USA: inside the kids’ cells

Richard Ross. The work stems from a previous politically motivated project called Architecture of Authority. I was shooting in a juvenile detention centre in El Paso (Texas). I started talking to half a dozen Mexican kids who had been arrested and were in custody. None of them spoke English. My Spanish wasn’t that good, but I realized that I was the only person that was possibly giving them any voice. Even though I had been concentrating on architecture rather than portraits, at that moment, I started listening to them, sitting down with them, and realized that I was a conduit for who they were.

It became more than just me taking pictures, I was the conduit for their voices for any chance they had of having somebody listen to them.

I had just gotten a reasonably decent grant called Guggenheim. I wanted to go around the country and create a very accessible exhibition that would be unmatted and unframed. I could go where policy makers of the future would be, I wanted to do a book, I wanted to do a website, I wanted to do a blog. Over the course of that year, before people knew what I was doing, I was able to use my credentials working for the New York Times and working as a senior research professor at the University of California to gain access to these juvenile detention centres. I would use anything to get into these institutions, but I wouldn’t put anything up about them and I wouldn’t have anything published. I did that for about three years during which I ended up going to 35 different states, interviewing more than 1,000 people, mostly kids. I also spoke with guards. Then, I started using audio, creating an extensive library of the nadir of the American justice system as it impacted children as young as seven.

I covered isolation rooms, the torture chambers– the deep end of the system- as well as Child protective services and dependency–the light end

The work has become the definitive go-to for people wanting to talk about the juvenile justice system in America, a system of injustice. Data is critical and important in this day and age, but it exists in a very sterile fluorescent light. It is yearning for the anecdote, for the voice and the image of these children in order to blend together and create an empathetic argument to treat these kids better, more effectively, and to produce better outcomes for them and society as a whole.

Photography is evidence. It may be fake news. With Photoshop, I can put your face in any of these prison outfits and have it look credible. But there’s still the basic prejudice that it’s a believable image when you do that. When you start adding the voice to the kid, it makes it even more impactful. I’ve become a sound editor as much as I am a visual editor, putting information together in almost fortune cookie bites to attract people on Instagram. A lot of this is not presuming you have one audience, and the audience is static, but keeping on changing the way you offer information in a credible form to multiple levels of power, multiple levels of experience, and multiple levels of how the information is suggested.

RR. We learn from our environment. I was trying to figure out how to be effective when I did the architecture of authority and realized that authority exists on high and looks down. While talking to these kids, the authority that they get comes from older white people that talk down to them. If you break that cycle, you become something very different for them. Number one, you ask for permission. Number two, you take off your shoes because they have their shoes off when they go into these cells. Number three, you sit on the floor so that their eye line is above you, putting them in a position of authority. All of a sudden, they’re in control. It reverses everything that they’ve been taught, and it confuses them. I have a bad back, but there’s a kid sitting on concrete floors, so it’s not pleasant, but I’m there looking up at them, telling them they can shut the conversation down whenever they want. They’re used to being abused by young people of colour from their communities and white people who are mostly their institutional guardians. And then, I’m just a Martian, I’m just somebody that’s so out of their realm, I’m not a threat to them. Who asks for permission to go into a kid’s cell? The custodial guardian basically owns the cell. Everybody else is saying “step back from the door”, and I’m saying “Would you mind if I came in”. I introduce myself, I sit down, and I just listen to them. They’re teenagers, they want to talk and nobody is really listening to them. I’m flipping the script 180 degrees. It makes them feel uncomfortable because they’re not used to it, and there’s a lot of silence. I’m just there with a genuine interest in who they are, and I explain what I’m doing.

They’re curious, they’ll often want to know how the world is around them, other institutions, other states, other kids. There’s no bliss that compares to listening to them for an hour as they open up to me and tell me who they are. Just building that trust, it’s phenomenal.

