rights read to them, at least half have no idea what is being said. Sentences are harsher than they were pre-Gault. As juvenile justice scholars Thomas Grisso and Robert G. Schwartz have said in Youth on Trial, “The adult-like procedures introduced by the left worked in spiral-like tandem with punitive measures introduced by the right to create an ungainly, harsh, and internally contradictory juvenile court.”

  Maturity does not arrive with adolescence; statutory regulations long ago set a minimum age for drinking, voting, sex, and driving. Biological evidence now demonstrates that the adolescent brain is structurally different from the adult one, which supports making a distinction between adult and juvenile crime. In the prefrontal cortex of a fifteen-year-old, the areas responsible for self-control are undeveloped; many parts of the brain do not mature until about twenty-four. While the full implications of this variant physiognomy cannot yet be mapped, holding children to adult standards is biologically naïve. On the one hand, kids who commit crimes are likely to become adults who commit crimes; but on the other hand, kids who commit crimes act on impulses in part because they are kids.

  More than half of juveniles who are arrested test positive for drugs, and more than three-quarters are under the influence of drugs or alcohol when committing their crimes. Arrested juveniles are twice as likely as age peers to have used alcohol, more than three times as likely to have used marijuana, more than seven times as likely to have used ecstasy, more than nine times as likely to have used cocaine, and twenty times as likely to have used heroin. These statistics do not elucidate whether substances actually influence juveniles to commit crime, whether substance abuse and criminality are symptoms of a single underlying personality disorder, or whether laws restricting access to substances compel abusers into criminal activities. They do suggest, however, that drug treatment for juveniles is important to fighting crime. Sadly, only slightly over 1 percent of those arrested receive substance abuse treatment.

  • • •

  Sophia and Josiah McFeely had no idea that their seventeen-year-old son, Chuck, was supporting a cocaine habit by dealing, nor that he was carrying a gun around south Boston. So they were completely bewildered when they heard a loud bang one night while Chuck and his friends were at the house. One of them had brandished a gun and mockingly proposed a game of Russian roulette. The others had tried to stop him, but he pulled the trigger once and shot himself in the head. Josiah ran upstairs just in time to hold him as he died. “When I go through recovery,” Chuck said, more than twenty years later, “I relive that moment over and over again. That I could have stopped it, and didn’t.”

  In college, Chuck was drinking and using heavily. He failed all his classes, and Josiah told him he wasn’t going to pay tuition if Chuck wasn’t going to study. Chuck went back to dealing and soon met a girl, Lauren, also a user; one night when they were high, they held up a gas station in Everett, Massachusetts, at gunpoint, wearing masks. Chuck bludgeoned the owner with a tire iron. Josiah found him a good lawyer, and the judge let him out on probation. “He’
d already blown the money he stole up his nose,” Josiah said, but he and Sophia repaid the injured party. To their dismay, Chuck and Lauren married—they were twenty-one—and soon had their first child, Mackenzie. When he was high, Chuck would hit Lauren; he went to jail twice for assault. Though they were both using heavily, mostly cocaine but also other substances, they had soon had two more children, Madison and Kayla; then, they divorced.

  The kids stayed with Lauren, who disappeared on drug runs at night; eventually Social Services threatened to remove them. Chuck brought his three daughters to his parents’ house and moved in with them as a stopgap to keep the girls out of foster care. Soon Chuck was using, and Sophia and Josiah told him he had to go. A year later, they applied for temporary custody; Sophia had to stop working, and she was resentful. “I used to be upset with myself,” she told me. “For God’s sake, they’re your grandchildren. But it wasn’t what I’d planned.”

  Since then, Chuck has been through major rehab fourteen times, as well as countless AA meetings and day programs; has lived in halfway houses; has gone through repeated detox. He has never managed more than nine months without a relapse. While cocaine and alcohol still figure large, he has also used heroin and OxyContin. He has been imprisoned for parole violations, driving under the influence, domestic violence, and petty theft. When he is clean, he is a different person, but he is seldom clean long enough for this other persona to be relevant. When I met Sophia and Josiah, Chuck was nearly forty, and their grandchildren had been living with them for a decade. Chuck is both reliant on and enraged by his parents’ generosity. He was furious that they had told the kids about his heroin use. “That would be so upsetting for them,” he said—seeming not to have assimilated that the use itself was upsetting.

  Nine years after Josiah and Sophia made their sorry peace with taking care of the three girls, they were shocked at the news that Chuck’s newest girlfriend, Eva, was pregnant, and that they were keeping the baby. “What the fuck are they thinking?” Josiah said. “She’s a druggie, he’s a druggie. They’re three months clean and she gets pregnant?” When the baby was born, Sophia saw that the bassinet had Eva’s name on it but not Chuck’s. Eva said she did it that way to qualify for government aid for single mothers. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, have we come to this?’” Sophia said. “I didn’t want to hold the baby. I was thinking to myself, ‘You poor thing, what have you got to look forward to?’” Yet Mackenzie, Madison, and Kayla keep holding out hope. “He’s back in recovery,” Sophia said. “They’ll be angry, but the minute they see him, they just melt. It’s sad to see how much loyalty they have.” By Christmas, Eva had relapsed, and the baby was living with Eva’s mother. “The kids were saying to me, ‘Nana, are you going to take the baby? We’ll take care of her!’” Sophia recalled. “How can I? Now?”