Not adjudicated girls

"Wouldn't the world be better off without your students?"

The person asking this with a bovine placidity does not overtly mean calling for the elimination of my kids to be malicious. They intend it as a gotcha question, a quandary to puzzle over akin to the Trolley Problem. If my students were tied to the upper track and their victims -- past and future -- were on the lower, would I flip the switch?

My students are not stick figures for moral philosophers to cut out and shift around in fun configurations. I know my students. They have bright faces and sweet smiles. I do not know their victims, which isn't to suggest that I do not sympathize with them and wish I lived in a world where they were not harmed or killed.

It isn't as though I don't see the point they are making in obliquely calling for my students' systematic extermination. I had an easier argument against this rhetoric when my residents were lower lever offenders in a nonsecure placement. I could be on surer footing that a drug dealer, nonviolent burglar, or gang patsy were within a stone's throw of redemption.

I can't put lives on a ledger. My present facility has around seventy residents. There were more, but the state moved them after the riot in hopes of getting us under control. (Those who were moved to adult corrections were over eighteen or complicit.) Around that number lost their lives at the hands of these offenders -- some have murdered multiple people, some have murdered none, but on average. I deal with a few more than ten of them, with most of my time spent on the girls' wing. Almost at once, they were my girls. I would fight with school districts and judges to get them an inch of ground toward a life outside the system. They were worth the defense. They are intelligent and funny, even the ones who annoy me. They resemble aspects of residents I have been fond of at my old facility. I look forward to working with them daily and am disappointed when sickness or misbehavior means that I do not get the opportunity. As for the boys, though I do not feel the same sense of attachment, and they are markedly rougher around the edges, I appreciate them. The worst of them behaves better than the average kid at my old facility.

But I see the teardrop tattoos under eyes that were earned by murder. In my sport coat, the boys joke that I look like the public defender who got them eight years. I hear them talking about the basics of their sentences without details. Even when our morning teacher meeting doesn't state it, I know our newest student is in for double murder.

My students at the nonsecure facility always blustered about their crimes, how "hard" they were. It is not so here. These kids are not proud of their crimes, nor are many of them ashamed. Murders (or violent rapes or serious assaults) are just things that happen from time to time, like bad weather. Everyone on the unit is as felonious as them, so what is the point of posturing?

If my girls were released tomorrow, one or two might kill someone eventually. If my boys were released, the statistics would not be so kind. It would be better if some of the boys in this facility were never released. That is not my call to make, however, and I am incapable of wanting any of them harmed to say nothing of being euthanized.

It should not be a statement requiring defense to say that I want my students to remain in the world. I do not work with the worst boys' unit, who have tried to kick in the guards' heads and sent them to the hospital. Perhaps my attachment to my stance would be less firm if I had to witness their brutality, though it is not in my nature to call for a death penalty for fifteen-year-olds.

I have individually liked students as much as I collectively do my girls, but I can think of only a few times I have had two clever students in the same class since I began working in facilities. I don't believe I have ever had three at once who would engage me in conversation about Drake's Equation and the scientific method. I similarly feel liked by them. With the boys, owing to some innate need to jostle for rank with men twice their ages, one usually spends half his class trying to test me or annoy his peers. Though the girls fight on the unit on a near-weekly basis, they do not bring it onto the school wing and absolutely not in my class. That may be the nature of girls, mine in particular, generally having other priorities. I have one student who has graduated from high school some time ago and spends every period with me quietly doing college-level geology for one of her classes. She has the most college credits of any student in the facility. If she ever leaves the carceral system -- and I have heard whispers that she will not owing to crimes I do not wish to know better -- she may do so with a bachelor's degree. I cannot look at her and accept that people want her dead, though some would like few things better.

Since starting in the field of teaching adjudicated minors, there have been kids whom I disliked. I dreaded them tearing up the classroom, as they did most days, or fighting with anyone in a ten-foot radius. I treated them fairly and consistently, but I didn't like them. I had a student who I can guarantee will commit depraved murders if not kept locked away in a mental health setting. He is too broken and his illness too extreme to be safe from himself. I have another who went on the commit so gruesome and senseless a double murder that I have no hope for him ever being a functional person again. When they were in my class, I did not dislike them. I had a soft spot for the latter boy, which makes his rank inhumanity more horrifying.

I don't know that my present residents are better. I have tried to look up the information about one of my girl's crimes because I have such hope for her. She is complicit in a ruthless murder, even if she didn't directly commit it. She will not live outside razor wire until she is in her late twenties, though I genuinely want to believe in her redemption. I like her whole class so much that I want them to escape the cycle and fulfill their best potential.

