Experiencing Preston Youth Prison
June 17th, 2009 by Kevin FeeneyThe average family travels three hours each way to get to the Preston Youth Correctional Facility. It took us two hours from our office in Oakland. When we arrived, Jennifer and I were treated to what has become a typical experience for families visiting Preston—an exhaustive (and intimidating) search of our vehicle by local police and their dogs. The search ended abruptly when staff learned we weren’t here to visit family—we were here for a tour.
Our three tour guides—the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, and a supervising parole agent—met us in the administrative office at the mouth of the facility. As we exited through the back, the first thing I noticed was the quiet. It felt like the parties to our tour were the only people on the grounds. The basketball courts—weeds cutting through concrete, and backboards soaked with rust—were empty, as was the swimming pool and the dry grass where rattlesnakes are known to curl in the sun. “It looks like a junior college, doesn’t it?” the parole agent said cheerfully. To me, Preston looked more like an inactive military base, its buildings worn, its spirit forlorn.
This was a tour of gaps and silences, and I’ll remember it as much by what we did not see as by what we were led to see. We did not have the chance to visit the living unit where young people adjudicated for sex offenses are housed—one of the poorest-kept units from the previous Books Not Bars tour—nor did we see the showers, where last November, parents told us their children were sprayed with mace after a fight erupted, the chemicals so thick in the air it was difficult to breathe. Of the 300 youth housed at Preston, we were in the presence last Saturday of maybe thirty of them, and spoke to even fewer. When I recall the tour now, the image that comes to mind is of the first living unit we visited, with its forty or fifty empty metal beds, many triple bunked and each topped with what could have been slices of a single mattress. The light was dim, the caged security station unmanned, and all to be heard was the dull hum of a fan.
Our guides seemed to take a certain pleasure in leading the tour—offering to take us to the top of the watchtower, twice recommending the wine tasting and open house at the historic castle nearby—as if we had come to visit not a prison but some site of national pride. Since the youth prisons have fallen under a federal consent decree for their deplorable conditions, the superintendent and his staff give tours quite often, and Saturday’s program, very much a highlight reel of piecemeal improvements, likely followed the path that numerous state officials and agents of the courts have also taken. While the superintendent and other staff we met along the way were more than welcoming and assured us we could visit whatever we wished to see, there is only so much you can see on a Saturday morning when most young people are either visiting their loved ones or in the mess hall or someplace else we do not visit.
For the superintendent, the tour was his way of saying the old, dark days are behind us, as he made it a point to lead us through his proudest accomplishments. He took us to the “Behavioral Treatment Program” unit (BTP), where youth once confined to 21-hour solitary are now housed. Most have access to a common area, and all receive programming outside their cells (though they still spend the majority of the day in lockup). In a different unit, we were introduced to a staff member well versed in the language of conflict resolution. According to the superintendent, court-mandated decreases in the number of youth housed on each living unit have helped reduce the number of incidents in which staff members resort to force (though the improper use of chemical restraints, we would add, remains a huge issue).
Midway through the tour, the sight of imposing metal cages outside the Sequoia living unit cast a silence over the group. The superintendent kept walking, and we followed. With his back to the cages, the superintendent said, “We don’t use any of that stuff any more.” From the way he said it, you’d think decades had passed since young men spent hours peering out from those cages during recreation time, but it has actually been just a couple years, if that. The superintendent quickly added that he plans to acquire dogs from the local SPCA, which some youth will be responsible for training, and in the abandoned cages, the dogs will be kept. And so cages for men become cages for dogs. The policy is rewritten, regulations updated, and the indiscretion is erased. The institution self-corrects and plows ahead like a steam train, or so the superintendent would have it.
But do the young people at Preston see the transformation? I was the last to leave the common area of one of the “high risk” living units, when a group of eight young men flagged me down. I explained who I worked for. “We have some concerns,” one of them said. The grievance process—another of the reforms the superintendent had touted—still wasn’t working. “They are throwing our complaints in the trash. We can’t do anything about it.” “The tour they’re taking you on,” another youth said, “it’s a joke. They’re putting on a show for you. As soon as you leave, we’ll be back in our cells again.” “And see,” the first young man cut in again. He cocked his head to gesture to the corrections officer stationed across the room. “We’ll all have trouble for talking to you.” His friends nodded wearily.
Preston is not a place that shows itself in an hour, especially to visitors, but there were moments like this when I caught glimpses of its character. In the BTP unit, while everyone else sat in orange chairs by the television, two youth remained locked in their cells. The cells are dank closets and each features a single window slat. One of the two young men stood right up against the door, looked out through the slat with heavy eyes, and waved. Apparently Sacramento County had paid the Division of Juvenile Justice to house him and his companion before their trial, but due to liability concerns, they were to have no contact with the DJJ youth, which meant they were isolated, in their cells or otherwise, at all times.
On the way home, I thought about what the young man I’d met had told me, that when the show was over, he and his compatriots would be back in their cells, too. And for a second, I imagined rows of youth holed up in their cells, just as the design of the facility—with its long, dark halls—prescribes. Like the old castle that shares its grounds, Preston is a fortress—obdurate and insular and tethered to misery. The superintendent’s protocol and pronouncements won’t take the misery away from those halls. No, he’ll need a bulldozer to do that.
