Growing Up Locked Up: Ella's Story

Ella was 15 when we met.  She was short with a round face, her hair in two upright pigtails on top of her head, secured with the kind of shitty elastic bands they give you in jail—the kind that break your hair after you get them off of a delivered newspaper, or on a bundle of broccoli in the grocery store. She was arrested just before my first day as a teacher in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center’s school. We met in the classroom, where she was quiet and reserved. When I approached the girls to ask if any of them would like to join my creative writing workshop that afternoon, Ella responded that she would come, “if I can write in Creole.” I told her that would be just fine, as long as she translated for me. It turned out that Ella’s family had immigrated from Haiti when she was a little girl, and her mother and baby brother were back in Miami. Ella’s spoken English was good, but her writing in English was at a fourth or fifth grade level.

Still, she was mature beyond her years.  She observed the people around her, surveying the classroom with her eyes, rarely speaking. Ella quickly became a role model to the other girls. She was an engaged student, quietly working in class, staying out of trouble, and hanging back when other girls became enmeshed in the day-to-day dramas of teen gossip.

Ella had adult charges, and was known as an “A.T.,” or adult transfer case. This meant that, although she was only 15 at the time, under Illinois law, she could be charged and sentenced as if she were an adult.

Children charged as adults are held in the juvenile detention center while awaiting trial, until they are considered adults according to criminal law. The age of adult adjudication in Illinois was 17 when Ella was arrested, but was raised to 18 in 2014.  This meant that young people stayed in the juvenile center until the eve of their seventeenth birthday, at which point they would be moved abruptly, generally in the middle of the night, to the Cook County Jail. Meeting Ella made me wonder-- Where did this age of adulthood come from? When does someone become an adult? And who gets to decide?

Ella joined the writing group and began working on her autobiography, beginning with her birth in Haiti. She continued to write the story over the course of five years in the Detention Center. Her writing grew and changed over the course of those years, into a mature narrative, examining her childhood and immigration experience, her family, and her life in Florida. She never, however, approached the incident that led to her arrest. None of the staff or students knew exactly what Ella’s charges were. She did not want to talk about them.

For five years, three times a week, Ella sat in workshop with other girls, sharing stories and poems, and over time she became like a second teacher to the girls. She began co-facilitating workshops, teaching alongside me, offering constructive feedback on girls’ poems. “I really think that poem could use more descriptive detail,” I’d hear her say. “Why don’t you try showing us instead of telling us? What did it smell like? What did it taste like?” I was amazed, watching her not only master the art of writing, but also the skill of gently teaching and thoughtfully critiquing others. 

She had gained the respect and trust of the girls on her section. When other girls misbehaved or disrupted the group, Ella would raise an eyebrow and they would pull themselves together. She could end a fight with a look. For years, I found myself relying on Ella to help me with classroom management. Ella did not fight, so her looks weren’t threatening or menacing, the tactic of so many students (and adults) who commanded the “respect” of others in the detention center. Instead, she became a maternal figure to many girls, giving them much needed attention, listening and offering advice.  Other students came to look up to her and even love her. We all did.  The Detention Center Administration started inviting Ella to present at trainings for new guards. She would come and talk about what it was like to be a girl in juvenile detention, and give guards advice on how to work well with girls who had experienced trauma and abuse.

There were dark sides of this special treatment, as well. At one point, I was told that Ella had become involved with a guard, who had been bringing lingerie and perfume to her in her room, and driving her off site, out of the detention center, in a truck. The staff member was fired, but to my knowledge, no criminal charges were pressed against him. Again, I wondered, who was the adult here? Why was Ella being held accountable for her crime, but not this guy?

Most of the Detention Center staff were protective of Ella, however. The Superintendent even extended several requests to the court to allow her to stay in the Juvenile Detention Center, in spite of her age, as a result of good behavior.

In one of her assignments, I asked the students in the writing workshop to write letters to then-President Obama, to share with him their experiences as young people in detention. In her letter, Ella reflected on her experience as an “A.T.”

“The reason for this letter is to touch bases on the adult charges that young teens are being charged with. To the state at the age of 15 and older you will be labeled with no hesitation. Do you think that’s right? I don’t.  We are all human beings, and we do make mistakes. I feel that at the beginning of a case you should be labeled by your age status. Then later on down the line if need be that you get charged with an adult case it will happen.

 Some children are stuck because the people they were with at that moment of the crime did not inform them of the situation that was going to occur. Some that don’t want any part of the event are still stuck, due to the fact that they have no other way back home.

The point that I’m trying to make is that charging a minor as an adult has to be the craziest thing that another person can do. If it was that person’s child, then the tables would be turned, but since it’s not their family member it’s no problem to treat children this way.

I am writing to ask you to help us change this, and to get rid of adult transfer laws.”  

