You're Wrong About - Juvenile "Justice" with Josie Duffy Rice

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

This week, criminal justice correspondent Josie Duffy Rice dives into America’s obsession with prosecuting children. From 19th century houses of refuge to modern day detention centers, we comb through the tangled braids of juvenile incarceration, tough on crime fallacies, as well as criminality and its dark shadow of capitalism. Please take care while listening. Side bars include ice cream boats, Ronald Reagan, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating range.Here's where to find Josie:WebsiteSubstackUnreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro ChildreSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalYou're Wrong About Spring TourBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:http://www.josieduffyrice.com/https://theunnamed.substack.com/https://www.iheartmedia.com/press/iheartpodcasts-and-school-humans-announce-unreformed-story-alabama-industrial-school-negrohttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Which I'm not against, it's just the pool keeps getting smaller for me to be a floozy. It's rough. Welcome to Your Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about juvenile justice. I hope you can hear the scare quotes, that's the scare quote tone. With me today is Josie Duffy Rice, our law and order correspondent. She is the host of Unreformed, an amazing new podcast that just put out its last episode. You can listen to the whole thing, and I certainly hope that you do. In that show, as well as here, we are learning from her about what happens when we incarcerate

children in this country. What it reveals about our beliefs, about childhood, about humanity, about punishment, about reform, and about race. This is, as you can imagine, an episode that gets into some very intense subject matter, and yet this is also a conversation that to me is special because one of the things Josie is so good at is determining what the way the law is functioning implies about the beliefs of the people who created the system and maintain the system that it works in, and alternatively, what the law could be, what could happen if we could take our understanding of the human

soul, of human love, human dignity, of humanity in all its complexity, and what we would get if we truly attempted to use the law, this powerful tool in all of our lives, to give people the resources they need to live the best lives they can rather than to strip them of their humanity at the first possible opportunity. So we have a big content warning for the subjects we're talking about here. We try to handle them very respectfully, but we're talking about murder, we're talking about abuse and child abuse, we're talking about slavery, and we're talking about incarceration, and all the areas of overlap between those categories in this topic.

As I said, we're trying to use what we know about history to think about utopia, to think about how we can change systems, but also how we can change our beliefs right here, right now, in this brain, in this body, to treat each other with love and respect. And she and I always have a great time. I always love talking to her, I'm so happy that she came back on. We talk about the ice cream boat, you'll have to listen to find out what that is. Thank you so much for being with us. Here's our episode.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we talk about how the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, and sometimes I suspect we talk about how juvenile justice is neither juvenile nor justice, which means that, of course, our guest today is Josie Duffy Rice. Hi, that gave me a lot to think about. At some point, I would like to hear more about the Roman Empire again. We're doing this episode partly because you have a podcast out that explores this topic through a particular case study, I would say, and I would love to start by talking about that.

Yes, so the podcast is called Unreformed, and it is about a juvenile reform school in Alabama once called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. Before that, it was called the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers, among the worst names for a school that I've heard personally. The institution is kind of a microcosm of the history of juvenile justice. It started in 1911, so about 115 years ago. It was started by a black woman in the interest of rehabilitating black children who had been accused of crimes or delinquency, which we can discuss

what the difference is between those two ideas. She was not able to keep it open because it was expensive to keep a school open. She was a black woman, daughter of an enslaved woman, didn't have the money, so she ended up relinquishing control to the state of Alabama. What happened after that was pretty predictable. The institution became basically a site of rampant abuse, mistreatment, neglect, and it continued that way for at least another 50 years at which point, and this is sort of where the podcast center is on.

There was this major whistleblowing situation, this major case that kind of changed a lot of what the school, how the school operated. However, it didn't change everything and the institution is still open today. A lot of what I've been doing over the past year and a half is not only looking at this institution, which we call Mt. Megs, but also looking at how it plays into the broader conversation around juvenile justice and the history of juvenile justice. I've been sort of looking at it in context, but also talking to people who went to this institution in the 60s and the 70s and really looking at how their involvement in the juvenile

justice system shaped the rest of their lives. It's called Unreformed. You can find it wherever you get podcasts and it is the reason I am here today to talk about juvenile justice. I'm sorry I always go in to talk about murder and or kids' murder. I mean, I feel like if you were, it would suggest that the world was in a better place if you were like, we have to talk about how the little marshmallow bits and Lucky Charms are made. That's true. That would be, I would love to have that conversation. Whenever anybody's like, what are you working on? I'm like, trust me, I don't think you want to hear about it.

You're really going to bring down the mood. Do you want to hear a like, I don't know if this is whimsical because it's a wartime fact. I was amazed by it though. I was just reading a book called, I think, The Secret History of Food by Matt Siegel which talked about how there was in World War II an ice cream boat that's made ice cream around the clock for the armed forces. Wow. Right. And there was a sense at the time apparently and also in World War I that like American soldiers were so dependent on ice cream as a source of morale that like we needed to keep

providing them with ice cream in order to win the war. And the thing about that is that I think it's probably true. It suggests like a deeper understanding of the human psyche than I suspect anything in the rest of this conversation will. It sounds bizarre until you realize it actually is the most logical thing. It is the most logical thing. Best military strategy I've ever heard. Honestly, seeing that in quotes like on the DVD, best military strategy I've ever heard. I mean, that's so smart, right? Yeah.

