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Summary: Chapter Eight: All God’s Children
Chapter Eight opens with a poem by Ian E. Manuel called “Uncried Tears.” The chapter features stories of teenagers from impoverished backgrounds who were given life sentences for their crimes. At fourteen years old, Trina Garnett accidentally set fire to a house, causing two children to die of asphyxiation. In prison, she was raped and impregnated by a correctional officer. She developed severe physical and mental illnesses. Ian Manuel, the author of the chapter’s opening poem, was thirteen years old when he shot a woman during an attempted robbery. He was placed in solitary confinement where he started to cut himself, but while in prison he also educated himself through books. Antonio Nuñez was also thirteen years old when he was shot in the stomach and watched his brother get killed. Suffering from this trauma, he got involved in a kidnapping scheme that lead to his imprisonment for the attempted murder of police officers.
Stevenson then shares the history of the criminalization of juveniles. Before the 1980s, generally, only Black children charged with crimes against white people were treated as adults, reflecting Southern racial politics. Ill-conceived concern over juvenile “super-predators,” however, led states to lower or eliminate ages for trying children as adults and take away judicial discretion. Years after their original convictions, Stevenson connects with Trina, Ian, and Antonio and tries to help them. He uses photographs of Ian in a report intended to draw attention to the children sentenced to die in prison.
Analysis
Through the stories of Trina Garrett, Ian Manuel, and Antonio Nunez, Stevenson explores how childhood trauma often leads to incarceration, which compounds trauma and makes any chance of a life outside incarceration virtually impossible. As a child, Garrett is both the victim of and witness to physical and sexual abuse, leading to emotional and mental health issues. When Garrett accidentally starts a house fire that kills two boys, the law requires a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole even though the judge disagrees. With the added trauma of being raped and forced to deliver a baby while handcuffed to a bed, she experienced further mental and physical decline. The judge in Manuel’s case condemns the boy for homelessness, lack of supervision, and minor property crimes, even though he’s only thirteen and has no choice. Initially to protect him, then to punish him, Manuel spends eighteen years in solitary confinement for eighteen years. Nunez, who grows up surrounded by domestic abuse and gang violence, gets a brief reprieve from trauma before the court orders him back to Los Angeles. These children are unable to escape a cycle of trauma, arrest, and sentence to a system that traumatizes them again and again.
While Walter McMillian’s case focuses on the death penalty, Stevenson uses the cases of Garrett, Manuel, and Nunez to suggest that a life sentence without the possibility of parole equates to a death sentence. He uses the term death-in-prison to reinforce this idea. He states that adult defendants who commit the same type of crime rarely receive a sentence of life without parole, suggesting that the most vulnerable receive the harshest sentences. Stevenson notes that his office would take on these life-without-parole cases, further aligning the sentence with the death penalty. Stevenson shares the letter from Manuel following his photo shoot as Manuel’s words emphasize the same point. Manuel feels like he was buried alive and dead to the world, but the pictures allow him to prove, to himself and others, that he’s alive. Manuel offering more than half of the meager $1.75 in his prison account highlights just how much the photos mean to him. His life sentence, intensified by years in solitary confinement, already feels like death. Stevenson, referring to these prison terms as hopeless confinement, suggests his agreement that life in prison is another kind of death sentence.
Fear, when used as a weapon, promotes injustice. Stevenson’s story of George Stinney, convicted of murdering two white girls in 1944, provides an example of fear used as a weapon. The 14-year-old boy’s family, threatened with lynching, flees town, leaving him with no support as he faces trumped-up murder charges. Without sufficient money, family support, or legal representation, Stinney receives the death penalty after the all-white jury deliberates for only ten minutes. Because of racial politics, financial disadvantage, and his family’s fear, Stinney’s life comes to a horrific and unjust end. Stevenson highlights fear in action decades later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the business of mass incarceration makes juveniles a prime target. Stevenson reveals that, based on theories of young super-predators from high-profile criminologists, states heightened children’s exposure to prosecution as adults. Though he notes that these theories were eventually discredited, young people like Garrett, Manuel, and Nunez already suffered the negative impact of the weaponization of fear and the injustice of its results.
