A mental health clinician, certified Compassionate Inquiry® Practitioner, and certified trauma-informed yoga for substance abuse recovery teacher. Brooke works with those experiencing mental health and substance use challenges, formerly incarcerated, as well as individuals in the juvenile-legal and -carceral system. Passionate about education and diminishing stigma, Brooke advocates for public awareness and compassion for people criminalized for their situations and trauma responses.
This post is a short edited excerpt of Brooke’s experiences working with traumatized juveniles in
the US legal and carceral systems. Listen to her full interview on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
In my work with the populations in the juvenile-legal system facilities, every child I meet was abused in some way. As humans, when we experience abuse, we under-represent what happens inside us in order to survive. Children aren’t safe in these institutions. It’s dangerous to reveal certain things. Being vulnerable, sad or open carries risk. That’s a whole other ecosystem of survival.
Children of colour are disproportionately represented in the juvenile-legal system. Their childhood experiences of abuse and neglect are also disproportionately diagnosed with labeling pathologies like ‘Oppositional Defiance Conduct Disorder.’ So we’re pathologizing, labeling these behaviors without any understanding of why they show up. These children are vilified at such a young age due to behaviors that emerge as a result of society letting them down, culture letting them down, systemic racism, or a combination of all three..
Juvenile-legal systems don’t work, they just perpetuate and exacerbate these issues because to survive in the system, children orient to other kids like them. There’s gang involvement. And all of these things happen as a result of putting deeply traumatized children together in a facility. They happen as they need them to survive the system, to survive a culture that is intent on criminalizing them.
I’ll probably think about many of these children for my entire life because their situation is so heartbreaking and profound and sensitive. One particular 17-year-old divulged they’d been physically and sexually abused since they were four, and also suffered extreme neglect. They were likely on the spectrum, but without a neuropsychological evaluation, I can’t say for sure.
They were acutely aware how these things impacted them, such that they gravitated toward drugs and developed an opiate addiction at an extremely young age, had trouble forming relationships, had trouble in school, attention difficulty, (ADHD)… All of those things, along with their environmental stressors, which included living in a really dangerous neighborhood in South Central LA, made this person extremely vulnerable. They got into trouble with the law and oriented to peers who weren’t supportive. It also became a matter of, how do I survive in this neighborhood? I have to orient, or I’m a target. (Hold on to Your Kids gives a rich understanding of orientation, how and why it happens.)
They were aware of what had happened to them, but unable or reticent to explore certain things as being that vulnerable wasn’t an option. In their environment, it was actually dangerous to do so.
This individual experienced many overdoses and constant involvement with the juvenile-legal system, because they could not cope with the trauma they had experienced. They needed drugs to forget, to disassociate… I don’t know what happened to them. I heard they survived a drug overdose. I don’t know any specifics of that, but sadly, it’s a common occurrence with those using substances as substances are often easy to acquire or bring into carceral facilities.
Even doing the ACE (Adverse Child Experiences) inventories… it’s easy to forget that these are human beings and that each of their ACE scores is a trauma that includes so many narratives. And what do these ACE scores even mean to the person in the cell, at the end of the day? They invite internal awareness, and there’s a real responsibility in that. If you open up your awareness, what’s next? An individual might not have considered certain things traumatic. But once they’re elucidated, what then? People do different things to survive their experiences, to survive in general, to support their families. It’s about survival and poverty and all of the social issues for which they don’t have viable solutions.
So I think what’s most important is to stop the polarizing, black and white, good and bad thinking. Thinking that someone’s bad means they’re inherently not you, they’re separate. Goodness and badness, these are ways we’re propagandized… It’s largely done through politics, by ‘tough on crime’ politicians pushing fear, separation and shame. They rely on that shame, and too often, we accept it. We need to look, be direct and question the narratives that have been fed to us for years and years. To stop them by asking, is it true? Let’s look at what’s actually going on. What’s this system doing?
Everyone involved, all of those who abet it, need to ask themselves, why? For example, “Why do I want to be a prison guard?” To brutalize people with impunity, or to look out for those who have already suffered so much? Everyone needs to do their personal work before systemic change can be affected.
Disconnection is another way to look at our legal-justice system, and we can see that this separation is not helping. Our systems are broken. True rehabilitation isn’t happening. Prisons are just holding pens for traumatized human beings. Justice isn’t being served for anyone. High rates of recidivism affirm that truth. We’re not looking at existing subsystems and situations; the school to prison pipeline, the foster care to prison pipeline, intergenerational trauma…
I think everyone should read Angela Davis’s incredible book, Are Prisons Obsolete? Prisons are businesses making money on the backs of inmates. To be generating profit from traumatized individuals who are further traumatized and victimized within these systems is unconscionable.
I like to think that if people become more knowledgeable and society really understands what’s going on, there will be more compassion. So much of it is education and noticing how we buy into systemic propaganda. I want to believe that when the public better understands the people who are incarcerated, when they learn to look at the trauma, not just the behavior, or a narrative, or a pathology label, humans will ultimately do the right thing.
The first step is genuine compassion and a willingness to be open to the possibility that there are other, better, more compassionate ways to address these issues, to reform broken systems, to treat complex trauma that’s escalating exponentially.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing,, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the interview, and if you like it, please subscribe, rate, review and share it.
