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Tuesday, July 17, 2001
By Steve Twedt, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Joan's 17-year-old son has two histories.
One history is documented in various police reports: An armed robbery in January 2000, for which he's spent most of the past year in a maximum security prison for juveniles in New Castle, Lawrence County; before that, car theft.
The young black man's other history is largely hidden: Confidential documents from county youth and family services say he was sexually molested when he was 4. He was placed in three different foster homes after his mother's bipolar disorder and schizophrenia incapacitated her, prompting the county to remove him and two siblings from the home.
Bipolar disorder, or manic depression, runs through at least two generations of his family, which means he is vulnerable, too.
Yet he's never been evaluated for that psychiatric problem, even though his moods turn so dark sometimes he won't get out of bed for days.
Nor has he ever undergone therapy for the molestation, according to court papers filed after last year's arrest. He still has trouble going to sleep in darkened rooms, and he sometimes hears voices and sees people coming into his room.
"He thinks they're spirits, or ghosts," said Joan. Until she forbade it, her son would take a butcher knife with him when she sent him to bed. Even today, he seldom sleeps at night. When he does lie down, he admitted, "I sometimes think, 'What if I turn over and someone's looking at me?'"
Sitting in her McKees Rocks apartment living room, Joan, 38, and her son agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they not be identified. Joan is not her real name, and the Post-Gazette has a policy against identifying victims of sexual assault. As they spoke, Joan held her son's 10-month-old child, whom he had never seen until he was released from the New Castle center this spring.
What has happened in this young man's short life reflects a troubling phenomenon in the juvenile justice system: White offenders are more likely to get mental health treatment, while black offenders are more likely to get locked up.
Disturbing numbers
One New York study showed that 62 percent of 1,474 adolescents admitted to mental health programs were white and 23 percent were black. Among the 1,169 put in corrections during the study period, 28 percent were white and 56 percent were black.
In 1999, The Baltimore Sun reported that 120 white juveniles in Maryland were sentence to treatment in 1998, while 223 were jailed. By contrast, 132 black youths received treatment and 672 were confined without treatment.
That tendency not to offer mental health treatment to black juveniles is one reason why they have disproportionately high rates of incarceration.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's most recent national report found that in 1997, black youths -- who comprise about 15 percent of the 10-17-year-old population -- represented 66 percent of all juveniles in custody.
A 10-year study by the same group found that 27 percent of delinquency cases involving black youths included detention, compared with 15 percent if the accused were white.
Joan's son was arrested under Pennsylvania's "adult time" law, meaning he was initially charged as an adult and spent seven months in Allegheny County Jail awaiting trial. He was then sent back into the juvenile system. After a short stay at Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, he served nine months at New Castle.
When anyone asked if he felt depressed, he'd tell them no. "I just hated talking about the past," he said. "Talking about the past is hard when you have so much pain."
There is no authoritative data that, once they're in the juvenile justice system, white offenders are more likely to receive mental health treatment than their black counterparts. And, though her son has never received psychiatric treatment, Joan doesn't believe it's necessarily because of his race.
"I think it's economics. They cater to the middle-class, and the upper class."
She said a neighborhood group of children her son's age -- both black and white -- once kicked in a door and burglarized a house. All were caught, but only one escaped jail: the white, middle-class youth whose parents hired a private lawyer. Everyone who was poor got jail time.
"A lot of white and black kids are suffering because the system doesn't care. It's about money. It's not about an innocent child's life."
Trouble started early
Joan's son attended school in Beaver and Allegheny counties, earning average to good marks in his early grades. The trouble began at about age 8 or 9, she said, when he started hanging out with tougher children. By age 13, he was selling drugs and getting into fights.
"He saw guns. He had guns," she said. "I worried about him all the time. I prayed for him all the time. But nobody could handle him."
He started breaking into houses, but he was so young people wouldn't report him to police. Then, while on probation for bringing a BB gun to a football game, he was slapped with a probation violation for missing curfew.
"I knew he was headed for trouble. I just thought he was going to be in and out of jail all his life," said Joan. She did not ask schools to test her son for mental problems, she said, because "I always blamed it on him being molested. I didn't want to believe my son was mentally ill." Nevertheless, her son did take some medications.
Joan believes some of her son's problems stem from her own mental illness, which so paralyzed her at times that her children were left to fend for themselves. "I was in a zombie state. When I got sick, I couldn't function."
He started drinking heavily at 13, and stopped taking his medication because the combination made him sick. Drinking and drugs then became his medications, he said. "Every 20 minutes, I had to be high or drunk, because I didn't want to remember anything."
Because he couldn't sleep at night, he slept most of the day and missed school. He occasionally showed suicidal tendencies, Joan said, noting that she caught him once walking along nearby train tracks.
"He told me, 'I was going to let a train run me over.' "
Finally, her son agreed to get help, she said, but only weeks later, he was arrested when he and a friend stopped a woman outside a Coraopolis bar and took her purse. With his arrest, his best hope of getting treatment may have been lost, his mother fears.
"They are not looking at why he broke the law. They are only looking that he broke the law. They don't look at the fact that he does have mental trouble."
With his release from New Castle, Joan hopes her son will turn his life around for the sake of his own son, whom the two of them were taking care of. He, too, sees his young son as a new beginning.
The past is past, he said. "I have to learn to live with my fears."
But his mom knows how those fears can lurk, then unexpectedly surface.
"I don't think he's going to be able to get help until he asks for it," she said.
"I hope it's not too late."