Though why we trust him, I do not know

There is that cliche that every student is different. Each has their own needs and wants, their motivation to perform, their own dreams.

When it comes to a job in juvenile detention, this is wrong. I teach English and civility to the same students every few months. I don't mean this literally - though recidivism is far likelier than rescue - but in the archetypes. The same rough character with subtle variations in sentenced to our care, a new face and hairstyle, a name.

He will be an unusually good-natured kid with occasional violent explosions when he feels neglected or rejected. He needs protection from the Predator, who almost always arrives the same week as a joke from the Cosmic Bureaucracy.

His crime is usually repeated theft to support someone else's addiction, often his mother. Secondary and tertiary crimes are being a gang gofer ("Yo, get me drugs, YG") and unintentional arson.

Predator - Over eighteen, here on a voluntary placement because we are non-secure. No one else - not group homes, not relatives - wants anything to do with him. He has aged out of the juvenile system. If he is smart, he understands that this means he will go to adult corrections if he so much as sneezes the wrong way. He signs himself in here as a Hail Mary.

Usually, but not always, a scrawny white kid (not to be confused with the White Boy).

I avoid knowing the specifics of his crimes, but we receive emails alerting us that he is never to be alone with women or younger boys. He is unsettling in a way hard to articulate, but generally well-behaved. We are the only thing keeping him off the unkind streets, but that level of awareness could be giving him too much credit. He can be a good student, but this is the aspect of the cunning and charm that allowed him to victimize. He will use anyone who gives him any leeway, so rules around him need to be strict on paper and in practice. He perceives kindness as weakness and an invitation to abuse.

Almost always, he has been in the system since he was young. It has become all he knows anymore. He didn't decide to become a predator one day. He didn't sleep with a girl who was fifteen. He didn't rape a passed-out acquaintance at a party. He didn't merely commit predatory acts but is a predator almost before he is anything else.

Whenever he entered a residential treatment facility, he would either escape to assault someone or molest another resident, which put him right back in the juvenile justice system. I believe in the redemption of almost all my students, but I believe in his the least. In a way that comes close to literal, an inability to understand other people are human drives him. He has often been sexual abused since he was preverbal and aims to pay that back in spades. He was taught every day of his childhood to be a predator.

He needs higher security with more intensive psychotherapy. As a voluntary placement, he must be in the lowest security until we can help him transition elsewhere or he becomes annoyed enough at our minimal restrictions to sign himself out.

It is about 50/50 if we find him a group home that will take him, or he will sign himself out to live in a homeless shelter. We cannot legally prevent as he is an adult now.

White Boy - He believes "pretending to be ethnic stereotypes" and "having smoked pot" is all one needs for a personality. He tends to be the most irritating in his constant pretending.

His sentence is a matter of racist filtering. White teens aware enough not to posture in front of the judge, who know to say "Yes, your honor" and "I'm so sorry about what I did, and it will never happen again," get probation or fines. Minority youth committing the same or lesser offense will be sentenced to juvenile detention, leading them to be out Normal Boys. When a White Boy reaches us, it is because he couldn't keep his mouths shut in court and won't now that there are peers to impress and a pecking order. He won't be the top, not by the nature of his insecurity, but he will torture anyone near him so he doesn't sink lower.

Whatever minority he is aping detest him, though the White Boy doesn't understand that blackface-in-all-but-makeup is offensive. Despite the residents' slang being pervasive and easy to adopt (even I can pepper in their vernacular), the White Boy always sound forced and unnatural, like Minnesotan soccer moms "tryin' ta shoot da poop wit' these hip youngsters, my homeboy black fella."

If he transitions into a stoner persona, his life improves. If he is trying hard to be Blaxican, as he puts it, half the work the YDAs (guards) have is keeping him from weekly beatings.

He is most often the target of the Jerk and serves as his errand boy.

