Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility

Jerry Gold fought in Viet Nam and later served in the build-up for the first American war in the Persian Gulf. Here he tells of his fifteen years on staff in a juvenile prison in the state of Washington. Although called a detention facility, Ash Meadow is in fact a prison. Gold had earned a PhD and published a hallucinatory, death-becharmed blood-flow of a novel about Viet Nam and his service in Special Forces (Sergeant Dickinson, originally self-published in 1988 as The Negligence of Death)--and essays and verse as well. And he had become a small-press publisher when he took on his new job of putting down mayhem among the imprisoned and striving to rewire deadly teens. He also began a journal of his more troubled moments as a rehab counselor, which is what we have here. All his male and female juveniles are high-test bad kids in for murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, pushing drugs, prostitution and so on. As a counselor, he tells us, "I want to be able to look at my life and feel that what I did had meaning, for myself and for others. And one of the ways to create meaning is by the giving of yourself to others." And, he says, he's "trying to save the lives of those I lost thirty-some years ago in Viet Nam." For this he remains a hands-on counselor rather than rise into the ranks of administration, where the kids become statistical abstractions. He wants the heart of darkness. "What continues to trouble me most about these kids is that, though some of them have done terrible things, almost all of them were the victims of terrible things first. While they are being punished for what they have done, indirectly they are being punished for what has been done to them. For these kids life isn't a matter of getting into the right university, it's a matter of dealing with the memory--and the consequences--of seeing your mother beaten to the ground, or your father stabbing someone, or having his own throat cut. Life is goddamned unfair, but we all know that, don't we?" While reading from a book by Primo Levi to the girls he counsels, and the book mentions Nazis, "Almost immediately I realized that they didn't know the Nazis were Germans. The girls thought Nazism was an American invention, a variety of American racism. They didn't know when World War II was fought, nor which country fought on which side. They hadn't heard of the Holocaust and did not know of the mass murder of Jews." He decides not to read Primo Levi to them. "And yet the next day I found myself saying and meaning it, `There is nowhere I would rather be at this moment than here with you.'" A fellow counselor tells him, "Somebody here has to love these kids." After ten years of mal-administration and a fecal letter of reprimand from his superiors and then reassignment from counseling girls to once again riding herd on a pack of the worst, wacked out males in the prison, he tells a fellow counselor, a female, "I hate feeling like a slave." She looks appalled at his innocence after a