There has been some positive change in this country’s attitude towards harsh policies for youth since Karter went to prison. The inhumanity of juveniles serving time in solitary confinement is an example. Solitary, where one can spend at least twenty-two out of twenty-four hours a day locked up, gained particular attention after the case of Kalief Browder shocked the nation. Browder was arrested at age sixteen for robbery, a crime he said he never committed.32 He spent two years in solitary confinement during his three years at New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex, where he tried to hang himself twice; he had been abused by guards and other prisoners, not to mention the agony he suffered from isolation—all this despite the fact that he had never been convicted of a crime.33 After his release from Rikers in 2013, he wrestled with all of the scars suffered from being a youth incarcerated with adults, and he hung himself less than two years later.34 While California passed a bill to limit youth solitary in 2015, as of this writing, only seven other states limit its use.35 Likewise, as policymakers struggle with how to treat juveniles in light of recent Supreme Court rulings, the use of practices designed for adults (e.g. shackling kids when they are transported to or appear in court) have come into question.36
By November 2007, Karter had served nearly fifteen years of his life sentence and was someone who Robert Kinscherff, a psychologist who testified on Karter’s behalf during his trial, called “a poster boy for success.”37 While behind bars, Karter had educated himself, read hundreds of books, stayed away from the troublemakers and sexual predators, and succeeded in every program he could participate in, from barbering to emotional awareness. He dreamed of what he would do if he earned parole: become a sociologist, help his stepbrother grow up, find someone to love and start a family with. And, every day, he thought of the boy he had killed. A few weeks before his parole hearing in 2008, he wrote, “I am torn between the dreams I have for myself and my family, and the thoughts of dreams I’ve stolen from another family.”
Karter’s story itself makes the argument why we must stop incarcerating juveniles in adult prisons. Kids are hardly incapable of change. This has led many activists, families, prisoners, and organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation to ask if our society will ever give up its incarceration model for youth and embrace “a more constructive, humane, and cost effective paradigm for how we treat, educate, and punish youth who break the law.”38
The trend has been mixed in many states, which have continued to pass bad laws in response to brutal crimes.39 This is, in part, because a horrendous crime draws outrage from the press and an outcry from the public, and then we tend to legislate by anecdote.40 Stories can be used for political advantage by the powers that be, and before we know it, the need for change, and in some cases, vengeance, turns too quickly into ill-conceived laws.41 For example, in 2014, Massachusetts passed harsher juvenile sentencing laws for first-degree lifers, setting parole eligibility between twenty and thirty years, allowing that a youth as young as fourteen could receive thirty years before parole eligibility if he was found guilty of a heinous murder.42 This was a reaction to the Diatchenko v. District Attorney ruling, the groundbreaking 2013 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which struck down all sentences of life without parole for juveniles.43
In 2014, Karter went with me to see State Senator William Brownsberger, then head of the Judiciary Committee, to protest the impending changes in the law. Karter told Brownsberger that many of those youths sentenced to JLWOP will grow up and age out of criminal behavior while others will dramatically change behind bars. He spoke out for second chances. But he was unable to stop the punitive attitude that still has hold all across this country.
I first met Karter Reed by mail in November 2007. He’d come across a book I’d written, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison, and wanted to know if I could help a friend, a female prisoner who wanted information about parole.44 I was no longer working at the women’s prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, where I taught and directed plays for almost ten years, but Karter could not have known that. He was merely reaching out to a name on a book jacket. Although he did not say so, when I received that first letter, I thought that perhaps Karter wanted help for himself, too.
For more than twenty years I’d worked with women in the criminal justice system and believed the theory of the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who coined the phrase “a woman behind bars is not a dangerous man.”45 I was suspicious of male prisoners, imagining them to be stereotypically brutal and aggressive, i.e. dangerous.46 I had never received a letter from a young man sentenced to prison for second-degree murder. I thought long and hard about whether to answer someone who said he had recreated himself in prison but who in news articles had been condemned as a “monster,” carrying out a “methodical crime.”47
Perhaps I would send just one reply. But then another letter followed, and soon another. Pulled in by his language, a little awed by the quality of the books he’d read, and genuinely shocked that a sixteen-year-old could be sentenced to life with only the possibility of ever getting out of prison, I began to correspond with Karter. We each wrote more than one hundred letters after that first one in November 2007. The content of Karter’s letters inform much of this book, and his thoughts and insights helped me understand what a person sentenced as a child goes through behind bars. The discrepancy between the man I saw in his letters and the boy described by prosecutors, the press, and school officials in the town of Dartmouth urged me to reconsider how I thought about juveniles who kill.48
While writing this book, I met Karter in person five times. The first was in January 2008, when I took students to the state prison for men in Shirley, Massachusetts, to hear Karter and several other convicted murderers talk about their botched lives, what brought them to crime, and the difficulty of change behind bars. It was that meeting, and the swirl of questions about justice that resulted from it, that drew me in to writing Boy with a Knife. I wondered: Would these once-juvenile murderers ever get out of prison? Or would they face parole boards that felt pressured to respond to victims’ rights advocates who resisted paroling prisoners, and to the communities who wanted no part in their return? And: Would these prisoners ultimately end up living behind bars for the rest of their lives, even if they had not been sentenced to life without parole? What would it mean to take on a system that insisted on keeping young people locked up in spite of personal transformation?
But it was the doggedness of Karter Reed, the way he kept at his own case, his self-development, and his belief that everyone deserves a second chance, which persuaded me to share his story, and show how it connects to our country’s harsh policies for juveniles who commit violent crimes. Karter refused to settle for anything less than what he felt was justice. He had the support and inner strength to face the consequences of his actions and was not crushed by unjust punishment. In some circles, one might call him just plain lucky. But those who know Karter and the criminal justice system would argue that he is an example of overcoming the odds. He floundered and failed along the way, but eventually he was able to beat Lady Justice Red at her own game.
I
If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
For many kids in New Bedford, Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s, the world was a minefield. They saw fights in school and at home. In a 2009 letter, Karter wrote that it was “common” for high school students to attack junior high kids. Even when he was jumped in school—and he was jumped five times before he got to high school—Karter said, “I just took a beating . . . I never threw a punch.” As a result of this environment, however, Karter felt he needed a knife for protection.
Karter’s first knife was given to him by his father. It was a double-edge non-folding style with a leather sheath. Karter later obtained other knives. Once he stole a paring knife from