LGBTQ - The first few weeks will involve being as outrageously "gay/trans" as they can to see if this is a place in which they will be safe. If no one is disrespectful - and we are trained not to be - they cool down and are as good as any student, if not a touch better.

They are quick to take offense. Having lived in impossible situations as a minority within a minority (they have always been black during my tenure and have expressed how estranged their sexuality and/or gender makes them from their racial identity). They may also be inappropriate to staff and students as a learned behavior.

They tend to be fighters and will attack before they can be attacked. They do not lose fights because they are fighting for their lives, not prestige or bluster. It usually only takes one fight before the other residents learn to keep their mouths shut in front of their LGBTQ classmate.

As the LGBTQ present someone who might be attracted to them, the boys, otherwise homo- and transphobic, fall under their sway. We have had girls who swore they dated every boy in the facility who was not drooling on himself. The boys will fight over them (usually because the gay or trans resident gets a sense of power from it).

They are among the most dangerous students in the facility for the lax staff, as they have the ombudsman on speed dial. They will make allegations against whoever didn't bend to their whims that week, and the ombudsman will investigate each one. When the LGBTQ student does something warranting a restraint, each of the YDAs involved know they will be facing child abuse charges and spend months fighting them. I watched one of my girls, shoes off, laying sideways on a chair, grinning and gossiping to someone on the phone when she ought to have been in class. The person on the line was the ombudsman, who encouraged this familiarity. Ombudsmen have been reassigned for being so friendly with our LGBTQ residents. If you talk to someone twice a day for three months, it is hard not to get too personal.

More than most in the facility, I tend to like these students. Social adversity has given them the excuse to develop real personalities, a rarity among my felonious youth. When I let them know I have homosexual and trans friends, I rocket to being one of the more trustworthy people.

Trafficked - My students have often been raped for money by johns and the coyotes who smuggled them. The Trafficked student is easily triggered. It is a random word generator's minefield what will set him off. One student shattered to the ground and took two hours of screaming before he could restore. Why? One of his classmates passed gas and reminded him of a man who would flatulate on his head before raping him.

The Trafficked's crime is often "prostitution," meaning survival sex. I want him off the street, somewhere he is safe. The juvenile justice system is still punitive, no matter how much we claim to only be therapeutic. It feels we are punishing him for being pimped.

The clinicians are fond of saying, "Hurt people hurt people." The Trafficked sometimes commits sex crimes against other people, usually family members. This is how he has been taught to behave. (He is not the Predator. He is not conniving or predatory. He is not actively trying to victimize people. He doesn't completely understand that what he did was wrong. Outside the aftershocks of his trauma, he is a normal enough kid.)

Especially in a boys' facility, we do not have the curriculum to help him deal with what happened. A few have left here, returned exactly where they were and turned tricks until they ended back in the system.

How does the system thinks tween prostitutes are criminals and not victims? I am especially sympathetic to the Trafficked and do what I can to make his time with us safe and pleasant.

Low Functioning - At the reception center he visits before coming to us, he received a torrent of tests to assess his various skills and capabilities. We have had students whose IQs barely rise above the fifty. I don't believe anyone is so clueless as to tell them this fact.

Depending on how realistic we are being, the Low Functioning may be in a special program directed toward getting him a non-Regents diploma. Otherwise, the state requires him to endure months of torture as we try to get him to understand the causes of World War I and the functions of each part of the cell when he needs independent living skills.

He is usually here because he did some asinine crime for a gang that mocked him to his face, but he was too stunted to realize. He is a patsy, which can play to his favor here. If he behaves himself long enough to get a cleaning job, he will give himself totally to it. My room is never cleaner than when a Low Functioning boy focuses on it.

Otherwise, he is here because he is volatile. It is how he has survived. When someone might be insulting him, punching spares his ego more than seeming foolish.

The Low Functioning boy struggles to understand, but he is a creature of emotion. Once he is angry, that is all he can see until he comes out the other end of the crisis. He often cannot understand why you are talking to him about an offense from days before. You must have a conversation with him as soon after the event as you can.

