Suffer The Little Children

Veteran TIME photographer Steve Liss traces the origins of No Place for Children (University of Texas Press, 2005), his compassionate and troubling look at juvenile justice, to what he calls "a photo op from hell" back in March of 1998. Liss was in Marlin, Texas, covering then-Governor George W. Bush, who was running for re-election amidst speculation of a presidential bid.

Touting his "tough love" approach to juvenile crime, Governor Bush took the press corps to a juvenile detention center where photographers were lined up along one wall of a gym while young offenders were paraded before their cameras. In a subsequent roundtable discussion, the governor told the young inmates, "I hope you learned your lesson; we're tough in Texas."

"I was appalled," says Liss. "It was the most exploitive thing I had ever seen a politician do."

Liss made a mental note to return to Texas when he got the chance in order to see what the real state of juvenile justice was there. That chance came in 2003-2004 when Liss took an official sabbatical to spend two years on a personal project about children at risk.

Liss, 50, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, began freelancing for Time in 1976, and became a Time contract photographer in 1984. Though he has covered the political life of the nation for decades, his personal work might best be described as a one-man children's crusade. His photo essays "In the Midst of Plenty" and "Walk of Shame" focused, respectively, on children and hunger in America and runaways in Hollywood; he has shot stories on autism and the over-medication of children for Time; and his next project will tackle children in poverty.

"We have not served the next generation terribly well," says Liss of his youth-oriented agenda. "We might do well to examine our priorities. I've gravitated to stories that explore issues of social justice through the eyes of ordinary people."

No Place for Children documents the stories of young people incarcerated at the Webb County Juvenile Justice Center in Laredo, Texas.

"I went to Laredo because it is where the 'American Dream' begins," says Liss. "It's a border town and it was the second fastest growing town in the United States. It's like a funhouse exaggeration of everything that is happening in America."

In Laredo, Liss first approached a child advocacy organization that put him in touch with a juvenile probation officer who gave Liss a tour of the Webb County facility without a camera. Once ground rules were established, such as obtaining consent from inmates and parents, Liss was allowed to begin taking photo- graphs. At first he was escorted each time he visited and his conversations were monitored, but over the course of the 28 months he spent photographing and taping interviews Liss became an accepted part of the institution.

"I would ring the doorbell, come in and wait for some intake. The trust was so complete that no one monitored anything I was doing."

Liss was able to establish trust both because the young offenders were eager to have someone listen to them and because juvenile justice officials shared Liss's concerns. In its get-tough approach to juvenile crime, Texas had simply lowered the age at which children could be tried as adults to 14 and built more prison cells. There was no meaningful rehabilitation, no detoxification unit, no mental health services, and no aftercare.

"The problem is not the personnel, the problem is systemic," says Liss. "This was not a cruel facility. It was actually rather humane. The worst crime I saw there was laziness."

No Place for Children essentially portrays the juvenile justice system as a dumping ground for children who are themselves the victims of poverty, violence, neglect and drugs. Many of the children Liss met, in fact, had been incarcerated on "status offenses"?such as running away?that would not be a crime if they were adults.

"I want people to see these kids as they would their own," says Liss. "Is this what you want for your children?"

As a veteran magazine photojournalist, Liss takes a storytelling approach to social problems, often focusing on individual youngsters in No Place for Children in order to put human faces on abstract issues. His portrait of Jose,14, captures both the confusion and rage of a boy who really just wants his mother, herself in prison on a drug conviction. Liss's sequence of photographs of Gabriel, 15, is a deeply disturbing portrait of a drug-addled youngster, handcuffed and manacled, who has no idea what is happening to him.

But Liss says he might have had even more powerful images had he not adhered to a personal commitment not to photograph anyone who didn't want to be photographed. Linda, a 13 year old prone to violent outbursts as a result of having been sexually molested by her father, is seen in thoughtful seclusion, for instance, but when Liss first saw her she was crying hysterically and writhing on a cement floor. When Liss approached her with his camera, Linda screamed, "No pictures. No pictures. No pictures."

All of the 96 black-and-white pictures in the book were taken with Tri-X 800 film on Canon EOS cameras. With the exception of a sequence taken at a youngster's home, all were taken using only available light, adding to the you-are-there immediacy of No Place for Children.

Liss reports that he lost money on his juvenile justice project, raising some $70,000 in grants but still coming up almost $50,000 short of what it cost him to spend 28 months working on No Place for Children. He was tremendously moved, therefore, when Laredo officials recently held a fundraiser for him that contributed another $12,000 to the project.

"That's been the most gratifying thing since the book was published," says Liss of the local fundraiser. "I hold a mirror up to a dark part of life in Laredo and they say thank you."

Liss, now based in Chicago where he teaches at Northwestern University, continues to advocate for juvenile detention alternatives even as he embarks on his new project on children living in poverty.

"I don't know what good the book will do or whether it will be seen nationally," Liss says of No Place for Children, "but I do know that on the local level in the town of Laredo this can do some good."