reprint of Juvenile offenders

Many people seem interested in this article recently so I decided to reprint it. I think what most amazed me at this job and time in my life is what I discovered about juvenile offenders that greatly surprised me at the time. The first thing was the main cause for their predicament is not what you think. I think the primary cause of most of their experiences was PTSD from horrific childhood experiences. 2nd basically they were unable to trust anyone especially adults because of various kinds of abuse in their lives. and 3rd 3/4 of them were already committed to a life of crime (life long) by ages 12 to 17. I found this last fact horrific in the extreme. 

But also, the 25% that I might be able to save from a life of crime were usually the most confused of all the boys I counseled. The least confused had a very cynical animalistic view of life but also respected order and discipline sort of like soldiers. So, even though they might become (or already were) potential murderers, and committers of crimes of every description they also respected order which is a part of surviving as a criminal. Also, what all the boys wanted was respect from everyone they met. If you didn't treat them with respect they might kill you or anyone who dissed them. I found all these things very surprising. Also, there was a sort of Robin Hood attitude among them of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.

I think most people might be very surprised that convicted childhood felons are actually like what I'm defining above and not the caricature that TV paints which isn't usually accurate. 

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.