If the adults in the room are sharp enough not to try to argue, the Low Functioning kid can be easy to deescalate. If you behave as though you are going to be nice to him, he wants to please you. He doesn't question your motives as he doesn't quite understand anything other than the present moment. If you don't hold a grudge (and you are in the wrong line of work if you do), he is incapable of remembering why he was upset three periods ago. Show him the emotion you want, and he will reflect it. Be aggressive and you will have a restraint within minutes.

Normal Kid - In my seven years with the state, I can count the Normal Kids on both hands. He made a mistake, was caught hanging out with the wrong people on the wrong night, had drugs on him when a police officer wanted to prove a point. He is polite and remorseful. His IQ is average or above. He acts like a typical students in a public school. He deescalates his peers better than some of the staff and almost never gets in fights. He encourages discussion and dives deeper into every assignment. He values his relationships with the teachers, seeing us as the closest to his level of anyone at the facility. His parents are involved with his life, honest about what happened and how they will support the boy upon his return home. These boys rarely reoffend, having learned their lessons.

For years after, we will fondly mention the Normal Kid. I could not tell you most of my students' names after a year outside my classroom. I can give the full name of each of my Normal Kids and a series of charming anecdotes.

When two Normal Kids overlap, every adult in the building finds a renewed vigor for coming to work.

Gentle Giant - He is massive in every sense: tall and fat and strong, an easy two fifty to three hundred pounds. His size is a comfort to him. He will use his weight as a means of control. He is not always gentle to start - how could he survive in the carceral system if he was? - but he learns that his size will not intimidate the YDAs or teachers. Like the LGBTQ kids, he is accustomed to harassment and has defenses that will put a stop to it. Even given how much the residents mock one another, trying to maintain the pecking order, they do not linger over the Gentle Giant long. The residents understand that having the big guy on your team is more important than teasing.

Continuing with the trope, the Gentle Giant also tends to be a teddy bear when given the chance, softies who want to watch children's cartoons while drinking hot cocoa.

Jerk - This may seem unfair, but we sometimes get jerks. Sure, the Jerk has trauma, a life no one should have to lead. There is preamble to his behavior whose dimensions we can never fully know. All that said, he is a jerk. He whispers to two residents that the other said fighting words, so he can sit back, eyes wide with feigned innocence, as a brawl breaks out. In a regular school, he would not be the brightest pupil in the room, but he is a Svengali among Low Functioning kids. He will be smarmy and obnoxious but will stop always one hair away from anything that will get him a write-up. If one is in the business of pussyfooting around him, they will wreak misery. As I am of the mindset and demeanor that I can call him on what he is doing, Jerks tend to be manageable for me.

He will come back to us because he forgets that the outside world does not contain YDAs to save him from the ramifications of his perpetual pot-stirring. We can only ever have one Jerk. If one is already established and another is relegated to our facility, the two will engage in a symbolic battle. Then the weaker one will hold back and serve as flunky to the stronger Jerk. Once tamed by the presence of an alpha, a former Jerk can be a decent student. His mind is turned toward something other than pissing off adults and tormenting peers.

Toddler - Though he is learning disabled, he is distinct in the fact that nothing about him has progressed beyond stilted speech and Terrible Twos tantrums. All he wants is candy and an adult to play parent with them. He will bang on furniture, cry, hit walls, fall to the ground, and whatever else you can imagine a three-year-old in need of a nap doing to get his needs met. We treat him as close as we can to his cognitive and emotional level, to our disadvantage. Every other student will often and loudly proclaim that this is unfair. Not a one of them would want to be in the Toddler's shoes.

It is cruel that he will end up imprisoned later in his life, where he won't have Safe Rooms and toys. He does not and cannot have the mental capacity to understand this. Rehabilitation is difficult until he chooses to grow up. Until then, he is only tamed and raised properly until issued a prison uniform. He will only be further stunted and abused there.

