My graduate

When we think we can trust our residents - as much as we can ever trust these trained manipulators and self-proclaimed gangstas - and they have earned the appropriate level, we allow them to go on trips. Some are educational, going to see plays, the aquarium, and the New York State Museum. Some, community service, working in a soup kitchen. Some are pure recreation, going to the YMCA, a water park, or to see a movie.

My students believe the world knows who they are, what they did, and judges them. They are teenage boys, so of course they assume they are standing in the center of a stage with a spotlight glaring. They refuse to know that people don't think they are criminals because they do not think of them at all. At worse, someone might assume they have poor fashion sense or, in their red and khaki uniforms, are employees of Target. Though Red Hook is mainly of a paler hue than they are, we bring them to Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Albany, all places more racially balanced than this town beside a posh private school. Even here, no one is likely to take much notice of them, except in that they act nervous in the presence of people who don't see them as they see themselves.

Last year, I took two of my students to see a play (it was meant to be most of the facility, but misbehaviors canceled that plan). Around us, students from a dozen schools, their chronological peers, fluttered. My residents were on high alert, positive that all the teenagers, awash in their inside jokes and flirtation on this day out of school, stared. They could not have told you what the play was about because they spent most of it trying to hide inside their shirts against their imagined attention.

Afterward, they demanded that we take them back to the facility to be locked up again. It was a beautiful autumn day, not too cool, the sun filtering through changing leaves. I was not eager to return to work, so I told them to just relax and encouraged them to sit at the picnic tables with other students (under the watchful gaze of YDAs and me). They refused, hiding deep within the van with their bag lunches and grumbling comments about which girls they would sleep with. When I pointed out that they didn't even have the courage to sit within a hundred feet of these girls, they told me I didn't get it. I responded that anyone who would rather be locked up than essentially skipping school in the fall to hang out with fun people their own age didn't get it on a far more profound level.

That same year, I took a student to the local library. As before, it was meant to be far more students, but they all misbehaved until it was whittled down to one. I saw it as obvious avoidance - why leave the facility when you can get restrained and have an excuse to escape the eyes of society? - but we pretended their rebellion was genuine.

All that was required of the boy was to waste the afternoon with his MP3 player, paper, and books. There was no one to bother him. The library contained five other people, two of whom were clerks. The resident demanded to know where they girls were, so I helpfully reminded him that everyone his age was in school and the Bard kids had their own library on campus.

We were not there more than a few minutes before he was too irritated by unshackled hands (metaphorically; while we need to shackle them for medical appointments because they have violently lashed out at having their teeth cleaned, we do not find it necessary for trips). He demanded to go back to school, where he immediately moped that he had to go to school, but at least it was familiar. It didn't taste of noxious freedom, of a world where he was more responsible for this life rather than the state of New York telling him when and what he would eat.

Teenagers are myopic narcissists. It is nearly the entirety of their charm as their world is so small and surely fascinating melodrama in which they star. Each heartbreak is as if the first in the history of the world. Every fight among friends rivals world wars. Teenagers are great to watch, but never how they think or want.

My boys lose six months of their teen years, maybe more given how well they can say what the judge wants to hear. They lose something vaster than the time in our care. They seem to never fully restore their footing in society, sure everyone thinks they are criminals, sure they are. At their age, I would do whatever I could to prevent separation from girls and friends, which included not committing crimes. Being at my facility, even given the lightness of this program, would have scarred my ego. I don't know what intervention could have healed that. This becomes so much what they are and is preschool for adult incarceration for many, since this is to what they are acculturated instead of public high school and normal peers. (Let's not pretend that the student whose parents send him to private school is as likely to end up at a juvenile detention facility, irrespective if they committed the same crime. Talented lawyers exist for naughty scions while my boys are lucky to have met their overworked public defender.) They are released having spent formative months idolizing rapist and murderers in fabled stories, believing the false bluster of fourteen-year-old gang patsies who swear they are the big homie, just in a different neighborhood, one my foolish resident has never visited.

We don't make them criminals directly, but we don't stop them from the contagion. They won't let themselves be exposed to the sanitizing light of normal life.

We talk about rehabilitating juvenile delinquents but that assumes that they were habilitated to start. If they were never taught how people are expected to behave, how can we expect them to grasp misbehaving? Is that even the correct term for them, some emulating parents who raised them to act this way, in lessons overt or demonstrated?

I teach five feet noting seventeen-year-olds who refuse to exercise but have all their hopes pinned on being the next LeBron James. I grade the assignments of boys who are Jay-Z, less the talent, devotion, dedication, money, knowledge, connections, and skills.

When both these grand aspirations fail as they must for almost everyone, they decide they have only one career path before them: criminal until they graduate to inmate. They are not upset by this., Their fathers, uncles, and brothers have all loped down this path. It is masculine to be incarcerated for most of a decade. If the world didn't want them on death row, it should have handed them a contract with Death Row Records, even if they never bothered to write a rap or practiced anything beyond grunting off-tempo to other people's beats. If they weren't meant to be in from of a judge, they basketball court would have loved them first.

We try to introduce them to better options. Not merely the hard sell of "you need to know how to write an essay about Macbeth so you can articulate your thoughts for more practical matters" but "you know how to repair engines and speak sign language. You can have a life on the right side of society. You don't have to be used as slave labor to the prison industrial complex." They can't believe us. It insults their upbringing to believe they aren't felons.

Years ago, I had a student who was a brilliant, natural artist. He could sketch perfectly and in minutes. He drew photo perfect shoes in Microsoft Paint from a blank screen, a feat I ruled miraculous savantism. We did all we could to show him the future he could have if he went to art school, on the state's dime for four years. He had no interest because he was going to be a prison tattoo artist. He wasn't posturing. He genuinely wanted this life and we could do little to make him care about anything else. Last I read, he was busted as part of a heroin ring, so he may have gotten his wish and disappointed our every hope for him.

Of the men and woman I taught prior to my tenure at a juvenile detention facility, none are to my knowledge incarcerated. There were drug offenses and one young lady who was visited by the police for the production and distribution of child pornography for sending out selfies, but no gifted or learning disabled student turned convict.

At my facility, my boys who bristle at sitting in a library or having lunch with peers on a fall day, eighty to ninety percent of them return to the system. Many graduated from our near summer camp to cells in Sing Sing.

Prison is usually the end of the story that might have gone otherwise, but it is not a one they see as anything more than a fairy tale, no matter how many people they see living it. It is a one their parents didn't tell them and we are often too late to read it to them now. They won't be the heroes -- they'll barely be the protagonist -- so they one see the role of henchman left.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies. The interview.

last watched: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: Fiona Apple