Yes. Just like keep feeding our boys ice cream if you do nothing else. Nothing else. This is the way, yeah. I mean, I didn't intend it to be like this, but I do see a segue here which is that my sense is that kind of the way in the United States, at least for, you know, if not for our entire history as a country, then at least for most of it, we have designed prisons and kind of the system of incarceration and all its forms based on an opposite understanding of human behavior, right? Like if it if that there is an alleged logic to that because like if a good boy in the Navy needs to fight the axis of evil, then we have to feed him ice cream to keep him going

because good boys run on morale and ice cream and nice movies and pictures of. Right. They're sweethearts back home, right? Yeah. I was trying to think of who would be a pin-up at the time, but I kept thinking of Greer Garson and no, it's not, no one, I don't think there was a Greer Garson. She was in Mrs. Miniver as like a nice mom. I bet there was one freak who had a pin-up of Greer Garson in his foot locker. He was not a nice kid. So good boys run on nice things, but in jail and prison and whatever juvenile justice thing we have at the time or is for bad boys, bad boys don't run on normal incentives, criminals don't

run on normal incentives, they don't run the way humans run and they are motivated by like increasing levels of hopelessness weirdly, even though no other human being is. And I feel like the whole thing falls apart so interestingly when you remove this pin of like, what if criminal are human? Finding the priors that fit our biases is probably the most human instinct that we have, but it's especially, I think salient and dangerous when we think about the criminal justice system, especially when we're talking about children. I have two questions. One, is that something that seems baked into juvenile justice as a concept in America? Like has that always been with us for as long as we've been attempting in

some form to have such a thing, however you define it? And B, I would love to talk more about the concept of shit judges say. I just, I know, I know I bring this up all the time, but I'll never stop. I'm obsessed with how judges are so incentivized, you know, to punish harshly. I think the adage used to be that nobody ever won an election pledging to be soft on crime. I think now it's that one person has won an election pledging to be soft on crime, and he was recalled. Right. Right. The juvenile justice system began, or at least the juvenile justice system for the juvenile justice system for white kids began as really an attempt to quote unquote rehabilitate, to like take kids that the system thought were neglected,

or at risk of being delinquent and send them to a house of refuge, for example, in the early 1800s, or send them to a juvenile reform institution in the late 1800s. There was kind of this understanding, this acknowledgement that kids were different, that was born out of years of, you know, there was a whole generation where teenagers were functionally seen as no different than adults. You know, they got married, they had kids, they had jobs, like they were functionally just little adults. But then you see that kind of start to shift, and there is a real reckoning, I think that happens among parts of society, especially post-civil war, in the wake of industrialization, in the wake of people moving to cities, in the wake of more diversity, more white diversity rather,

where people kind of think like, well, kids are not adults, right? They can be rehabilitated, and we have to get in there and help them before they, before it's too late. I'm going to try and keep the newsies references to a minimum, but I just have to point out that please don't. A lot of what you're talking about is referenced in newsies. For example, the houses of refuge, famously what Sullivan is escaping. But so okay, we're in the 19th century, it's the time of the newsies. It's like a period when we seem to be kind of noticing that adolescence exists, which is very exciting for everyone. Yep, exactly. This like movement towards a juvenile justice system starts with these houses of refuge, as you mentioned, famously in newsies.

And these are kind of four kids who are either neglected, the state thinks they've been neglected, or they're at risk of delinquency. And it's kind of this first time that you see these two concepts treated similarly, even though they're rooted in maybe different things, or they're not necessarily similar. And it is kind of the beginning of this idea of like, some kids don't have the care that they need, it's the state's job to take over, we're citizen making. So a year after the house of first house of refuge was started in New York, there's a case called ex parte crouse, about a 14 year old girl whose mom goes to the court and says, look, my daughter is guilty of vicious conduct, which is an incredible phrase, and needs to be put away, I can't handle her. And

so the court takes the kid away, and puts her into a house of refuge. Later, the kid's father comes along and is like, wait a second, she didn't get a court date, nobody told me. There's no due process. What's the deal? And that's when the court develops this idea of parents, Patriot, which is this concept that the government, the state is your parent. So you have parents, you're a kid, you have parents, and your parents are in charge mostly. But if they can't be in charge the way that they we want them to be, or if they aren't, if they tell us that they need us to be in charge, we're taking over. And we are the new parent. And this, again, is kind of citizen making, right? Because it's kind of like taking kids who are not fitting

within the bounds of the American project, and not only like, quote unquote, disciplining them and rehabilitating them, but making them, turning them into really strong patriots, right? Giving them the citizen education that the state thinks that they need. This is a time before public school looks the same. This is sort of an iteration of what every conservative is scared public school is. For the record, I am not a libertarian. However, there are things about how people get worked up about their kids that I really get. And one of them is like, you have to send your kid to school. That the system of having bells was, to my knowledge,

designed to like, help train people to work in factories, and that the sort of, you know, and to me, school was absolutely hell. And I think is for a lot of children, where you get the sort of the expectations of it and the kind of linear thinking, either you're able to sit still for eight to nine hours and not fidget or you're dumb, or a bad kid. I don't know. I think it is worth, yeah, just appreciating this as it seems the moment when, when maybe the American government realized that the American child was an important export of theirs, or like an important domestic product. These are thorny questions. These are really tough questions, right? The state's role

in raising children is a really hard question. When the state should take children from their parents is a really, really hard question. And there is kind of no bright line rules that result in justice every time. And so, when we talk about juvenile justice, we're not just talking about, you know, the criminal justice system, we're talking about child welfare, we're talking about child neglect, we're talking about class and race, and the incentives for the state to take over. Yeah. And what are the incentives? At this point, a lot of it is this idea that every, that kids can be rehabilitated, that kids, and again, we're talking about white kids. And I think it's really important that we point that

out because the history of juvenile justice for black kids looks very different. It's just not the same. And so, when we talk about it for white kids, there was this idea that like, America is still a really new country at this point. We're kind of building like, these idea of where the social safety net quote unquote, so it shows up and doesn't. And this idea that like, it's in the country's best interest to see children as able to be rehabilitated versus incorrigible is kind of a powerful one because it is something that we've lost along the way that it is in the country's best interest to see people as able to change. Like, that didn't seem incompatible with our goals in the 1800s, at least for white kids.

