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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“Well,” she said flatly, “yesterday I got a call from a kid who thanked me for not transferring him to prison. He thought about what we’d talked about when he was locked up. He has five kids now; he’s married to the same girl. Twenty-eight years old. He called me before that, after the first baby. Yesterday would have been his first day out if he had been transferred to prison instead of paroled. He thanked me for whipping him into shape.”
Although Raymond had expected his crime story to take the usual two sessions—“I don’t have much to say,” he explained, “just the same type of fight over and over”—three sessions filled quickly with recollections of smashing people’s faces into basketball poles, water fountains, and pavement. The stories revealed a tendency on Raymond’s part to pummel his adversaries until they were immobile, and Soto explained to him that he clearly needed to work on his low self-esteem so that a perceived slight wouldn’t trigger these explosions of uncontrollable rage. She drilled him on this point until he began to recognize how dangerous he really was.
“I know I could kill someone if I couldn’t stop,” he said. “It’s scary, Miss.”
Raymond had been selling drugs to assist his mother with $500 of rent every other month and to buy himself stylish clothes for school, but he told the group that his bad behavior had often been overlooked because of the social status he enjoyed as a football player. One day, when he was seventeen, he was walking from a drug deal when he saw a For Sale sign on an old Lincoln. Raymond already owned a 1993 Honda Accord, but it was in the shop getting extravagant rims installed, and the idea of a backup car appealed to his sense of importance. After counting the $1,600 he had in his pocket from his recent transaction, Raymond handed $600 over to the man in possession of the Lincoln, an acquaintance named La-La, and drove away.
Two weeks later, Raymond was driving the upgraded Accord when he stopped at the house of a friend named Terrell to pick up some drugs. During the visit it came out that Terrell was the Lincoln’s original owner. He’d sold it to La-La the previous month but had yet to receive any cash; now that Raymond had the car, Terrell perceived this outstanding debt as Raymond’s responsibility.
“He came up and said, ‘Pay me what you owe me,’” Raymond told the group. “And I say, ‘What you talking about? You know I paid.’ And he got mad and started cussing.” The pivotal moment came when Raymond’s cell phone rang. It was his mother, asking him to pick up a cake on the way home. Terrell made a disrespectful comment, and tempers escalated until Raymond found himself vowing to return with a gun and “shoot the house up.”
“You never wanted to shoot anybody before,” Soto pointed out. “Why now?”
“He said ‘Go get that bitch her cake’ about my mom!” Raymond said.
Soto probed a little deeper and found another motive. Raymond admitted that, in part, he was afraid. Terrell had told him, “I’m gonna get you wherever you are,” which Raymond interpreted as a death sentence. Never one to react to fear by hiding, he stormed home, intending to retrieve an AK-47 he kept in his brother’s room. The door was locked. Undeterred, he hugged his mom, telling her, “I’m gonna be gone a long time.” Then he drove back to Terrell’s house, where he planned to fight him. Raymond’s brothers, having been alerted to the situation, pulled up behind him and dragged him into their car. As Terrell approached, Raymond saw a lead pipe near the seat and grabbed it.
“I came out of the car with it,” Raymond said. “He stopped and said, ‘Damn.’ I said, ‘You f—ed up,’ and chased him. I threw the pipe and it hit him and he fell and I got on top of him and started punching him.”
“Did his head hit the concrete?” Justin asked.
Raymond nodded.
“How many times did you punch him?”
“About thirty,” Raymond said.
“Was he moving?” Kenneth asked.
“His skull was crushed,” Talbott said.
“Where did you hit him?” Carlos asked.
“In the face,” Raymond said.
“Why did you keep fighting him?” Soto asked. “You usually quit when they’re down. He wasn’t saying anything or moving. Were you saying anything to yourself?”
“Nothing,” Raymond said. “I didn’t even see nothing. I didn’t say anything to myself until I got up. Everything was blank when I was punching.” Raymond seemed shaken by the memory, but the therapists didn’t let up, confronting him coldly with the facts of the medical report.
“They had to pick the bone out of his brain,” Soto said.
“Cut away the dead brain material,” Talbott said.
“You broke his nose,” Soto continued. “And his nasal cavity caved in. There was no way he could do anything after that first blow. And you kept punching. There’s things he won’t ever be able to do again. Things he had to relearn, like how to walk. Did you ever think of that?”
Raymond was crying now. Talbott motioned for the boys to stack their chairs in the corner. As they exited the room, he dimmed the lights. Raymond sat motionless in his chair, holding his head in his hands like a stone statue.
