Steve Reba: On the Ground in Georgia's Juvenile Justice System

For more than an hour, I sat in an interview room waiting for the prison guards to bring him up from solitary. In a place where anything can be fashioned into a weapon, time is no exception.

Tired of staring at the large metal door, I pulled a manila folder labeled “Letters” from my case file and began reading. Sent in roughly four-week intervals, each letter was a plea in the same format.  Part one, the abuse.  Part two, imploring me for help.  Part three, thanking me profusely.

As I reached the end of last month’s letter, I heard the faint sound of ankle chains hitting the ground. The door clicked, swinging open, and he appeared in the doorway with a guard on each arm.

I asked the guards to remove his cuffs, which they did with typical deliberation. Standing up, I walked over to the twenty-two-year old who had spent the last eight years of his life in prison and the last two months in solitary.  I reached out and shook his hand.

He smelled like urine.  His hair was grey with dust, fingernails overgrown, black skin dry to the point of bleeding between the self-inflicted scars on his forearms.  His already gaunt face looked noticeably thinner than only a month ago.

Criminally tried and convicted of armed robbery at the age of fourteen, he was dying beneath a twenty-year sentence.  The trial court’s sentencing order told me it was year eight of his sentence, but his child welfare case file, a box of documents that detailed his life in Georgia’s foster care system, told me it was year twenty-two.

I knew a two-month stint in solitary didn’t make the top 100 worst events of his life.  I knew he suffered profound abuse before the age of seven. I knew his father stole the school clothing his foster grandmother bought him for his eighth birthday to buy crack.  I knew he told a state-appointed psychologist “it’s too late for me” when he was nine.  I knew he had been victimized again and again in his five years in state prison.

I began our conversation by telling him about my week.  He always asked, so I told him about my infant son and wife, and then moved into my legal work.  He liked hearing about my other clients, in general terms of course.  So, I spent a good deal of time telling him about an eleven-year old client I recently began representing.

The eleven-year old had spent two weeks in one of Georgia’s harshest regional youth detention centers for accidentally bringing a fishing multi-tool, which had a small knife as one of its many instruments, to school.  The boy forgot to remove it from his jacket after a fishing trip with his father the night before.

I told him about my visit to the regional youth detention center to see the boy.  I told him about the small, chubby boy’s high voice and how this was his first contact with the juvenile justice system.  I told him about how the boy had only rarely been able to eat a meal while detained, because the older boys were constantly taking his food at meal time.  Finally, I told him how the boy was shackled and wearing a blue jumpsuit in court when I got him released from detention.

We chatted for a while longer about his life at the prison, later moving into a detailed discussion of his case.  As we ended the conversation, and the guards re-entered the room to place the restraints back on his hands, he said, “You tell that eleven-year old not to let the lock-up mess with his head.”

I told him I would, and I began the long process of exiting the prison.

As I walked down the outside corridor stretching between the cell blocks and the prison entrance, I thought about the twenty-two-year and the eleven-year old and how they represented two poles of an expansive system.

The sun glinted on the rows of barbwire adorning a fence that seemed to carry to the horizon, and I asked myself the fundamental questions behind my project’s mission:

Can the eleven-year old be stopped from progressing further into the system?

Can the twenty-two-year old be snatched from the precipice of a life forever lost?

Yes.

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Steve Reba is an attorney at Emory Law School’s Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic where he directs an Equal Justice Works project called Appeal for Youth.  The project, sponsored by Ford & Harrison LLP, provides holistic appellate representation to youthful offenders in Georgia’s juvenile and criminal justice systems.  This blog follows the clients Appeal for Youth represents, hoping to present a genuine look into a system that is largely unknown or misunderstood by the public.