Again, because black kids had a totally different system, and there were totally different expectations, the state was more generous towards thinking about what kids were capable of because they were able to kind of separate out white kids from black kids. You always see, as always with any of these systems, as soon as they integrate, suddenly they become much more cruel because it's very different when you say like, what are black kids capable of to the state versus when you say what are white kids capable of to the state? So the houses of refuge start in the 1820s, then you have this idea of parents, patriots, then you see a ton more houses of refuge pop up and a lot more institutions, juvenile reform institutions pop up. At the same

time, we're moving towards the 1900s, we see the Civil War, we see after the Civil War, you see in the South, especially tons of convict leasing, it was not rare for children to be leased out, right, and for black children in particular to be leased out. So as we're both seeing this shift towards a more structured juvenile system or a more dedicated juvenile system, you're also seeing one of the worst periods of incarceration in the country. I mean, the convict leasing period in America was beyond comprehension, how deadly and cruel it was. In some places, 30% of people, 30% of the convicts leased out died and our system's bad now. 30% of people are not dying like yearly, right? And so, and like, what are the conditions? What are some of the

circumstances in terms of how people are dying and also how people are being leased? Well, this is the relationship between capital and criminalization, right? I mean, there is an incentive for the states to arrest and punish people not just because we're seeing a shift away from slavery and they are trying to ensure that, you know, they're trying to prevent black people from gaining power, but also because this was a way for the state to make money by leasing out people and for businesses to get cheap labor easily, that was easily replaceable. So there was really no incentive for these businesses, for example, to keep people alive, to feed them, to make sure they were healthy because they could just, the minute they died,

they can get another one, right? And this was a really common practice in, in some places, up until the early 1900s, early to mid 1900s, it took a kind of a long time for some states to get rid of convict leasing. But, but yeah, just get like getting into the early 1900s, like I feel like that sounds like a long time ago. It wasn't exactly like in the 90s, you could be an old lady who remembered having sex then with Jack Dawson, right? And that's not the most compelling example, but it was like, you know, the telegraph was being invented around this period, like this is totally era of science, we have the telephone, we have, you know, the gramophone, like this is a period whenever it like, when the world is mechanized and feels a lot like our own

and we and how does this work, acquiring people like for a flat rate for like weeks or months, like how does that work? Well, it kind of depended on the state, but this all kind of begins in the 1860s, right after the war, I mean, and it is, it's, it is plantation owners, it's farmers who want business owners who want basically to replace the slaves that they had had that are now freed. So the governor could or the state could issue basically a call for people who needed labor and say, we have 100 or 200 or 50 Negro convicts. There were white people who were leased out, many fewer, and the process was very different. But it's not like slavery because there isn't a little auction. Right, exactly. It's just we don't call it, we just have a different name.

And so then someone pays $2,500 or $250 or whatever it is, and they get their convicts, and that's that. And but again, like this kind of labor, as long as people are being arrested and convicted, it's unending. And so the incentives on both ends are for more criminalization, more punishment. And there is a real kind of narrative about these people as evil. And sometimes you saw children in that system, right? So for example, like, we have records of a six-year-old being leased out for stealing a hat, a black six-year-old girl leased out for stealing a hat in Mississippi, right? And this is in the late 1800s. So in the late 1800s, in 1899, we see the first juvenile court. And this is a pretty big deal. It's the first time, this is in Cook County,

this is in Chicago. This is the first time that there's like a dedicated court and judge for kids. But it doesn't change the parent's patriotic system. It doesn't actually grant them any due process rights. It doesn't like standardize really the process of being a kid sent to juvenile court. It just means that you have your own court. But it doesn't really grant you any particular substantive rights by that court existing. Along with that, we see a movement towards these juvenile reform institutions in some ways. Like this is the combination of some of what we see at the House of Refuge, some of what we see in prisons, some of what we see in convict leasing, right? Which is, send kids to these institutions to be rehabilitated. The way we rehabilitate them

is largely through hard work and labor. And the state owns these kids. The state is in charge. The state gets to decide if you go in and the state gets to decide when you leave. You're not entitled to a set sentence. You're not entitled to have a lawyer in court. You're not entitled to even have your parents even know where you are. You now belong to the state and the state is going to make you better by working you. And so that's the context in which Mount Megs is started, right? Which is this place for black boys and eventually black children who need rehabilitation. And the way we're going to rehabilitate them is that we're going to put them in the fields. We're going to make them work. This is a way of getting free labor, right?

And by the way, you also see how easy it is for white people in charge, whether it's state authorities or the board at these institutions, to tell themselves that they are doing something not just okay, but great. We have letters, right, from members, white members of the board to the governor or from the governor to the superintendent of Mount Megs, basically saying, praising each other. Congratulations on taking on these heathens and trying to improve them. Meanwhile, we have kids in fields picking cotton, you know, slaughtering animals and being abused to benefit these individuals specifically, right? Like to pick cotton for these particular board members. So it is a real kind of mental fiction as well in the wake of slavery where you have people who

are saying, oh, I'm not like that, right? But their ethos around child development just happens to completely coincide with slavery, functionally. And I guess that this is what this does, like, come back to something that I find so revealing about human behavior and that I feel like our unwillingness to comprehend this stops us from seeing a lot of the really dangerous stuff in our midst. Because I think people truly most of the time are motivated to do the most harm out of the goodness of their hearts or what they perceive to be the goodness of their hearts. And that very rarely do you have someone pulling off something seriously harmful or evil while thinking, I'm so evil. They're like, no, it's so great of me that I am getting these teens' lives on

the right track by making them pick cotton for me. Absolutely. And look, I mean, this is an era of corporal punishment. They're not treating these black children like their own children, but they're also not treating their own children very well in a way that would indicate that this is, that they don't, on some level, truly believe that this is the way that you address delinquency. Right. For these theoretical, like, white board owners and for, you know, people who make law and who vote today, I think that the stakes are like, if you can't fix a white child by making them suffer, then I don't know, they'll be kind of a fuck up. It's too bad, but they won't reach their potential. And that if you can't fix a black child

