I noticed someone had read this article recently. Often I will reread articles people read that day or recently to see what they were interested in. I found this article to be well written and to the point. So, I decided to share this with you today. Understanding "WHY?" Juvenile offenders are the way they are which is a way for them to get any attention at all in order to stay alive one more second and one more day gives each of us a clue as to how to keep them alive. However, when boys (or girls) get to the point of the ones I'm talking about here you have statistically only about a 25% chance of actually saving any of them from an ongoing life of crime. However, often what saves these boys or girls at some point is a significant other who is not a criminal or having a child also often puts "The fear of God" into them and they straighten out on their own.
It might be easier to read in it's original format which is:
Juvenile Offenders
Friday, August 1, 2008
Juvenile Offenders
All children need attention to survive. The only real question is: "Will
they receive enough positive attention to thrive?" So what happens in
real time is that if children don't get enough positive attention they
will get any attention they can. And if it is not positive attention
then it is negative attention.
Positive attention creates eagle scouts, honor students, star athletes, college students and college graduates. Positive attention creates people who care about themselves and others in useful positive ways. Negative attention creates abused children or unloved children or criminals or all three. Negative attention creates children in jail, children stealing, children doing drugs, children dying, children killing each other or their parents, children going crazy.
In the early 1990s I chose to work counseling male juvenile offenders ages 12 to 17. I had had a good life and one of the ways I chose to give back was to help young offenders retrain as positive young men moving into adulthood and moving away from the future candidates for real life "Pulp Fiction" the movie.
At the time I was counseling male juvenile offenders who had more than 7 felony convictions(non gun related) ages 12-17 years of age. It was a very difficult assignment. First of all, these young men were hostile in that when you met them they would do things like call you a m-f- and other colorful phrases vehemently. However, as an adult counselor I was not allowed to respond with swearing or violence in return. So, the first job was to try to move these boys individually toward positive attention and positive actions. Since they all had been so abused by life in general they did not trust me or anyone else. I guess the best way to define them would be paranoid in the extreme. However, if you had been shot at multiple times in your life, and beat up or stabbed you might be paranoid too.They didn't trust anyone. They tended to bond together like in a gang and the best I could hope for was to be viewed as a helpful uncle type of figure and hopefully they wouldn't kill me or injure me.
My job was to try to save the 25% of them that hadn't already embarked on a life of crime. Many of them didn't even see choosing a life of crime as a choice. It was just what everybody did in their neighborhood and in order to survive there, it is what one did to stay alive. For a middle class guy like myself, this was a lot to take in for me. It was hard to believe that for many crime was a way of life from cradle to the grave as normal for them as breathing. Trying to recondition the thinking of these youths was very difficult. I found I had to become extremely pragmatic in my thinking in regard to them all.
It became easy for me to spot someone who could be saved from a life of crime. They vacillated more in their decision making than hardened criminals. I found there was an order to the thinking of hardened criminals, even in their teens. Many of these boys couldn't ever be saved, and some would only be saved by a good woman, whether it was a girlfriend, a wife, a mother or a grandmother. And some others were past hope and others I could see wouldn't ever live to see 20 or 25 because of their thoughts and actions. I was around 40 years old at the time and so these young men saw me either as a do gooder like a minister or priest or they saw me as an uncle. I earned their respect because they didn't want to go to CYA(California Youth Authority) where they knew they would be very harshly treated and where all the murderers between 12-17 go as well as other serious gun related felonies tend to wind up. They were all terrified of having to go there and become someones girlfriend and get AIDS or TB or worse. So, one of the reasons they treated me with respect was terror and fear of a potential worse situation.
I did what I could for all the boys there. I tried to be as fair and as helpful as I could to them all. However, when I took 6 shanks(knife like objects) away from one boy during the course of one day and then he put a butcher knife up against my back and laughed and I had to disarm him I knew it was time for me to quit this job before I died there or had to kill someone to survive. We were not allowed any weapons to defend ourselves as counselors. So when things got out of hand(and they often did) it got pretty scary at times.
After I resigned my post, my replacement was threatened by the same boy with a broken off broom handle and called the police. He was fired for this. Within 6 months, 2 counselors were murdered by juvenile offenders in San Jose where I worked then, one was beaten to death and the other stabbed to death with a shank. I'm glad I trusted my instincts to get out when I did.
At the time I was going through a bad divorce. I probably wouldn't have taken this job if I hadn't been a little self destructive at the time looking back now. Maybe I had a slight death wish because of that awful divorce and child custody battle. However, I learned so much through this experience that books could never teach. I learned that people who are criminals want respect more than anything else and whether you think they deserve it or not if you don't give them respect they might kill you.