When her trial finally came, Ella was particularly withdrawn and silent, hardly able to make eye contact with me. She wanted to sit in my classroom and write in her journal, alone. She was clearly afraid of what was coming. She was being tried for a crime she had allegedly been a part of more than 5 years earlier. She had come of age, even learned to read and write in English, inside of the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. But now the day of judgement had finally arrived.

One morning I arrived at work and found all the girls in my workshop huddled with teachers in a classroom, crying. When I walked in they rushed around me, hugging me, a crowd of tears and snot, choking out the words; “Miss Amanda! Ella is GONE! THEY TOOK HER.” I felt my skin go cold with anger, my eyes well up.  Her conviction had finally, after so many years of slow-moving court dates and unjust detainment, come to pass. Ella had been convicted and moved at 3 AM, before anyone could wake up to see her off. The guards later explained to me that they moved her at that hour because they didn’t want to make a scene. They didn’t want all the other girls to protest or become riled up. No one had a chance to say goodbye.

The next week, “The Chicago Reporter,” a generally progressive magazine, ran a dehumanizing story that profiled Ella.  The story included her original mug shot at 15, and listed her tattoos and other piercings, in a grotesque portrayal, as if these details meant she was a hypersexual, heartless, violent monster.

The story got into detail about a heinous crime she had been a part of:  She was 15. She was visiting her cousin in Chicago for the summer. She and her cousin were convinced by their boyfriends, men were in their thirties, to call a sex hotline and convince some men to come to the house, where they would rob them. When the two men came, lured by the possibility of sex with these teenage girls, the boyfriend instead killed the men. Ella was convicted of armed robbery and accessory to murder.

The day after the story came out, I walked into the Detention Center and found the entire staff reading this story. Photocopies had been handed out to the guards in the hallway. As I passed, people who had known and loved and mentored Ella for years stopped me to say, “Amanda did you read this article?” One long time colleague exclaimed, “I always thought Ella was a good person.” I was hurt and angered by this response. After all, Ella was not even old enough to legally consent to sex at the time of the crime with which she was charged.

Why was she being treated as a criminal and not a victim of trafficking or sexual violence? If she had been white, or middle class, if she spoke English as her first language, if her mother had enough money to visit her in detention, let alone hire her a lawyer, perhaps the outcome of this case would be different. Perhaps she would have been seen as a victimized child, rather than a predatory adult.

This is what our court system does—it judges and condemns (primarily) black and Latino young people based on the worst thing they may or may not have ever done. The worst mistake they ever made. We define young people by their worst moment in life, and then deny them any opportunity to grow and change and develop, to make meaning, to make amends.  We deny that they too are subject to the social and biological processes of human development, the process of growth that I am now studying and naming as a doctoral student.

Our work leading writing workshops in the Detention Center is intended to counter that, to create community in an institution that seeks to isolate young people, and to help our students find connections and to make meaning together so that they can change the conditions of their lives.

When Ella was sentenced to 43 years in prison, I was a little afraid to write to her. I was ashamed of this fear, but wondered if I had the capacity to keep in touch with her for so long.  Still, I knew that she would have no other letters, no other visits. Her mother had never visited in all those years at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. I wondered what skills she might have to survive on the outside were she to be released, after spending all of her formative adolescent years and then living out her adult life in captivity.

What do I have to offer her now? I wondered.

It was Ella who first made me think about what it meant to be locked up during this formative period between childhood and adulthood that we call late adolescence, or “emerging adulthood.”  What made Ella an adult according to the court, when she was only 15 years old? And why didn’t it matter to the judge who later sentenced Ella, that she had come of age, grown and matured into early adulthood during those long years in detention--even becoming a role model to other young people inside? I came to learn in my years of teaching that “A.T.’s” were often our best students. The students with the most serious charges, who had been accused of the most heinous crimes, were also in detention or jail the longest. They were the students who stood a chance of earning a high school diploma in jail. They were therefore the most invested in their studies. These students were also growing and changing, maturing in the presence of steady relationships with teachers and adults in jail-- for better or worse, we were often the first stable and caring relationships they had built with adults in years. We watched Ella grow up, but her growth was of no consequence to the court.

I have started this blog in order to tell the stories and examine the policies impacting young people who are entering adulthood in American jails. Across the United States, there are efforts at reform that aim to change the way the justice system treats young adults. These efforts are based on advances in neuroscience and human development, including research revealing that the human brain is not fully developed for most people until the age of 25.  Seven states, Illinois among them, have raised the age of adulthood to 18 over the past decade. Connecticut is now taking steps to treat 18-21 year olds in the system differently, and Governor Malloy has announced plans to create a “young adult offender” status, to prevent them from acquiring adult criminal records.  San Francisco has created a Young Adult Court (YAC), established in summer 2015 for eligible young adults, ages 18-25.  This court is the first in the country that attempts to recognize the special needs of this group, and to take their developmental stage into account.

How should our courts, jails, and prisons, treat these young people? I hope that as we engage this question, we can hold on to the principle that all young people can change and grow.