by making them suffer, then you just throw away the key. I mean, I want to be clear that the spectrum of juvenile justice is pretty broad. And so not every school looked like Mt. Megs. Not every school in Alabama even looked like Mt. Megs. There are these institutions in every state in the country. They're not necessarily as bad as Mt. Megs was, but you don't have to look far to find a place, you know, in your own state, in your own area, where children were sent and mistreated. We know now that, like, taking kids away from their home, away from where they feel safe, putting them in a kind of constructed environment that can be abusive or often violent, where they don't get the treatment or the attention that they need, where they're not getting an

education, where they're being forced to work. It doesn't work. It doesn't rehabilitate them. Right. We know that. And that's kind of reflected in the juvenile justice system. One of the things that really is haunting about looking through the letters and the archives that we have, like, these parents writing in and saying, I have no idea where my child is, and my child has a sickness and illness, and I can't find them and nobody will tell me where they are, and I don't know when they're coming home. Like, that's torture. Oh, yeah. And that is also related to the parents' patriotic idea, right? Because at the time, kids had no rights. Parents had no right to find out exactly where their kids were, to get kind of,

to have a definitive sentence, to know for their child to have a lawyer. They went into court, and I heard it a lot from the people I interviewed, went into court, and the judge said, okay, you've been accused of this, you're going to Mt. Megs for six years or whatever it was. And that was that, you know? Whenever I talk about the law lately, there's a lot I think we could just get rid of, but that due process thing. I love due process. Yeah, they really do matter, and they don't exist for children until the early 1960s, under the Warren Court, when we see a case called Enray Gault. It is a case where a 15-year-old was accused of making prank phone calls, calling his neighbor and making jokes about his neighbor's boobs, if I remember correctly, which I'm almost

positive I do, because I don't think I could forget that. You know, you could stick with Prince Albright in a can, but not a jailable offense. Like, he was trying something new. He was blazing new paths for prank callers everywhere. So she calls the police, the police come, they take him away. His parents aren't even home at this point, right? So his parents don't even know where he's gone, and he's sent to juvenile detention and sent to juvenile court, and the judge says he should go to a juvenile reform institution for six years for these prank phone calls till he's 21. This is the case that goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court basically says, like, kind of disavows this parents-patriot idea as an excuse for why kids don't have due

process rights, right? They say, like, even though kind of the goal is to rehabilitate kids, you're still taking away their liberty, they still should have some, not all, due process rights. They still should be able to have a lawyer. They still should be able to see a judge. They still should be able to plead their case. Their parents should be able to know where they're going. Suddenly, you see this idea of kids as people, people who deserve some level of constitutional protection, like the rest of us, that does sort of, in many ways, regulate and to some extent streamline consequences for children accused of crimes. Lots of the kids that we saw that we talked to who went to Mount Megs in the 1960s went for loitering. They went for breaking curfew. They went for

truancy, right? They went for things that are signs of delinquency, but not actually criminal, or are not criminal for adults, and that we've kind of constructed this idea of crimes for children because they're indicative of a later tendency towards criminality. I don't know. It's like you're making candy or something, you know, and you're, like, heating sugar, and you're, like, watching it and watching it. You're, like, where's the softball stage? Where's the stage I need it to be at before I can pour it out onto the mat? I've never made candy. But, you know, where you're just, like, you're vigilantly watching for, like, the first signs of the thing that you, by being so vigilant, are revealing that you are certain will happen anyway.

Yeah, exactly. You're kind of creating the problem by being so worried about it. You know, there is kind of this tone that we've always had, this period of time is the most important time of your life where you make all of these decisions about your future, and the time at which you are the most impulsive, the most, the least emotionally regulated, going through the most major kind of emotional changes of any stage other than, you know, babies, toddlers, functioning, and your frontal cortex isn't developed. Like, what we, again, this is, plays into this, the fiction that we've constructed around childhood and the line between childhood and adulthood, because we put a lot of pressure on that period of time, even though at

this point we know that kids are not fully developed at 18, right? That they are not fully capable of making their best decisions, that who they are at 18 is not who they're going to be at 40. That reoffending in your late teen years is not an indication that you will reoffend at 30, or 10 years later, or 20 years later. I think it indicates a lot sort of whose teen years are supposed to matter the most, right? Because, like, if a white teenager does something terrible, he often will go on to, no one will say anything until he runs for office. And, you know, now in the, like, the era of me too running rampant, someone will, like, people will be like, hey, he committed sexual assault, maybe he shouldn't be a surgeon general, but then he will anyway.

Right, right. So there's, like, really these balances we're always trying to strike and discuss, which are about privilege and age and access and violence and trying to predict the future. Who will you be? And how do we keep you from being the worst version of what you could be? And often we end up, like you said, kind of creating that version because we're so, we're trying to stamp it out. And then by the same token, we have the adult system of, you know, trials and punishment, which also, like, I love to point out, because I feel like not enough people know this, that, like, when you go to trial, if you're a defendant, the prosecution goes first, and then they tell their story, and then you go next,

then your lawyer has to get up and be like, actually, actually Halle Berry is Catwoman. Right. And obviously, like, we know from how people accept sequels that that doesn't work very well. That's a good point. It's a great analogy, first of all, excellent. And when we think people are bad, we don't think that they deserve rights. And that goes for people who are been accused of a crime, because we think if you've been accused of a crime, you probably did it. And that goes for kids who have been accused of a crime, because when you hear stories about 16, 17-year-olds who do something pretty horrible, like, let's say murder, right?

