“What about counseling and drug treatment and other services that kids get once they’re part of the system? Don’t those make a difference?”
“Interesting question.” He caught the eye of the waitress and beckoned, and she nodded in an I’ll-be-right-there sort of way. “There was a really ambitious and well-funded project in Massachusetts back in the 1930s and ’40s—the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, it was called. It was designed to identify kids who were at high risk of becoming criminals, and to provide them with all sorts of educational and medical and social services to steer them toward solid, productive lives.” I searched my memory banks for any scrap of knowledge I might have about it, and I came up dry. “Kids and parents and social-worker types loved it,” he went on. “It became the gold standard, the holy grail, for juvenile services. Kids who completed the program were tracked and interviewed, and years later, they were still saying glowing things about it. Things like, ‘That program saved my life,’ and ‘Without that program, I’d have ended up in prison.’ Impressive, huh?”
“Sounds great,” I said.
“But here’s the kicker. So here’s this legendary model program, right? But another twenty years down the road, when the kids were now middle-aged, some new researchers did a follow-up study, and guess what? The kids who’d gotten all that great help actually turned out worse than similar kids who didn’t get the help. The Cambridge-Somerville kids were more likely to have committed serious crimes, or turned alcoholic, or gone crazy, or died, compared to the control group—a group of other high-risk kids who’d gotten nothing. Leaving kids the hell alone turned out to be better for them than this gold-plated program, which actually proved harmful.”
“So you’re saying the answer is to do nothing? The best way to keep them from drifting into crime is to look the other way?”
He shrugged. “You know the biggest single factor that steers boys away from crime? Getting a girlfriend.”
Angie gave a brief laugh. “So instead of sending them to juvie, we should sign them up for Match.com?”
He smiled. “Maybe. Delinquency is something kids outgrow—unless we confirm them as ‘delinquents’ and lock them up with other, older delinquents, who teach them worse things; who teach them to be better, badder criminals.”
What he was saying had a certain logic to it, but it seemed to dodge the bigger question of social responsibility. “But what’s the chicken, and what’s the egg? How do you separate cause from effect? I mean, kids don’t just get randomly snatched up and sent to lockup for no reason. A kid has to do something to get pulled into the system in the first place, right? Steal a car, rob a store, vandalize a school, or something?”
“Something,” he conceded. “But that ‘something’ can be as simple as being defiant at home. Or playing hooky a few times. Or living with a single mother who gets arrested, so the kid gets sent to a foster home, where maybe he gets abused and starts doing drugs and it all goes to hell from there. Tiny, tiny things can start kids spiraling down the rabbit hole, especially if all the kid has done is pick the wrong parents or the wrong color skin or the wrong socioeconomic class.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I’d lived long enough to recognize that random luck—good luck and bad luck—could play a big role in shaping a kid’s life; after all, what if my grandsons had been born in black skin instead of white skin? Had been born in Darfur or Rwanda instead of in Tennessee? But I wanted an answer, a solution, so I pressed him. “So what would you do if you ran the circus? Just open the cages and let out all the animals?” I’d intended for the second question to be a witty riff on the old cliché, but it came out harsh and judgmental. “Sorry. I didn’t really mean that the way it sounded.” At least, I hoped I didn’t. He waved off the apology, though I thought I saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. “But seriously, what would you do?”
“I’d light a single candle, and I’d keep cursing the darkness. I’d try to bring evildoers to justice, especially the evildoers who hide behind uniforms.” He took a breath, gearing up. “I’d redistribute wealth. I’d do away with poverty and disease. I’d close the prisons, and spend all those billions of dollars on schools and health care and jobs instead.” The waitress appeared at our table, and he beamed at her. “And I’d love a dozen oysters, with extra horseradish and lemon.” She scurried toward the kitchen with the order. “Sorry to get on my soapbox, but I’m appalled by how much money and how much human potential we squander locking people up. What if society renounced the right to use violence against kids—what if we just said, ‘We don’t do that’?”
“It’s a complicated problem,” I acknowledged. “And except for the oysters, those things you’re talking about aren’t quick fixes. They’d require fundamental changes in our whole society.”