I also blur the faces in my photographs. If you look at the face and you say “Well that’s not my friend, it’s not my kid, it’s not my brother”, then it dissociates you from responsibility. Whereas if you’re not sure, then it makes it more general. You look at me and you say, “Well, that’s not my father”, but if I turn around a little bit, I become more of a generalized figure and I’m more representative of an age or a generation. I did one piece where I had photographed at a detention centre in the Midwest. I’d befriended the director of the detention centre and I said, “You know, I’d like to know what this feels like”.

He says, “Come on in the lock”. I was booked, mug shots were taken, and I was in prison for 24 hours, just as if I was a kid.

Initially, they privatized a wing for me, but I actually paid them $256 so that my cell would be paid for. I didn’t want anybody accusing the director of giving me a free cell with state money. I was spooked, I was in a cell, and I put up a camera with an intervalometer that recorded me for 24 hours in stop action. The piece was published in Wired.com and got a lot of traction. Then, I got a note from the director of the detention centre saying my piece had an impact in his comprehension of the kids’ experiences. I’m retiring at Christmas and one thing I’m doing before is making sure that kids are not held in isolation anymore. I changed that specific institution. Then it went from that institution to that city; it went from that city to that state; and it went beyond that. So, my piece had a distinct impact and that’s an email that I cherish.

RR. How big is your room? Think of an 80-100 square foot room (between 7 and 9m2). The base is concrete. You have a teenager, they’re taken out of their home, they’re taken out of their school, they’re taken off the street and they’re put in a closet. That’s what you’re doing, there’s nothing in it. What does it do to the mental health of a kid? Theoretically, in detention, your goal is to try and have them properly placed outside within seven days maximum. These kids linger and languish. They get destroyed. Kalief Browder was held for three years at Rikers Island prison for allegedly stealing a backpack. What does it do to a person? What does it do to an adult? Imagine the consequences being amplified by formative teenage brains that are made to be social, but put in situations where they’re isolated. The condition of the paint doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter whether it has roaches or not, it’s all window dressing. The fact that matters is that you’re taking the kids out of the family and you’re destroying them. You’re taking the kids out of their community and you’re hurting them.

You’re hurting any chance of development. As soon as they cross the threshold of one of these institutions, tragedies occur.

I was at a juvenile facility, and I asked the director what percentage of them had been sexually abused before their detention. The director said: “You’re kidding me, what percentage… all of them, all of these girls have been abused and most of the boys too…”. They come from a world of violence and where childhood isn’t respected. Many of these kids are truant, they drink and smoke… but those are only status offenses. They’re breaking the law only because of their age. As soon as they turn 18, they’re not breaking the law anymore if they don’t want to go to school. If you’re going to college and you cut classes, nobody’s going to come and arrest you. If you are truant from high school, you could be subject to arrest. It depends on how the institutions around you are working to either help guide you in the proper way or just bully you. The percentages of incarcerated minors have gone down, but the percentages of girls as part of that population has gone up. I wrote a book specifically about girls in the justice system and their unique issues. I would go in and talk to girls … It’s really a hard battle when you talk to these kids to try not to retraumatize them, to try and get their story.
Sometimes when you go into their cell and ask, “Well, how often were you abused?”, they might be startled. But it establishes the fact that you understand their story and you’re not coming to it with a feeling of: “what the ##### did you do to get here”. I establish the fact that I understand that somebody hurt them and that they should be considered as trauma victims. The “adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)” research shows that people with high scores have the deck stacked against them. Once you establish that credibility of understanding, something opens up. It’s a real careful dance: these kids are so fragile and a lot of them don’t survive the system once they get in.

My goal in this work is always looking for alternatives to these detentions. How do you dissuade authorities from putting kids in? How do you stop that first step in? That’s the work I do.

It’s very political, it’s very legislative. There are people that work with kids in the system to try and teach them yoga, they provide art, theatre, and writing programs. My goal is to not have them in there in the first place.