I regularly hear from people who say, like, well, some kids are evil. Some people are just bad. Some people are just born bad. And I don't mean just conservative people. Like, I mean, like, that is a pretty common perspective that if you, not like, oh, this person did something young, but more like, oh, they're already lost, right? Because if they can do something like that as children, imagine what they can do as adults. Right. And that they like, you know, to misquote Lady Gaga. They were born this way. Well, I guess to quote her correctly in the wrong context. It's hard for us to even generate, based on the way our legal system functions, as far as I can tell, it's hard for us to create any kind of a statistically meaningful sample of people who

have committed serious crimes, violent crimes, as children or as juveniles, and then been rehabilitated, because it seems like we don't really try to rehabilitate them anymore. And there are, you know, I think the most prominent case that comes to mind for me and a lot of people is Mary Bell in England, who was, you know, a little girl who committed murder, I think, a couple of murders and was rehabilitated by the system and, or, you know, maybe not by the system, but inside of it at least and released and had a nice life. Not only do we not have a good sample size of kids who commit serious harm and have been rehabilitated, we currently sentence children to life without parole. Hundreds of people in this moment are serving life without parole sentences

for crimes that they committed as juveniles or were accused of committing as juveniles. Not only do we not give them a chance to be rehabilitated, we predict that they are unreabilitatable before we've even tried. We say we want to rehabilitate you, but actually, once you do something bad, we have decided you are evil. We have decided you can't be rehabilitated, and we have written you off, basically. Yeah. As you know, I've been researching Reagan this week. Who's that? He was an actor. He also got involved in politics later on, but so many Americans loved and still love Ronald Reagan so much, despite there being nothing to him, which is not even an insult. Like, they're just that he had such beautiful delivery because he just kind

of had nothing to say. I mean, he like, that's the thing. He like, he was nailing the aesthetic. Right. That's true. He was serving president. Yeah, he was serving president for sure. But then that was it. But then it turns out that that was like all we really wanted. And then just like, for better and for also much worse, like the American character is like, ignorance to the point of stupidity, but somehow sometimes like, by being ignorant of how impossible the thing you're trying to do is actually works out really well. And you know, and that kind of like, dumb naiveness that like can serve you, that can serve you well, right? But who does it serve well? It serves you well if you're a white man primarily. It serves you well if you're Ronald Reagan. And also that

like stupidity is a national value, which I do think we have, like then also extends into like into everything. And then looking at juvenile justice, it feels like it comes down to this question of like, if we're going to talk this talk and say that we believe that we can you know, that we can affect outcomes for children and that we have the power to like decide who they're going to be, or at least to influence that. Then like our ability to implement that then comes down to like, our ability to grasp the reality of these children and their humanity. Right. And it feels like the truth that the truth that everybody is revealing whether they know they're saying it or not is like, but you know, these black children, like

they're not, they're just of a different, they're not like the other children, you know, and that that's being expressed the entire time, whether people know it or not. Yes, I completely agree that there is this overlay in any kind of conversation about children and children's future that is really about potential. And that inherently, we don't believe that black children have the same level of potential that white children have. To this day, when you look up institutions like Mt. Megs or private institutions for problem kids or Christian institutions for problem kids, whether it's rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids, whatever, the conversation is centered around how do we make these kids productive citizens? How do we not make them

a drag on our economy? How do we make sure that they grow up and, you know, have good jobs and contribute to society? I see how that can seem innocuous and even like a valuable goal. We want people to be part of community. We want people to contribute to community, right? But it's not framed around mental and emotional health and development, addressing trauma and ensuring that kids have what they need. And so what ends up happening is that you get work programs, right? You get programs where kids work in the auto shop or they work in the cotton fields or they work in the they work. And that is how they prove that they have changed, that they have value, that they appreciate the value of being a law abiding citizen. Yeah. The goals themselves to me seem

off track from what we actually would want a juvenile justice system to provide for children who need help. That lack of distinction between like, do we want a productive child or do we want a healthy child? That we're still struggling with that so clearly where I think the bulk of American culture believes like, well, a productive child is a healthy child. And also a productive adult is a healthy adult. And a healthy adult is a productive adult. So we're done here. Right. And how it just changes everything completely if you ask like, to quote President Kennedy, like ask not what the child can do for you, but what you can do for the child. Exactly. But it is true that like, parents can be faced with situations where they don't know what to do. Acknowledging that is crucial

because we are not just talking about cruelty, right? We are talking about a lack of tools. Yeah. Because we're not very good at providing parents with the tools they need in the community to address the needs of their children. Right. Notice this. Yeah, exactly. What we're good at is giving them other new ways to punish their kids. Right. And it's like, no, what if what about support now? And it's like, no. You know, in talking about something like this, like, I don't blame the parent, I blame the society that teaches the parent that like, even if this feels wrong, even if you feel like this is the wrong thing for your child, like, you're wrong and you have to trust us. Or in many cases, like you have no choice but to try and trust us because

you can't get your kid back. That's a really good point because it is really hard to determine when someone becomes adult enough. It's when Leonardo DiCaprio no longer wants to date you. That's exactly right. But this isn't reflected on our legal system. Honestly, I didn't really feel like an adult until you pointed out that we are now too old to be someone's young, too young girlfriend, pretty much. That was when I felt like an adult. I mean, I would have to get with someone really old.

Yeah, like in their 80s at this point, for someone to be like, oh my God, yeah. Which I'm not against, but you know, it's just the pool keeps getting smaller for me to be a floozy. It's rough. Anything for the story? Yeah. Something that you and I had talked about is this idea of charging children as adults, which I'd been doing criminal justice work for a while before that even struck me as bananas as it is. Before that phrase even sounded weird to me, this idea of someone

has done something extra bad, so they are extra grown up. But they're not adults. Well, exactly. If you have an 11 or 12-year-old who does something violent and very clearly that they did not think through, that doesn't make them more adult. That makes them more of a child because you're like, wow, you didn't and couldn't think about the consequences of your actions. Right. So one of the stories that I think about all the time that really haunts me is the story of Lionel

Tate, who was 13 in 2001 when he was convicted of first degree murder. He was with like a neighbor who was, his mom was babysitting like a family friend, a neighbor. And Lionel and this girl, the six-year-old girl, were downstairs playing, wrestling. And his mom called down for them to be quiet. And 45 minutes later, he comes upstairs and says the kid is not breathing. This is in Broward County, Florida, which is not known for being the most fair justice system in the country. And so I always take some of the narratives with a grain of salt, but let's assume that what the court concludes here is accurate, right? Let's assume that he brutally killed this girl, whether or not he meant to or not. He physically harmed her to the point that she

lost her life. So actually, when he committed the crime, he was 12. When he was sentenced, he was 13. And he was sentenced to life without parole in prison. You can see how killing a six-year-old child to many people is grounds for never getting out of prison, right? That is not an uncommon perspective. It's not my perspective, but it is not an uncommon perspective. And so what do you do when you have a child accused of doing something that we only imagine adults to do? And what we do in those situations is deem that child incorrigible. That is how we deem that child as not really a child. They are just a small evil adult. People are afraid to believe that you can be rehabilitated after killing someone.

