Failure in Family Court

...Failure in Family Court The Child Savers: Juvenile Justice Observed By Peter S Prescott Knopf 244 pp $12 95 Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Among the valiant young "law guardians" Peter Prescott came to know during his six-year study of New York's Family Courts, there was an able Legal Aid lawyer who was also a gifted photographer He had spent a year in a remote part of Turkey taking thousands of pictures One shows a group of metal workers "Theydoeverythingbyhand," he tells Prescott "They cast metal in little molds that they make out of mud and dirt They pour the molds by hand, heating them in sulfur They stand there for hours just stoking the fire, sweating immensely, and working in absolute darkness " Prescott, senior writer and literary critic at Newsweek, had the wit to leave the quotation at the end of a chapter without comment By tricks of art like this he has made his inside look at one of our grimmest, most complex and frustrating social failures completely fascinating His book is full of wild, weird characters, many of them playing dramatic courtroom roles These battle scenes beforejudges—and with them—havea special poignancy, for thecentral figure is always a child One is four-year-old Lila, with whom her mother has had lesbian relations Despite this, Lila is in danger of being returned to a parent so mad that she beat her daughter with ropes, and boasts happily of her plans to earn big money playing baseball next year on a team managed by Yogi Berra The child in each case is either the accused or the victim, and often both The confusion—who is fighting whom, and why, in whose interest, and to what end —offers a more tangled puzzle than any in Robert Ludlum—or Lewis Carroll Prescott's title is clearly an irony The children are not being saved, neither are we, from them Nobody knows quite why, including those voters and legislators who, angered by such headlines as judge frees teen-age killer, keep putting through harsher laws that prove to be still less effective At least in part, our ignorance stems from the fact that these courts have been—and are still—hidden from the public Like most developments in juvenile justice, the rule of privacy was originally created for humane reasons But institutionalized secrecy breeds its own reasons for being, usually shameful ones Prescott had to struggle for 15 months to be allowed inside, and in the end received his pass more by fluke than favor He made masterly use of it " By hanging doggedly about a single court for weeks and even months on end," he says, "I worked to gain the acceptance, then the trust, and finally the alarming confidences of everyone who works or appears there judges, lawyers, even the court clerks, stenographers, probation officers and guards So much time in court is spent doing nothing at all—the proceedings are always being interrupted, often for no discernible reason—that 1 could chat also with policemen, witnesses, social workers and psychologists, as well as with petitioners, respondents and their relatives " Labyrinthine as the tangle is, he is able to show it mostly through these personalities—hundreds of them, each one distinctly, frequently passionately, occasionally fantastically individual The book opens with the case ot a boy Prescott has renamed Angel Sanchez, who at age 14, before stabbing a drug pusher to death, already had eight "petitions" pending against him, mostly for acts of violence Angel is 4' 9", and because he agonizes over his stunted growth has been taking double the dose ot male hormone that vvas prescribed to make his hair grow alter he was badly burned by an explosion when he used gasoline to start an indoor barbecue fire Angel is likable and affectionate (He kisses his mother, a rare act in this setting, before the policeman leads him in handcuffs back to custody) There is speculation that Angel's medication triggers his fits of violence His Legal Aid law guardian thinks there is a possibility of brain damage as well "So many of our clients were born to mothers who have no idea at all of prenatal care The mothers are 14 years old, hav e lived for years on a diet of Pepsi and Cheez Doodles, and as soon as posssi-ble they feed their infants Pepsi and Cheez Doodles, too—when they remember to feed them at all Some of these mothers were junkies when they were pregnant We get psychiatnc reports on these kids, their average IQ is maybe 65 to 75, just barely the minimum to function " Angel's law guardian is there to represent him as lawyers traditionally represent their clients "My self-respect has to do with getting people off," one lawyeradmits "1'matechnician Ihelp these people by getting them their freedom Sometimes they use that freedom badly I've gotten one client off four or five times and he goes out and knifes people 1 don't have time I don't have space in my head, to teel compassion for the victim " "I do," argues a colleague, "because the victims are from the same element of society " How these lawyers got into the picture is one of Prescott's stones, and Us hero is Charles Schinitskv, who became head of the new Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society