When they filed back in, ten minutes later, Chuong opened the scene. “Check out this car of Raymond’s, man,” he said.
“It’s cool,” Justin said. Kenneth walked up and threw his arms around Chuong in a bear hug.
“You see that car?” Chuong said. “Look at those rims!”
“Whose car is that?” Kenneth asked. He was playing Terrell.
“Raymond’s car,” Chuong said.
“That guy owes me money,” Kenneth muttered. “Bitch-ass n—er. Where he at?” He walked over to the spot where Raymond was still sitting in the chair. “You got money to pay for two cars?” he yelled. Raymond didn’t budge. “Come on, man. You pay me for this car.”
“That’s La-La’s car,” Raymond said quietly.
“What?” Kenneth asked. Chuong put a foot-long cylindrical piece of foam in Raymond’s hand, and Raymond began breathing harder. As Kenneth continued yelling, Chuong elbowed Raymond and said, “He’s trying to get you.”
“F— that bitch,” Raymond said, finally rousing to the scene. “I’m gonna get him ’fore he get me.” He dived at Kenneth, throwing the foam at his head and knocking him down. He hit Kenneth once in the face before he caught himself and pulled his punches, slapping his hands above Kenneth’s face until the boys tackled him from behind. Though he was clearly strong enough to drag them around, as he had before, Raymond allowed himself to be shoved over to the opposite side of the room.
“He take me for a ho!” Raymond said.
“He’s unconscious, man!” Justin said, crouching over Kenneth’s face.
“Someone get an ambulance!” Chuong shouted.
“He wouldn’t listen,” Raymond said. “I felt weak.”
“Look at your hands,” Soto said, touching Raymond’s knuckles. “Look. You’re all cut up. You beat his face in!”
“I’m scared,” Raymond whispered in Soto’s ear. “I’m scared.”
Soto was satisfied with his reaction, but the real test of empathy comes when the protagonist assumes the role of his victim. To start this scene, Kenneth, playing Raymond, tossed the foam at Raymond’s head before leaping on top of him and throwing him to the ground, where he pretended to punch him in the face repeatedly. Instinctively, Raymond flexed for a second, then released his tension and let Kenneth continue. He closed his eyes and lay still as Kenneth shouted in his face, “I told you! F— you, n—er! I don’t pay you for shit! F— that shit.”
“You can’t move,” Soto whispered in his ear. “You’re paralyzed. Nobody can stop him and nobody is going for help. You’re having trouble breathing now.” She asked him to respond to his attacker.
“You crazy,” Raymond said, his eyes still closed. “You don’t listen.”
If Raymond showed pity for himself, as Chuong had done, she was prepared to cut him off, but with Kenneth sitting on top of him, staring him in the face, Raymond began to evaluate his younger self.
“Why you do this?” he asked Kenneth. “You don’t care about nobody. It don’t make sense.”
“I’m sorry,” Kenneth said, almost mockingly. “I know I got to change, but it keeps coming back.”
Talbott turned the lights down even lower so that the room was almost completely dark.
“You got to change,” Raymond said to the figure pinning him down. “You can’t do that to people. You better change the way you think. The way you see. You get mad, and it didn’t have to go like that. It wasn’t right. You gotta think before you get mad.”
The scene was over. Raymond stayed on the floor, looking at the ceiling. Tears ran down his cheeks.
“How do you feel?” Soto asked him.
“Dizzy,” he said.
“What else?”
“I hurt someone. I didn’t want to see that in myself again, but I didn’t listen.”
Talbott asked him if he could still hurt people.
“I can,” Raymond said. “I need to work on not hating myself, and when I have a situation, think.”
BACK IN HER OFFICE, Soto made her assessment. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “But I think he has a good understanding.” On her walls, pictures of kittens in precarious positions were posted next to group photos of past classes. “Going through the role play, Raymond realized how dangerous he is. He scared himself. He saw it. He kept saying he’s scared, he doesn’t want to hurt the kids. To me, that’s the difference between passing and not passing. He wasn’t resistant to recognizing how dangerous he can be.” Within the next month, he would be going before a committee to discuss his overall improvements, and she was optimistic that he’d be praised for his progress. But it was hard to know how long the lessons of Giddings would stay with Raymond. All Soto could be sure of was that for now, he was headed in the right direction. Someday, she hoped, in five or ten years, he’d remember her on his release anniversary and call.
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