I think that's true. Right? And like, isn't that weird? Like, it feels intuitive. Like, I understand it, but you like look at it and you're like, wouldn't we want to believe? Yeah, but people like certainty more than they like hope. Oh, God, that's true. Put that on a tea towel and then never sell a unit because it's too sad. Yeah. This is why I'm not a salesperson. People like certainty more than they like hope. Josie Duffy Rice for Senate. Yeah, exactly. My dad would wear it, honestly, but that might be the only person.

I would wear it. You know, the truth is that kids can be rehabilitated more easily than adults, but weirdly, we actually conclude the opposite very often when kids commit serious harm. We conclude that they must be particularly bad because if they weren't, they wouldn't have done this. Right. It's almost like child prodigy logic. It's like from the time she was three years old, we couldn't keep her away from the piano. And we're so obsessed with this idea that like, people announce themselves early is what they are, which is also weird because in America, like all we ever talk about is how America is the

land of possibility. It's like our whole thing. And yet we're actually like constantly revealing ourselves as being obsessed with like determining who people are before or from birth and then like locking them into a track based on that. And it becomes really self-fulfilling too for the people accused. So Lionel Tate, for example, ended up having his sentence overturned and a few years later ended up was arrested and charged and convicted of armed robbery for holding up a delivery man. And he got a 30 year sentence. On one hand, you think like, oh man, here's a kid who had another chance because his sentence was overturned, his life without parole sentence was overturned. And he blew it, right? That was the

kind of like media tone. The general tone around the story was like, oh, maybe he really was a bad kid. The other kind of way you could look at that, right, is like, if you keep telling a child over and over again, that they are unfixable, that they're a murderer who's unfixable, like it's not super surprising when kids adjust to the narrative that you build for them. Right. And again, I mean, it's like we should be able to extrapolate this by thinking about ourselves and with some amount of real honesty, thinking about how much psychological harm we've experienced by just feeling that we were like pigeonholed in a certain way, feeling like authority figures or parental figures in our lives were dismissive of us or harmed us intentionally or sort of willfully misunderstood

who we were. Just like stuff that's like just fully within the bounds of kind of a typical American upbringing can be like extremely scarring. And then it's like you have to have this like fundamentally eugenicist belief in like the differentness of the criminal class in order to not believe that like the sort of basic laws of humanity and how our psyches are affected by the way we're brought up will be the same. And, you know, and then also it's like armed robbery isn't murder and like bad impulse control does not a murderer make. Right. Exactly. One of the things that we looked at at this Mt. Megs project is we interviewed a lot of people who had gone to the institution and now are one of them is a world famous artist,

one of them is a gardener, one of them, you know, plays music. Like some of them are living huge lives and some of them are living regular lives. But all of them are really affected by their experience of Mt. Megs. The other thing we did was follow the story of a guy named Jesse James Andrews, who Jesse James Andrews is currently serving life without parole in California for murder. He committed a very heinous, I mean, unimaginable murder in the 80s in California and killed three people and killed them brutally. And he was sentenced at first to death and the judge when sentencing him basically said like, you are evil. Nobody who is redeemable would do something like this. And when you read the details, you think, yeah, there's an argument there,

right? Because it's so heinous. So a couple of years after he was sentenced, which was in 1989, a couple of years later, he appealed his sentence and basically appealed saying that his lawyer had provided ineffective assistance of counsel. And his argument was that his lawyer should have brought up what he had gone through at Mt. Megs. His new legal team went out and interviewed about 30 people who were serving life without parole or death row sentences who were at Mt. Megs at the same time as Jesse James Andrews. This is in the 60s. There are only a couple hundred people, kids there at a time, right? And so the idea that there are that many people that they found, that's not the total number, but that many people that they found who are serving

such extreme sentences. Well, you could drive one of two conclusions from that, right? Some people hear that and they think, okay, then the people who went to Mt. Megs were the bad kids. And the system was right for putting them in that school because clearly they were worse than other kids. They were more evil than other kids. They were more capable of harm than other kids. Or you could hear that story and think, wow, that place must have really, really messed these kids up. That abuse must have stuck with these kids. It must have shaped them. It must have contributed to what they did later on in life, right? And when they interview, we have the deposition tapes of these interviews and you hear person after person say,