I may want to believe in the possibilities of these kids more so than my previous students because many won't get the chance to achieve them. At my old facility, I lectured the boys to let their so-called "thug life" drop by the wayside. Go away to the four years of state college that the state will give them for free by dint of having been locked up, try to leave your neighborhoods behind, and become fully realized people who thrive in society instead of violent cliches. At my current facility, they won't get the opportunity to go away to college. We provide some college classes -- come the spring, I may be among those teaching them -- but most of the residents will spend their college years incarcerated. Some will spend twenty years to life behind bars, graduating from our facility only to go to the Department of Corrections without a chance of parole. I do not believe any of my present students fall into the latter category. Murderers though they may be, the judicial system has shown mercy (or was forced to by established precedent) because my students committed their felonies below the age of majority. I suspect the families of their victims are not so generous as to want to believe that my students deserve a reduced sentence. I would not ask this of them. My students have not victimized me or mine, so I can extract myself from the severity of their actions. With me, they are only my students. I treat them as such because I could not perform this job treating them as violent convicts. This does not mean that, when a YDA goes into another room while I am working one-on-one with a boy, I don't think at him, "Please do not leave me alone with the murderer." (The boy was perfectly polite and studious, but I did not want there to be unobserved seconds if something in the text triggered him.)

I am almost always furious at their parents for letting it go this far or victimizing their kids into brokenness. At my old facility, we had an illiterate but sweet boy who was with us at eleven. His mother had told him to steal laptops from his elementary school for her to sell. He received six months with us (twice, because he hit someone at his subsequent placement). She received nothing but the money she made from selling the laptops and a year without the burden of having her son home. We had another mother of a severely dysregulated boy. He was one of the most volatile children I have ever met who would get restrained so he could reenact his trauma, screaming, laughing, and crying in the most horrifying way that I have ever heard. She visited and was all but molesting him in front of the guards and referring to him as though he were her boyfriend. We called the child abuse hotline on that. I feel that whenever their child is adjudicated, Child Protective Services should investigate the parents. We also have an interstate compact with most of the continental US, meaning that we can return these children to their parents even if they move. That is unless they move to Georgia. You would be surprised how many parents suddenly get an urge for Georgia peaches right about the time they know their kid is being released. We had to keep their children for months after their sentence as we fought with the courts or tried to get the children placed in a residential treatment facility since they no longer had a home to which to return. We had students with us for over a year of a six-month sentence because no one would take them, certainly not their families.

Several of my former students told me that their stint with us was the best time in their lives, as they knew they would get enough food, that they had their own bed, that they were safe, and that people cared about them. I do not believe my present crop of residents takes so generous a view.

My previous facility dealt with the "rejects" from other facilities: the learning disabled, the physically disabled, the markedly emotionally disturbed, those ending their sentences in the juvenile justice system, the LGBTQ residents who would be assaulted at higher security facilities, and the adjudicated who were in middle school (or lower a couple of times). In short, the students who might have better reasons to be dysfunctional in the system or who were traumatized in a way that impeded them rehabilitating. We gave them so heavy a dose of therapy that they couldn't help incorporating it into their bodies and behavior, which annoyed them. We earned the facility Sanctuary certification for trauma-informed care just before the state shut us down.

Now, I have students who have accepted that the rest of their lives will possibly occur behind bars. They don't want to spend every day with the drama my former residents fostered from boredom. The unit is their home. They don't want to be keyed up in the dayroom. (This is not universal, but it is more so.) They are older and, one hopes, more mature because of it. Even if it is not a wholly functional one, they know the system and want to relax as much as possible. In their position, I can't blame them.

Most of my residents are polite enough. Boys will be boys, which is to say that they bond with insults and like when adults deflect them and roll their eyes instead of getting offended, but they like seeing me. Their behavior is within acceptable bounds. They don't seek to intimidate me. The one time a kid tried because I happened to go onto the wrong wing the first day, I laughed, introduced myself, and offered him my hand to shake. He said, "Nah, we don't do that," and instead gave me a fist bump. On the outside, he might have been a threat to me, but not here. It is not that he is in proximity to a YDA who is permitted to restrain him (under a few circumstances, but trying to hurt me would top that list) but that I know this population enough that I have no fear of them. Almost to a pathological extent, my years with incarcerated youth broke something in me that makes other people worried in the presence of erratic youth with sixty pounds of muscle on a 6'6" frame. Even when I have encountered potentially dangerous teens outside work, I look them in the eye, smile, and give them a slight nod. They are looking for victims. I have no real fear of anyone who isn't pressing the issue.

last watched: What If...?
reading: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies