Arrested Development

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Hubner spent nine months at the Giddings State School in Texas, observing the Capital Offenders group, a last-ditch effort to steer juveniles convicted of violent crimes back into society. Those who make it through the program are rewarded with an early release. Those who don’t are sent to prison, often to complete decades-long adult sen-tences. At Capital Offenders, the therapeutic process is built around narrative: Over a period of months, young people tell their life stories and act them out through role-playing in an effort to face both their own motivations and the harm they have done.

Like Szalavitz, Hubner describes a group process intended to break down kids’ defenses. The difference is that, at Giddings, young people who have robbed, assaulted, and killed are led through this process with skill and compassion and encouraged to treat each other kindly. The idea is not that they need to be “broken”—clearly, they already are—but that they can be put back together and can help rebuild each other.

The arc of tragedy in these intimate narratives approaches the Shakespearean, save for the final twist: an epilogue in which most of the young people Hubner follows emerge from the tunnel of violence as stable and productive members of society. Ronnie, who had faced a 25-year sentence for a brutal home-invasion robbery, is paroled to a job at a nursing home; within a year he is head of the custodial crew, supervising 11 people. The younger brother he once abused and terrorized tells him, “You’re a changed man. Now, you’re my brother.” Of the 17 boys and 7 girls Hubner followed, only 2 failed to meet the program’s demands and were transferred to prison. Fifteen were released. Of those, not a single one had been rearrested at the time of his book’s publication.

Those who favor a “tough love” or “tough on crime” approach often cite the need for “accountability,” a state they seem to believe can be attained only via inflicting protracted suffering. Last Chance in Texas offers a vision of accountability that is at once deeper and more hopeful than the notion that those who break the law had damn well better pay. The young people Hubner introduces us to are fierce in their demand that each among them take responsibility for the choices he has made, and in their rejection of anything resembling an excuse—including what the more flippant of the law-and-order crew have come to call “the abuse excuse.” At Capital Offenders, an examination of past abuse is not a card played in an attempt to deflect responsibility but rather a starting point for a conversation intended to heal.

A belief in tough love allows many parents to raid their children’s education funds to send them to virtual prison camps, and permits the rest of us to tolerate the expenditure of our tax dollars on failing juvenile prisons. But Hubner’s riveting account puts the lie to the notion that nothing—or nothing short of torture—works. It turns out we do have a pretty good idea of how to lead children out of delinquency and emotional turmoil and bring them back into the fold. We just choose, individually and collectively, to abandon them instead.

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Neill Bernstein is the author of All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated.

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