I'm the way I am because of what happened to me at Mt. Megs. It's a reminder of just how how moldable, right? How easily shaped kids are. And the fact that what we do to kids who we think are at risk of doing harm is basically put them in abuse factories, right? Is not only unjust to them, but it's unjust to everybody else, everybody that they then harm. I mean, the people that Jesse James Andrews later killed, I think should be able to bring a lawsuit against Mt. Megs, you know, people who represent the kind of tough on crime approach, you're like, you bleeding heart, whatever is like, you just want to give everyone a hug and a brown bag lunch. And I do, of course, you know, that this is like this ethereal, like fanciful, fundamentally not of this

reality belief system that will crumble as soon as something bad happens to you. When really like the tough on crime approach, like is generating bad outcomes and our refusal to consider alternatives means that we don't like we're refusing to even attain the perspective that we would need to allow us to recognize that we there are ways that we could generate fewer bad outcomes and actually make the world safer for people, which is the stated goal of that approach. Right. And that's because these are systems are rhetorical, they're not practical. Right. You could drastically reduce juvenile crime, quote unquote, by having better parks, by like having more kids play sports, by having more kids have access to after school programs,

like to keeping kids busy. Figure skating in the schools, as I've been saying. Oh, interesting. I had a terrible head injury as a child, figure skating. Oh, no. True story. Figure skating and helmets. Figure skating and helmets. That's what I needed. So, okay. So we've done a, as always, confusing and enlightening journey through history, you know, to sum up, which I know is impossible. What is the situation now? And like, what do you want? If you could pick like three key alterations maybe that you think would be an important place to start? Maybe what would they be? The juvenile system looks different state to state. Drawing

any single conclusion about our juvenile justice system as a policy matter is limited because the experience that kids have state to state is going to vary. But I think one thing that is really common is charging children as adults. If you have either hit a certain age, sometimes that's 15, 16, right, and are accused of a serious felony, or if the judge or a prosecutor has determined you deserve to be transferred into adult court. In general, again, I think the problem with this is not only practical, but ideological, right? We have to understand children as different than adults. We really do have to see them as a separate, a separate legal and societal entity that we want to prevent from causing harm versus punishing them for harm that they cause.

The idea that in order for there to be consequences, a child has to be charged as an adult seems, to me, a fundamental failure of our system. And so that would be my first change if I could wave a magic wand, right, is that we no longer charge children as adults. So I think the second thing is, most facilities don't look like Mt. Megs did in the 1960s anymore. But Mt. Megs is still open. From every indication we have, it's not a great place to be. Most facilities in states across the country look something like that. They are pretty dilapidated. They don't have strong services. There's not a ton of oversight. And kids often kind of get lost in these systems and then funneled through the adult systems, right? Because we don't actually take juvenile

facilities seriously as places of rehabilitation. There is a serious dearth of holistic kind of progressive institutions that are willing to imagine a different way of addressing quote, unquote, child delinquency, right? I think the third thing that's really crucial is using the evidence that we now have about brain science and about children and brain science to make policy decisions. For more on this, I think Jonathan Harwell in Tennessee is, to me, the person who explains this most clearly. We know now that children develop mentally and emotionally in a very different way than we used to think that they did. But we have not allowed our own policies and practices and rhetoric to evolve with the scientific knowledge. And that's a huge

mistake. Yeah. I think the other thing that's really, really crucial is that we acknowledge and understand how it's better for all of us when we protect and rehabilitate and focus on ensuring that children, especially teens, have the emotional and mental resources they need to thrive. And so understanding that it is in all of our best interests to ensure that kids have the resources they need to be mentally and emotionally healthy, not just productive, but mentally and emotionally healthy is really the only way to move towards a juvenile justice system that can grapple with both the potential for harm and the limitations of children at the same time. I think that when we see kids who don't really value life, whether it's theirs or others,

do the thing, drive drunk or put other people at risk, we see them as evil, but we forget what it's like to be a kid. We forget what it's like to be 16 and have a driver's license, but not really totally have a concept of the value of life or of your future of anything other than the exact moment. I feel like one of the mistakes that we make in these conversations too is dwelling overly entirely on the Aladdin crimes, gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat, otherwise we get along. But yeah, I feel like in all of, not just with juvenile justice, but in any conversation about reforming the legal system, we spend a lot of time talking about nonviolent crimes, victimless crimes, because there are a ton of those and it's very important.

But also, people do, kids do commit extremely violent crimes, the kind of crimes that we tend in the media to call unthinkable. I think these conversations really have to bring that into the fold as well and to at least talk about, this is part of the picture too, and we have to talk about rehabilitation as the goal for everyone. It is true that you get into older ages and the capacity for kids to commit more serious harm, the likelihood of them committing a serious harm increases, even if it remains very rare, you're more likely gonna see a 16-year-old commit a murder than you are an 8-year-old or a 12-year-old, right? And so, what that presents is a really tough question and I encountered it a lot last year

when I did a story for Al Jazeera on juvenile sentencing in Tennessee. I did the story before the Valde massacre, before what happened in the Buffalo grocery store, both of which were crimes committed by adults, but barely adults, right? I mean, both of the shooters in those two cases were, yeah, again, barely adults. I think I knew Valde that he had turned 18 just days before. I encountered a lot of questions about like, you know, we think kids are different too, but look at what this kid did. He killed 21 people. And again, technically he was an adult, but a couple moons before he was not, right? And so, I think it is really tough to talk about kids being different while also acknowledging that some of the things that have shocked us the most

over the past 15, 20 years in this country were committed by very young adults, if not children. It's actually like very, this is such a weird way to say this, but it's very, I think it's very unadult to commit mass murder when you think about it. And that it's like in a weird way, it is like immature to commit mass murder because it means that you're doing something, even if you planned it for a really long time, like you're still not fully cognizant of the consequences of your actions, you know? Oh, absolutely. There's a reason we send 18-year-olds into war, and it's not just because they're so good at jogging. Right. Like in a way, when you think about it, violent crime does feel like it's something that you do either when you're

young or when if you're old, you're like experiencing some kind of diminished capacity or like not thriving. Yeah. Like I know this is very El Woods of me. I know I always say this, but happy people don't commit murder and also healthy people don't commit murder. They just don't. And we know that the older people get, right, the less likely they are to do things like commit murder. I mean, by the time you turn 40, the likelihood of you committing murder drops drastically, right? And it's on a downward slope before you turn 40. Is that why young women love old men? Yes. I think that's part of it. We know they're less likely to kill us.