When the Legislature finally decided that thechil-dren should be represented bv counsel, he says, "It was a radical thing Thev actually talked about due process lor kids, as a recognition that ihev weren't chattel, that thev had some rights in what happens in their lives " Betore that, the old concept ot the "best interests" ot thechild allowed his elders to dump him anywhere convenient lor them, out ot sight, helpless ever to protesi The attempt to solve this problem, though, brought its own new ones Even good judges (and they are few, for scandalous reasons) can hardly assess what damage a delinquent is likely to do in the future without knowing what he has done in the past And they will not find this out if the law guardians can help it The judge may use strategies to get at the record, other strategies are used to stop him This wastes endless time, destroys nerves, loses witnesses their jobs, makes cynics out of idealists To be fair to the lawyers, however, most of them try to follow through on what happens to their clients after the days in court But what can happen9 The children most needing expert help are rejected by the centers and shelters capable of giving the best support Abused and neglected children are herded in with dangerous delinquents, to be brutalized and often sexually exploited by the very "counselors" who are there to strengthen them The Bureau of Child Welfare hires caseworkers who can barely talk, or keep records, much less offer creative guidance "The people responsible for treating kids, even today," Pres-cott is told, and he hardly needed telling, are thinking mainly about pensions, hours, perquisites Unions are very strong in the agencies " Jose at 13 was abandoned by his parents At 11 he had fallen, or was pushed, from a sixth floor roof The result was speech and motor problems that madechildren ridicule him He was sent to the Jennings School, where he received beatings, cigarette burns, lacerations and homosexual attacks He was quoted as crying out, "God, I want to die God, God, help me I don't want to be here any more " J ose stayed in that "temporary" shelter two and a half years What about foster homes9 Prescott could have devoted his whole book to horror tales about them Love of money is the root of the evil here, as elsewhere The so-called charitable agencies to which the Department of Social Services turns over control of the children make "huge profits," Prescott is told "They usually keep at least half of the $ 10,000 in government funds allotted to each child " It is to their advantage not to let children be adopted or given back to their parents, who are falsely promised easy contact and sure return Placements frequently turn out miserably, the children shunted from one household to another all their young lives But they may be luckier than Evelyn, who stayed in the same home from age two to 14 The routine cruelties and sexual sadism of her foster father, a former policeman, are recorded in detail, for this is one story that came to light, albeit long after Evelyn had tnedin vain to get help from her parish pi lest Evelyn's court case against The Catholic Home Bureau of Dependent Children is still pending But at 17 Evelyn herself has already lost Haunted by her former foster father, she dares not go out She has no friends "I still feel scared " For all the desperation Prescott caught on his tape recorder, the tone of his book is not heavy Hebrought to this enormous achievement not only his wit, clarity of language, and a lively, durable sense of purpose, but a specialized experience he could turn to new use Two of his earlier books (the third is a collection of literary pieces) also describe m-groups of diverse personalities clustered in a socially significant community A Darkening Green takes a delightful glance back from an adult viewpoint at the Harvard of the '50s, as reflected in his own student diary In A World of Our Own, which explores the campus of his old school, Choate, during the troubled academic year '67-'68, we see how Prescott's sense of humor actually informs and shapes his material Facts put together thoughtfully take on a comic edge and flash with wisdom In 77?^ Child Savers the humor is unobtrusive, as Prescott with a straight face juxtaposes conflicting absurdities He doesn't tell us what to think about the judge who suddenly throws all her papers in the air behind her Nor how to react to her boss, the administrative judge Joseph Williams, who admits he has his "foot on everybody," while rejecting government grants that would fund experiments in more effective methods with better educated personnel Nor whether to be shocked at the young prosecuting attorney who cries out in pain that her work has taught her racial prejudice Nor what Charles Schinitsky really means when, after musing on the young black generation we have brought up to dangerous idleness, teased by television, he murmurs, "Perhaps the whole system should be scrapped ' "Reporters are not social engineers," Prescott says "The business of the journalist is to point out the situations that exist " He has done that with a vengeance here It is a wonder that his book doesn't explode out of its covers...