During his year as a children’s attendant in Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, Mark Dostert loses count of the number of boys he meets who’ve been shot. Eventually their “names, faces, and disfigured flesh patches blur into a single mass of resignation, the boys’ and mine.”
Many of Dostert’s fellow attendants are even more cynical about their jobs and about the kids they’re trying to keep in line. They look the other way at abuse by colleagues and cover up incidents with phony reports. Residents who won’t quit pounding the walls of their rooms and screaming are sometimes ordered to strip. When one stripped child keeps pounding and screaming, an attendant douses him with a pitcher of ice water, telling him, “You’re a bad motherfucker now, huh?” The child quiets down. Dostert’s response is not to report mistreatment, but to write in a book years later that Audy Home attendants sometimes must “employ a bad means to justify a good end.”
By Mark Dostert (University of Iowa Press)