And they have money. They have money. That also helps. And even if we know that all of the people I just mentioned's brains were not fully developed, that doesn't mean like we accept a world in which we want anybody to be able to be shot up by a 19 year old, you know, because they're whatever, because they were on 4chan too much or whatever it is. There are going to be, apparently at this point, like there are going to be people, particularly young men who feel that it's a good idea to murder a bunch of people with a gun one day. And they're doing that partly because they're able to. What kills me is the idea of like dying and like someone killing me like at a mall or something

without having to try. Like to be clear, I don't want to be murdered by anyone. But if someone, maybe I've already even said this to you before because of what we tend to talk about, but like if someone kills me, they'd better fucking break a sweat. So again, this is like just such a societal dynamic. We like let 18 year olds buy assault rifles, you know, and then our solution to that is like, you know, sentence that 18 year old to life without parole. But like, that actually is not a solve for the structure that we've set up. Right. So it's like the question is, what's the solution if we change the system of juvenile justice? How will we solve the problem of minors and young people who commit extremely serious

violent crimes? And the answer is like, well, we're not really dealing with it now. So I don't know. I guess this is also my kind of lesson, which is like, if you're going to talk about stuff that forces you to just kind of like stay present through really, through things that are sad and difficult to countenance, like do it with someone you love talking to that helps a lot. I feel the same way. And I am ultimately, we're not going to get it right all of the time. But we could get it right a lot more than we do. And so the question is, how do we move towards that? And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Josie Duffy Rice, post event reformed national treasure for being here today to try and envision a better future

and to talk about Catwoman. And thank you so much as always to my producer, Carolyn Kendrick, who is here. She's always here actually, but this time you can hear her too. Hello, Carolyn. Hey, that's me. Hello. That's you. Did you get any good sunburns recently? You know, not as good as some of our other team members who were, but I did get one on my left shoulder because we were just on the Joko Cruise together. What kind of cruise is that? The Joko Cruise was such a delight. It was so fun. It was our first tour stop on the, you're wrong about live spring 2023 tour. And Joko Cruise was so fun. It was like this beautiful haven for beautiful nerds out on the open seas. And we got to hang out with so many of our good

friends. Yeah, I could not have said it better. It was very special and just the amount of people psyched for each other the whole time. It felt like more than the sum of its parts because everybody was there for each other's art and work and excitement. And what an inspiration for our future utopias. I'm so happy we could do it. Yeah, absolutely. It was the best. And it was really fun to be all together. It was you and me and our friend and co-worker and co-conspirator, Jamie Loftus, who will be joining us on some of our tour dates coming up. And also our dear team member, Alex Steed, who did get the worst sunburn, I will say. His shins are toasted. I think that as long as you don't get your whole body completely broiled, then you're a winner.

Totally. Well, I mean, we're all winners, you know, since we're a power of friendship. Yeah, it was so fun to all be together because we are getting into March and in about a week on March 21st, we are going to start our Midwest tour starting in Detroit with our friend Ryan Kahn. I have a feeling Nancy Grace might be there in some sense. The specter, the spirit, the diva. The woman, the myth, the wig. Yes. So I'm very excited about that. Are you excited about it? Oh my God, I'm so excited. I really, I loved doing these live shows that we did on the West Coast

so much last September and knew that I wanted to do more. And my initial proposal was to do, I think, like four shows and then that expanded the way weddings do to like 13. And I feel like I'm like, well, I didn't really want to be walking down the aisle in front of 500 people at first, but also I never didn't want it. That's, you know, I was going to say, especially when it's 500 of your closest dearest friends. Exactly. Right. And it's like, it's going to be like a whole thing. It's like our, this is our almost famous, like I've never done something like this before. I'm really excited to do it for the first time and just end to do it working with you and Ryan and Jamie out there on

stage and some other special guests across some of our wonderful cities. And I'm just like, know that I'm going to get up there and have a lot of fun with everybody. And I don't know how you envision these, but I envision our live shows as kind of like a little bit of a vaudeville kind of a thing where like, I don't want to like replicate the podcast. I want to come to your town and make you laugh. Yeah. Make them laugh, make them laugh, make them laugh. Exactly. No one ever gets that reference when I do that. I don't want to sing it so low. It's to give it a little dignity. Yeah. But so these shows have been so fun. They are, you know, variety shows. We're learning what we're wrong about. We're learning from our guests. There's going to be some music. There's going to

be some games, slideshows. We might even have a few PowerPoints. You know, it's just a great time. And we hope that you have your tickets already because they're selling out pretty quick. And if you don't have your tickets, we hope to see you there. Yeah. And if we're not coming to your city, we will soon. World Domination takes elbow grease. Don't worry about it. Even Napoleon had to, you know, put in some man hours. So yeah, so the dates that we have coming up, we have got March 21st in Detroit with special guest Ryan Ken and then Chicago, March 23rd with Jamie Loftus, Minneapolis, March 25th with Jamie Loftus. Then we have a few, a couple weeks off and then we'll be in Toronto, Manhattan, Brooklyn, of which there was recently one more date added at the

Brooklyn venue, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Boston, Burlington and Montreal. Because I'm very excited to finish there. Me too. Because then I'm just going to eat. Yeah. To let us know where to do that. Yeah, actually, I've never been to Montreal. So it'll be a first for me. I'm excited. Well, Caroline, the entire time we've been doing these intros and outros, which is over a year, you've been sitting here coaching me on how to sound like a human being. And I'm so happy that we get to hear from you during that part. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Thanks for helping me talk to the imaginary people. Yeah, no worries. For those of you who want some insider baseball, basically how we usually do

the intro and outro is that I ask Sarah questions such as, what show is this? What are we listening to? And then she answers. Who are you? Who are you? And I'm like, I'm so glad you asked. I would never have thought to say. Well, anyways, I really enjoyed this episode with Josie Duffy Rice on Juvenile quote unquote, justice. And I love making the show with you. And I'm so happy that we got to work together and that we're going on this tour. We're going to get rowdy, everybody. We can't wait to see you. And you will hear the increased life force in our voices as we travel this little part of the globe. Thank you so much for being with us. We will see you next time.