Also, the things most suburban people worry about from criminals are mostly all false. There is an honor among thieves and they don't usually steal from poor people, only the youngest and craziest do that. Adult criminals think of themselves more like Robin Hood. Steal from the rich and give to the poor.
So in the end the middle class and the rich in many ways try to protect themselves in ways that aren't really useful because they don't understand the criminal mind. Criminals are only trying to survive any way they can. They still have to live with themselves.
In the end all humans are the same. If anyone does something they can't live with then they don't live very long.
Positive attention creates eagle scouts, honor students, star athletes, college students and college graduates. Positive attention creates people who care about themselves and others in useful positive ways. Negative attention creates abused children or unloved children or criminals or all three. Negative attention creates children in jail, children stealing, children doing drugs, children dying, children killing each other or their parents, children going crazy.
In the early 1990s I chose to work counseling male juvenile offenders ages 12 to 17. I had had a good life and one of the ways I chose to give back was to help young offenders retrain as positive young men moving into adulthood and moving away from the future candidates for real life "Pulp Fiction" the movie.
At the time I was counseling male juvenile offenders who had more than 7 felony convictions(non gun related) ages 12-17 years of age. It was a very difficult assignment. First of all, these young men were hostile in that when you met them they would do things like call you a m-f- and other colorful phrases vehemently. However, as an adult counselor I was not allowed to respond with swearing or violence in return. So, the first job was to try to move these boys individually toward positive attention and positive actions. Since they all had been so abused by life in general they did not trust me or anyone else. I guess the best way to define them would be paranoid in the extreme. However, if you had been shot at multiple times in your life, and beat up or stabbed you might be paranoid too.They didn't trust anyone. They tended to bond together like in a gang and the best I could hope for was to be viewed as a helpful uncle type of figure and hopefully they wouldn't kill me or injure me.
My job was to try to save the 25% of them that hadn't already embarked on a life of crime. Many of them didn't even see choosing a life of crime as a choice. It was just what everybody did in their neighborhood and in order to survive there, it is what one did to stay alive. For a middle class guy like myself, this was a lot to take in for me. It was hard to believe that for many crime was a way of life from cradle to the grave as normal for them as breathing. Trying to recondition the thinking of these youths was very difficult. I found I had to become extremely pragmatic in my thinking in regard to them all.
It became easy for me to spot someone who could be saved from a life of crime. They vacillated more in their decision making than hardened criminals. I found there was an order to the thinking of hardened criminals, even in their teens. Many of these boys couldn't ever be saved, and some would only be saved by a good woman, whether it was a girlfriend, a wife, a mother or a grandmother. And some others were past hope and others I could see wouldn't ever live to see 20 or 25 because of their thoughts and actions. I was around 40 years old at the time and so these young men saw me either as a do gooder like a minister or priest or they saw me as an uncle. I earned their respect because they didn't want to go to CYA(California Youth Authority) where they knew they would be very harshly treated and where all the murderers between 12-17 go as well as other serious gun related felonies tend to wind up. They were all terrified of having to go there and become someones girlfriend and get AIDS or TB or worse. So, one of the reasons they treated me with respect was terror and fear of a potential worse situation.
I did what I could for all the boys there. I tried to be as fair and as helpful as I could to them all. However, when I took 6 shanks(knife like objects) away from one boy during the course of one day and then he put a butcher knife up against my back and laughed and I had to disarm him I knew it was time for me to quit this job before I died there or had to kill someone to survive. We were not allowed any weapons to defend ourselves as counselors. So when things got out of hand(and they often did) it got pretty scary at times.
After I resigned my post, my replacement was threatened by the same boy with a broken off broom handle and called the police. He was fired for this. Within 6 months, 2 counselors were murdered by juvenile offenders in San Jose where I worked then, one was beaten to death and the other stabbed to death with a shank. I'm glad I trusted my instincts to get out when I did.
At the time I was going through a bad divorce. I probably wouldn't have taken this job if I hadn't been a little self destructive at the time looking back now. Maybe I had a slight death wish because of that awful divorce and child custody battle. However, I learned so much through this experience that books could never teach. I learned that people who are criminals want respect more than anything else and whether you think they deserve it or not if you don't give them respect they might kill you.
Also, the things most suburban people worry about from criminals are mostly all false. There is an honor among thieves and they don't usually steal from poor people, only the youngest and craziest do that. Adult criminals think of themselves more like Robin Hood. Steal from the rich and give to the poor.
So in the end the middle class and the rich in many ways try to protect themselves in ways that aren't really useful because they don't understand the criminal mind. Criminals are only trying to survive any way they can. They still have to live with themselves.
In the end all humans are the same. If anyone does something they can't live with then they don't live very long.
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