When he is under fifteen, we do everything we can to make up for his lost childhood. Once he hits sixteen without any motivation toward at least becoming an emotional kindergartener, he has our pity, having ossified in a crawling position.

Lost - We are not a mental health facility, technically. We are the facility for vulnerable populations. The Lost couldn't be more vulnerable. Being suicidal in the juvenile justice system is unfortunately reasonable. Anxiety likewise is a reaction that scans. My students have suffered atrocities and committed them, giving them ample trauma to process. Fine. I can't fault any of these, but most are not the Lost.

The Lost is profoundly mentally ill. His crimes are unspeakable and bizarre. He will paint himself with his feces. He will take the advice of people who are not present or are not real. We must keep him away from pebbles, erasers, paper, utensils, anything he will try to swallow. He dissociates and forgets where and who he is. If YDAs restrain him for becoming a danger to himself or others, he will reenact that trauma for days.

He is the most volatile because his triggers are only in his head. He will be sitting there, doing his work, then he will be tearing his clothes off, trying to eat pencils point first, screaming nonsense to ghosts, flailing on the ground, and trying to wreck furniture with his head (our furniture, by necessity, does not wreck easily).

With the rest of the students, I can empathize with them to some extent and imagine their perspective. With the Lost, I am not welcomed into his reality. I try, but his underlying schizoaffective disorders and intense trauma makes him borderline alien. He operates by rules even he doesn't know.

The only upside for us, and not for him, is that he is rare by dint of the severity of his crimes. When someone has violated another person in a fashion better associated with a television serial killer, he is not ruled safe at a facility with no fences. He will stay in a facility with two layers of razor wire fencing and a sentence that will bring him straight from juvenile detention to the Department of Corrections. Until the underlying profound mental illness is treated - if it can be without money and resources he won't have on the outside - he cannot recover. He will not be free long.

Aside from the Lost, we prefer these archetypes to clump. When we have two of most of these, they can be in a class together and can feed off one other or be taught at their level. Two Toddlers alone in a class is a pain, but it is better than having one Toddler mewling on the floor while a Jerk and a Normal Kid are trying to discuss Shakespeare. Likewise, two Predators neutralize one another and provide no younger student to victimize. In a class by themselves, it can almost be productive, though pity the student who comes later to the facility and briefly is stuck in that class. Then, it is like shooing lions away from a bloody steak. Likewise, when the class is nothing but Low Functioning, we can put the curriculum to the side for most of the class and laser focus on shoring up their deficiencies. The Low Functioning and the Illiterate Too-Young Boy can be a great pair if we emphasize early and often that the Low Functioning student is supposed to serve as a big brother and tutor to The Illiterate Too-Young Boy. Both will work on their rudimentary skills and the Low Functioning one gets a protective ego boost. (It does not work with the Toddler, whom they resent and of whom they are jealous for perceived extra privileges. They do not have the patience to deal with The Toddler.) Two White Boys in a class will try to outdo one another until the feedback loop of "pretending to be black" causes them to call one another poser and start a fight; White Boys hate the mirror of other White Boys. Once they are defused, they revert to being simply Boys, though they will still fetishize smoking pot.

Gentle Giants mingle well with most any other archetype (aside from the Lost, who do not understand the social mores by which you don't attack a guy who outweighs you by a factor of two), at least once they get that first fight out of their system. The same can be said for the LGBTQ, assuming they are not also the Jerk.

They fall into a prescribed role, and so we are better experienced in how to reach them, but they are individuals within these boxes. For most of them, these are transitional states. The White Boy figures out how to feel safe without being a parody. The Gentle Giant can slim down and be seen as more than his mass. The Illiterate Too-Young boy must age and, with luck and effort, learn to read. Even the Toddler can grow up.

Our goal is to make them more than their stereotype.

Soon in Xenology: Sanity. Writing. Summer.

last watched: Good Omens
reading: What the Hell Did I Just Read?
listening: Damien Rice