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.
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The motto pertains equally well to those who get out. Release is addressed constantly at Giddings, where students are instructed to provide a “success plan” that details where they will live, how they will make money, and how they will avoid bad associates and habits. But the numbers provided by the TYC’s research director, Chuck Jeffords, show that even flying colors from the CSVOTP and a foolproof success plan are no match for the pressures in the neighborhoods to which graduates return. While the three-year recidivism and rearrest rates for the program have always been impressive, it turns out that after ten years, the graduates’ improvements practically wash out. I had been told by others in the juvenile justice field not to expect the CSVOTP to be a magic bullet, but the long-term findings were still worrisome. Forty percent of the program’s graduates are reincarcerated within a decade of release. This is only 5 percent less than the numbers for a control group of juvenile offenders who have not undergone the treatment. And most of the offenders at Giddings would be mingling with the public for much longer than a decade: Even teenage capital murderers facing forty years in prison (the maximum sentence under current law) would be back on the street by the time they turned sixty.
When I brought these apparent failings to Reyes’s attention, she was unfazed. She offered an analogy, suggesting that if a gunshot victim receives surgery at a hospital only to return to his neighborhood and get shot again, no one blames the doctor. “Is the original surgery responsible for the second wound?” she asked.
It is a difficult point to dismiss. The recently released begin an awkward dance with a reluctant public when they land back in their neighborhoods, and the TYC can do only so much to make it smoother. “There is no way TYC can stay in these kids’ lives for five to ten years after the fact,” Reyes told me. “They will be beyond the age where we are responsible for them. Communities have to change while kids are changing. They have to be able to go back to a place where there have been community-wide efforts to suppress the gang activity, where schools are inviting them back in, where there are local people willing to accept responsibility for continuing to provide guidance and opportunity to kids who have made changes while they were in an institution.”
Of course, many would argue that violent criminals should simply be locked away for as long as possible. The idea of rehabilitating young capital offenders as an alternative to incarcerating them for long sentences has been known to stir up strong emotions. Ten years ago, when a support group for victims’ families heard about the CSVOTP, they were livid. They drove down to the school as a group and confronted the staff. A tense meeting ensued, with the therapists on one side of the table and the enraged families on the other. Judy Nesbit and her husband, Ric, sat with the families; their daughter had been killed by two teenagers a year earlier. Judy recalled the families’ position as, essentially, “We can’t stand for this.” But after several conversations, many of them began to change their perspectives, and some began making annual presentations to the boys about the terrible chain reactions that result from a violent crime. Their feelings, however, remain conflicted. This year, when Judy spoke to the group, she admitted that while she supports the philosophy of rehabilitation, she was still thankful that the two boys who killed her daughter went to “big-boy prison.”
“I don’t have much feeling for those two except I want them in prison,” she told her audience. “No conscience, no remorse. They don’t have to do that where they are. They just make it through the day. From what I hear, the prison doesn’t have a rehab program.”
As tough as adult prison is compared with a place like Giddings, the strange truth is that for some of the youths, it offers the promise of a family reunion. Above Talbott’s desk a bumper sticker reads “My Child Is an Honor Student at the State Correctional Facility,” a reference to the staff joke that for some households, Giddings is high school and prison is college. Like a Yale legacy, a juvenile with a parent imprisoned at Huntsville may find it easy to follow suit. The state school’s acting superintendent, Stan DeGerolami, who’s spent more than twenty years working at the school, has begun to encounter this disheartening generational pattern. I’d heard that he had recently been approached on campus by a young female offender whose father, now in prison, had attended Giddings in the late eighties.
“That had an impact,” he told me, when I brought it up. “Here we are working with the children of students we worked with in the eighties? It’s hard not to feel like you’ve failed. I wonder if there’s something else we could have done. But apparently this young man didn’t take advantage of what he learned here.” He sighed and mumbled that he knew there were a thousand other factors involved in the man’s troubles, but his mood had grown sour. “Thanks for bringing up one of our failures,” he said.
