In 2004, when I was 16 years old, I spent 78 days in Savannah Regional Youth Detention Center. Twenty-two years later, I am still reeling from the effects, most often in the form of violent flashbacks.
For example, one evening last February, I was sitting at a red light, screaming at the top of my lungs so loudly I could feel my voice going hoarse. I spit, and it landed on my windshield. I stomped on the gas pedal, and I accelerated wildly down the road.
Luckily, I came back to reality within just a few seconds and slowed down to a safe speed. Then I realized I had just replayed a version of the first day that I arrived at the Savannah RYDC. It was a grey concrete building, with the same color roof made from metal. The building was surrounded by several layers of tall fencing topped with razor wire. I’d seen barriers at the zoo with tigers on the other side with less security. The squad car had to pass through two sets of barbed wire gates to get me inside. Years later, when I studied “Dante’s Inferno” in school, I read the phrase “Abandon all hope, ye who enter in.” It reminded me of that moment.
On that day I barely had time to take in my environment — the slamming doors, the shouting, the constant chatter of the guard’s radio — before I encountered young boys so hardened by the system that they looked like grown men. They were surrounding me and telling me how dangerous this place was. They offered to protect me in exchange for my food. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it wasn’t an offer.
During this flashback, I visualized myself spitting in their faces and fighting the good fight. But that’s not what happened in real life. Back when it happened, I gave them my food. It was the only choice I had.
This wasn’t the first time a flashback blurred with reality. In many of them, I’m very brave, very aggressive, and very willing to defend myself. My therapist tells me that it’s because I’m holding two hard-to-reconcile truths within me: I survived by submitting, and I wish I could have been the kind of person who fought back.
I once read how a survivor of the Titanic, Frank Goldsmith, couldn’t go to baseball games anymore. The roar of the crowds when the batter hit a home run took him right back to that traumatic event.
A crowd of laughing, rambunctious teenagers at my daughter’s school picnic does the same to me. Suddenly, I’m sitting there in my juvie uniform of a gray sweater and jeans, hearing my fellow inmates shouting and carrying on with each other. I’m in the moment where I get into my first fight in detention, or really my first beatdown. This memory, forever burned into my mind, causes panic and fear in my body.
I scan the crowd of parents, pushing their children in strollers, bracing myself for an attack that isn’t coming. My mind may know that it won’t happen, but my body doesn’t. Luckily, my wife is there to help pull me back to reality. As I listen to her words — just as ordinary as the laughter that triggered me, “Joey, you OK?”— I unclench my fists, ground myself, and come back to the present.
“I’m not powerless,” I say to myself. “I’m not trapped; I’m here with my wife and children. We are at school. You’re safe right here and now.” I keep repeating these phrases to myself as I try to count the things I can see, hear, taste, touch and feel. I use my senses to anchor myself to reality.
Despite my coping mechanisms, I have found myself punching and kicking the air. In my mind, I’m yelling at other inmates, only to realize I’m not in jail. Instead, I’m waiting in the back of the line at a 7-Eleven, and everyone is looking at me.
Those folks on the street that shout at nothing at the top of their lungs? Those are my people.
Even places of peace set me off. One day during Sunday mass, the power went out. It was pitch black within the sanctuary. Only I wasn’t in the sanctuary anymore — I was locked up again. That’s because every Tuesday morning, in the detention center common room, the lights went out for about three seconds. Three, long, dangerous seconds when I would take half a dozen sucker punches in the dark. I’m scared of the dark now.
On occasion, I find myself on the internet obsessively watching interrogation videos, police arrest videos and prison documentaries. It’s all just another way to try to make sense of it all. It’s one more hopeless endeavor to try to gain control over what was an uncontrollable situation.
Sometimes the flashbacks aren’t so obvious. They show up as anxiety and depression. Through a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, I’ve learned that I was so young when I was incarcerated that my experience hardwired my nervous system in drastic ways. It’s hard to turn survival mode off after being ganged up on and jumped repeatedly. After watching your friends get brutally beaten and being too scared to help, it’s hard to let go of the shame.
I served a little more than two and a half months at Savannah Regional Youth Detention Center, but my time was just a blink of an eye compared to that of others. Out of every 100 of us who came into a Georgia youth facility in 2004, 25 came back within a year, according to a state Department of Juvenile Justice report from December 2006. I’m one of the lucky ones. I escaped the wrath of the system.
Every so often, I’ll check the internet trying to keep tabs on guys I served with, who are now trapped in adult facilities. Whenever I find someone I was in detention with, it breaks my heart. I look at their potential release dates that are an age away and their blank, hopeless stares in their mugshots, and I carry survivor’s guilt for being one of the lucky ones who got out and stayed out. It’s yet another trauma that I continue to endure.
As severe as all of this sounds, for decades, I thought it was normal. I was not aware that I was having flashbacks. I thought they were simple memories or daydreams.
But that day in my car when I was screaming, spitting and hitting the gas, I finally realized what was going on. I connected the dots and recognized the flashback for what it was. It was a powerful moment for me.
I realized then that I could snap out of these flashbacks and take my power back. I had hope in that moment that I could move past them and grow beyond my PTSD. I had a vision where one day, I would leave the Savannah RYDC for good.
It’s taken a lot of work to get to where I am. And I have a lot more work to do to get to where I need to be. The problem isn’t personal; it’s structural. We lock up children in rooms the size of an elevator and expect them to get better.
My experience and those of countless others do the opposite. They get worse.
Even though I served my time and they let me walk out the door, my sentence isn’t over. Every flashback I endure adds another few minutes to the clock. It makes me wonder how much time I’ve really served. It’s a hard truth for some of us juvenile offenders, that even though our sentence may be over and we may have been released, we still have many years to go before we can truly be free.
Joey Heilman was formerly incarcerated in the Savannah Regional Youth Detention Center in Savannah, Georgia. He is now a husband and father of three, living in Washington D.C.
