Getting Ghost by Luke Bergmann

Author:Luke Bergmann [Bergmann, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2010-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Playtime

At the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility, the passage of time is twisted, Mobius-like, into a paradox.1 Days at the facility are organized according to rigid temporal schedules. Every ticking moment is accounted for, categorized, rationalized, and summarized. Five minutes for a shower, ten minutes to get dressed, thirty minutes to eat the facility's food, and fifteen to rest. Divisions of time are inscribed on and invested in the bodies and biologies of inmates, in calculations of the need for sleep, food, education, hygiene, medication, and punishment. Unlike in adult jails or prisons, where inmates may languish in their cells for hours or even days on end, time is utterly determined and embodied in the disciplined practices of young people confined at the juvenile detention facility.

But even as incarcerated youth are put through the paces like gears in a clock, as they click through their days, moving on the hours in even increments, young people at the detention facility are always waiting for timely decisions to be made about them. Owing to the fact that the bureaucracy is so entrenched and every decision must move through many clogged channels, kids may wait months for a decision about placement, sentencing, or adjudication that they expect “any day.” Young people locked up at the juvenile detention facility are simultaneously bored to stupefaction and racked with anxiety. Even as their days blur together, heavy with a sense of unknown imminence, things might shift unpredictably at any moment, as everyone goes to court, comes back, goes again to court, and comes back again to wait. And of course, not only do detained young people not know the length of time that they will be locked up, and often the length of time that they can expect to be under some sort of state supervision after sentencing, they frequently do not know what sort of time they will do. For many young people caught up with the law, this is the defining tension, the question that trumps all others: Will they do adult or juvenile time, or what permutation of either?

And the consequences are dire. As judges and court personnel huddle in front of courtroom benches, haggling in hushed tones over the short arcs of young lives and how they might bend upon judicial discretion, years—sometimes decades—hang in the balance. In many cases, a judge's decision to sentence a young person as a juvenile rather than as an adult can mean the difference between nine months of treatment and schooling in a low-security residential placement—with canoe trips on the weekends and off-campus visits with parents—or ten to fifteen years in a prison populated primarily by older men, surrounded by gleaming concertina wire, surveyed by gun-toting guards wearing reflective sunglasses.

Of course, to the kids locked up at the juvenile detention facility these distinctions seem absurd. Most of them are adolescents: somewhere between children and adults. They are in the nascent stages of understanding their sexual, economic, and political subjectivities. Many are in and out of school. Some are parents themselves, though with varying degrees of responsibility for their children.

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