A job with the TYC provides no shortage of disappointments. Resources are undeniably short, and the stress has, at times, led to troubling incidents. This spring, after a number of million-dollar lawsuits that accused guards of abusive behavior, the TYC’s executive director, Dwight Harris, explained that the low-paying agency had encountered challenges finding, training, and retaining staff in rural areas. Compounding the matter, the displacement of hundreds of youths confined to facilities affected by Hurricane Rita increased the demands on staff at the remaining schools.
The problems have hit hard at Giddings, where Soto and Talbott frequently work overtime to accommodate additional students. Last year eight psychologists populated the department. By midsummer that number had dwindled to four, and two new employees training for the CSVOTP weren’t sure they wanted to make the same commitment Soto and Talbott had made. The absurdly challenging proposition of the program doesn’t appeal to most child-loving social workers, especially when the pay hovers around $35,000 a year. After watching a particularly disturbing session, one troubled trainee told me, “It isn’t the kids; it’s reading what they have done.” Shortly thereafter, she quit. A few weeks later, Talbott announced that he would soon be moving out of state, far from the program’s heavy responsibilities.
Unfortunately, the strategic plan for 2006—2007 doesn’t contain much that would persuade employees like Talbott to hang around. Cuts in state and federal funds are forcing many facilities to eliminate programs. Without the resources to give every offender the specialized treatment he or she requires, schools like Giddings are being compelled to prioritize rehabilitation based on severity of crime and risk to reoffend. Reform advocates and TYC proponents alike support a decrease in the number of kids in the system, but for the time being, counselors make due with limited means.
They do have one thing for which to be grateful. In recent years, the number of juvenile arrests for violent crime in Texas is down significantly from the spike of the nineties, hovering just under four thousand annually (although the numbers are beginning to trend back up). Each of the past few years, the number of young homicide offenders has been around fifty, back to the same number as twenty years ago, a great enough reduction that the CSVOTP can now include other offenders just as dangerous as those who succeed in killing their victims, such as armed robbers and carjackers.
In the end, therapists look to reduce the number of future violent offenders by way of the students in their care. Two of the boys in last summer’s class already had children of their own, children who would feel the ripple effect of their fathers’ abilities to absorb the program’s lessons. The boys often wondered aloud about their kids’ futures and what role they might play in them. But since both had come from fatherless homes themselves, these thoughts required them to take a mental leap toward an unreal world. The rehabilitation program at Giddings could help prepare them, but they would have to make the jump themselves. Chuong summed up the nature of the struggle one day when he asked, “How can I become something I never knew?”
RAYMOND HAD OPTED to wait until everyone else had gone before he presented his own crime story. Summer had passed, and fall brought with it a high school football season in which he was now too old to participate. As the day of judgment approached, his thoughts swung back and forth between the lessons he was learning at Giddings and the hostile world outside in which he’d have to make them stick. Reflecting on Chuong’s failure, Raymond wrote, for his required “journal assignment”: “When Chuong was role-playing he did his part of the crime very good. He liked the part of being the bad guy but when it came to him to show feelings for a woman that’s no longer living because of the hands of him he had none . . . I wish things would have been different for Chuong. He needs to find his self and his feelings.” Raymond had become one of the group’s most supportive members, but some things still remained outside his control. One day, following a session in which he’d said nothing, he explained to me: “This is the anniversary of my granny’s death, and two friends just died. One got shot in a drug deal two weeks ago, and one got shot two months ago walking down the street.” His expression of deep sadness acknowledged a hostile reality no state-funded program could transform. For Raymond’s nineteenth birthday, his second one in confinement, Soto had tried to lighten the mood with some mini Twix bars. The boys savored every bite. “It’s all downhill from here,” she told Raymond, teasingly.
Raymond basked in the attention, turning it back on Soto with a flirtatious smile as he asked, “And how are you doing today?”
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