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Artist's Statement
Can we wipe out guilt by decree?
Can we absolve ourselves for throwing out the baby and the bathwater? Can we say a child is not a child so we don’t
have to admit failure?
How far are we willing to go?
Harsher and harsher sentences? More
draconian legislation? Capital punishment for
juveniles?
How did we get here? How
did we, in the span of 100 years, go from a society that created special courts to protect
its children’s best interests because of their status as children, to one that uses
its courts to strip its children of their status as children? Whose interests are we protecting by charging
these kids as adults? Who are we saving, if
we can’t save our children?
 I know
Garry Petit-Frere was not saved. He arrived
at the TGK Correctional Facility in the dead of night, and had been in his cell for fewer
than ten hours when he lost all hope. The
blank canvas panels and paint tubes for this project’s “convictim” mural
were in unit 2-5 of TGK a few days before Christmas, when he chose to hang himself.
The children held in lock down at this adult facility never had a
chance to meet him. His jailhouse neighbor
remembers hearing a kick through the cinder block wall, but didn’t think much of it. It was Garry’s struggle with death.
Garry and the twelve dozen peers at TGK who shared that last night
with him are all too familiar with struggle in their lives.
It is that struggle that first casts them as victims in their households and
spits them out as convicts in an adult jail. Shuffled
about aimlessly, from a childhood were they were raised by adults who can hardly take care
of themselves, to an adolescence where they are jailed by a system that has already given
up on them. They are all
“convictims.”
Instead of sentencing them to juvenile sanctions that help rebuild
them, we convict them as adults and set them on a sadistic path: They serve their adult time, and go on
probation—without ever being treated. Not
surprisingly, they recidivate. This time their sentence is automatic --- they violated
probation, they go away to jail or prison.
They were lost the second they were direct-filed.
How can we hope to get these kids to change? How can the adolescent buy into his direct file
sentence, when the most important legal decision made in his life—the one stripping
him of his status as a child-- didn’t give him a voice? No hearing --- everything is determined at
prosecutorial discretion. Scientific studies
decry the need to get rid of the direct file system; we get better results by treating
kids as kids.
But somehow, the body politic doesn’t get it. Maybe it doesn’t care. The truth is that most of the kids I saw at TGK
don’t look like the people in Tallahassee. We
don’t have a parallel demographic here. Misunderstood, they are dismissed: the kids may be 14, they may be 17, but they
aren’t good enough to be children.
But no matter how much we may think of them as adults, swimming
inside that huge brown jumpsuit, the one with 12 white letters, “INMATE D.C.
JAIL”, ironed on the back, is a scared and lonely child. A child replete with all the insecurities and
turmoils of adolescence, issues amplified and exacerbated by his circumstance. A child
that is pulled away from an antisocial society, but isn’t typically shown a prosocial
path.
Their standard crew cuts, their numbing routine, their sparse jail
cells, and their brown jumpsuits’s 12 white letters may do much to wipe out their
identity and individuality, but it can never mask the irrefutable truth: These are
children.
How did we ever let them get here?
How could have we ever done this to our children? How did we ever do this to
ourselves?
- Xavier Cortada
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