Acting Up
The most dangerous teenagers in Texas are sent to the Giddings State School, where, in a jailhouse version of group therapy, they reenact their brutal crimes in order to come to terms with their violent impulses. This is what we do with young murderers? Yes, and it works. For a while, at least.
(Page 2 of 4)
Borrowing from various therapeutical methods, including psychodrama, which uses role play to explore emotions, Gestalt, and other cognitive behavioral approaches that stress personal responsibility, Reyes designed a program that would work within the context of the school’s resocialization curriculum of academics, behavior modification, and correctional treatment. In a group setting, each offender would discuss events from childhood and early adolescence that led to his or her misbehavior. Following this narrative session would be a role-playing session, in which the group would act out key events the student had described. All this would be known as the “life story.” Then, after each student had taken a turn, a cycle of “crime stories” would begin, employing the same pattern of narration and reenactment in order to bring each student face-to-face with his crime—once from his own perspective and once from his victim’s.
Starting with a group of eight boys, Reyes progressed tentatively; almost immediately, she saw encouraging signs from her students. According to her observations during the first years of the program, 84 percent of the juveniles were able to reconnect with some basic level of empathetic concern for their victims. Over time, the positive effects the program seemed to have on recidivism rates won supporters throughout the state’s criminal justice system. And not only did the CSVOTP produce results, but it cost very little to implement.
Today, the CSVOTP is an exemplary program for the TYC, and juvenile justice experts from all over the world frequently tour the Giddings facility for a chance to witness the unique treatment. Earlier this year, an advocacy group in Colorado petitioned legislators to redesign the state’s juvenile rehabilitation programs in the image of the Texas system, making particular mention of the CSVOTP. If the Colorado group prevails, it would mark the first time that Reyes’s program has been implemented outside the state of Texas. Despite nearly twenty years of success, no other juvenile detention facility in the country hosts a program quite like the CSVOTP. Most states either confine their youth offenders to adult prisons or send them to juvenile halls, where they receive far less rigorous forms of therapy. Those familiar with the Giddings system have been known to suggest, without judgment, that perhaps some juvenile counseling professionals are simply happier to meet with a client one-on-one in an office than endure hours of intense psychodramatic role play while locked in a room with a group of crying and screaming murderers.
AS THE SUMMER WORE ON, young swallows chirped eagerly around the lush, tree-dotted campus, which looked more like a private school than a prison, causing a racket audible through the two sets of doors leading to the group room where the boys met. Every Tuesday and Thursday they assembled outside their sparse, white-walled dorm, where they slept side by side in an open bay. They marched through the baking morning sun past old stone buildings with copper roofs weathered mint green and descended into the group room with its walls marred slightly by fists and elbows. There they formed a circle of gray plastic chairs and sat in silence, waiting for Soto and Talbott, putting on silky black snap-on jackets as they adjusted to the blasts from the air-conditioning vent above.
Since May, I had been watching the boys, with their consent, from behind a one-way mirror. I had heard them tell about the trauma they had endured—the brutal beatings, the abandonment, the parenting that trained children to fight like pit bulls. But I had yet to learn the details of their crimes. When I asked Talbott, he said he usually postponed learning the specifics himself, explaining that during the life story sessions, he needed to be sympathetic, and knowing each boy’s violent history often made that difficult.
Soto, for her part, was confident about the upcoming crime story sequences. “They’re getting to that point where they can be heartbroken and still love,” she told me. Raymond, in particular, had been struggling admirably with his feelings toward his mother. “I still love her,” he told the group one day. “But I hate her for the things she did.” Soto reassured him that his feelings were normal. “I want to understand why,” Raymond said.
“We may never find out why,” Chuong said.
Before the sequences began, Soto gave the boys an opportunity to ask me questions. They were curious to know what I had been writing in my notebooks, and in my reactions to their stories they seemed to look for hints as to what the reactions of future neighbors and girlfriends and employers might be. Raymond put it plainly. “What do you think of us?” he asked me. “Will that change once you hear what we done?”
I told him I didn’t know. He stared at the floor, unsure of how to put his next question.
“Does that mean, like, if we saw you out in the free world, you would still say hi?”
Chuong told his crime story first, since his was the case under most urgent review. Before his upcoming twenty-first birthday, Chuong would go before a judge who would decide whether he’d serve anywhere from ten to forty years in adult prison or get released on parole. Based on the outcome of Chuong’s sessions, Talbott and Soto would advise a review board, which would in turn make recommendations to the judge. Chuong was smart, and he’d done well in the academic areas of the Giddings curriculum, where he’d earned a GED, but the therapists felt that until recently he hadn’t been putting much effort into his rehabilitation.
Normally, a student finishes his crime story within a session or two, but Chuong’s criminal history was so lengthy, and his memory so colorful, that it was four sessions before he finally staged the crime for which he’d been committed. He recalled practice-shooting at trees in the woods, learning about sex from porn movies on TV, and as a fourth-grader, transporting cocaine in his backpack for his uncle. Later, in high school, he sold the drugs himself. Sometimes, if a drug payment was late, Chuong would shoot delinquent customers in the legs so they’d remember him whenever they tried to walk.
This reckless idyll came to an end one night when a friend said he needed money to pay some outstanding debts. Chuong suggested they rob a bakery; in fact, he already had one in mind. He took a gun and told his friend to ask for the cash, and the two headed out. At the door of the bakery, they paused.
“I said, ‘Ready?’” Chuong told the group. “I opened the door, ran into the store, and had the gun up already. I didn’t see anyone at first; I thought it was closed. I went to the cash register, and that’s when my victim came out. I got excited. I said, ‘Give me the money, motherf—er!’” As soon as his friend had gathered the large bills, Chuong pulled the trigger and shot the woman dead.
It didn’t take much, after such a buildup, to get Chuong into his role. Perspiration beaded on his face as the group filed out and the lights were dimmed. Alone, he gulped and sniffled for several minutes until the boys returned. Carlos, a bashful new immigrant who’d unloaded nine rounds at a rival gang member (and missed), had been cast in the role of Chuong’s friend. He walked up and said he needed money.
“I got a gun at my house,” Chuong said, his body beginning to shake.
The two began to march back and forth across the room in lockstep, pretending to walk to the bakery. As he marched, Chuong sank into the scene, and the polite, intelligent expression I was used to seeing on his face gave way to cold intention. Kenneth, as the doomed baker, stood alone, pretending to wipe a counter.
Suddenly Chuong walked up to him and screamed, “Give me the money, motherf—er! All of it!” Kenneth held up his hands, but Chuong pretended to shoot him, shouting, “Boom!” As Kenneth fell to the ground, groaning and clutching his stomach, his assailants darted to the other side of the room, where Chuong began to twitch uncontrollably, like a cat doused with water.
“I didn’t do anything,” Kenneth whimpered, rolling around on the floor. “I didn’t even look.”
Talbott placed a photograph of the crime scene in Chuong’s hands and made him look at it while the other boys gathered around. “That lady has kids,” Raymond said. It was difficult to tell whether Chuong truly recognized the horror of his actions. Returning to the scene of his crime had only seemed to make him angry. He gritted his teeth and struggled to push out the words “I’m sorry.”
Soto took a mental note of Chuong’s response. Though the psychodramatic sessions have strong rehabilitative value, they also give therapists a chance to diagnose a student’s progress. In the heat of the moment, will he show an ability to empathize with his victim? This question was foremost in Soto’s mind as the boys rearranged themselves for the second part of Chuong’s crime story reenactment, in which he would play the victim.
For the role reversal, Kenneth took the part of Chuong. He demanded the money, Chuong pretended to give it to him, and Kenneth yelled, “Boom!” Instead of falling to the ground, however, Chuong walked away toward the wall. He seemed startled, unsure of himself. Soto was able to coax him down to the floor, where he made a halfhearted show of dying.
“You hurting now!” Kenneth yelled at him. “Look at your bitch ass!”
Chuong stared up at his attacker. Without much emotion, he asked, “What happens to my family?”
The scene was over. Talbott turned the lights up, and Soto motioned for the boys to sit in a circle, but Chuong stayed on the floor for a long time, staring at the white foam ceiling tiles. While he lay there, the group discussed his session. Kenneth offered that Chuong’s apology to him had felt so meaningless it was as if he’d been shot twice. “He still has that rage,” Kenneth said. “He’s still angry.” Chuong ripped open the snaps on his jacket but didn’t respond.
“Chuong,” Soto said, “you didn’t successfully pass this session.”
A VIOLENT JUVENILE in the midst of a rehabilitation that connects him with new, empathetic emotions is at a severe disadvantage should he wind up serving hard time in the less hospitable surroundings of adult prison. He may have let down his guard, spilled his guts, and done everything asked of him only to have his recommendation for parole be denied by a judge. “We’re asking the kids to change,” Soto told me, “and if a kid goes to prison, that change is going to hurt him. Sometimes we ask ourselves, ‘What the hell are we doing? Are we opening him to danger?’ We tell those who are transferred to prison to modify—they may have to put these tools aside for a while. But we ask them not to forget.” After ten years of experience with the program, her refrain to all the kids has become “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
My Library
