IS CREATIVITY STILL WELCOME IN JUVENILE JUSTICE?

Where there is no vision the people perish

Book of Proverbs 29:1

One of the most successful programs to come out of the early 1970s culture was called VisionQuest, named after a sacred Native American rite of passage ritualistic journey marking the transition from adolescence to adulthood.  A charismatic Arizona cowboy type named Bob Burton who always wore a 10 gallon hat and would rather be sitting on a horse than in a car recreated the experiences of our pioneers who settled the American West.

     For years and years several Wagon Trains circled the country year round manned by adjudicated delinquents and supervising staff.  Image what all these teenagers learned through this experience.  They learned:

     How to quickly work together with complete strangers

How to ride and how to handle and care for horses

     How to endure and survive through all kinds of weather extremes

     How to cook all their own meals from scratch and clean up afterwards

     How to maintain and handle primitive transportation equipment

     How to set up camp each night and break down camp in the morning leaving not a trace that they had been there

     Handle sanitation needs for both themselves and the animals – including clothing

     Eventually, how to plan, purchase and budget for food and the unexpected and how to educate the public as part of “graduation”.

     And, weather permitting, spend many nights around the camp fire reviewing their lives with each other and considering their future (vintage up-from-the-grassroots applied sociology).

     If you were to review the early writings of our scientific community as it slowly began to create what we now know as evidence-based practices (EBPs), might you find – in addition to the science – a subtle but clear put down of the then status quo?  As if they felt they had to justify the introduction of something new by trashing the old?  “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction” (Pablo Picasso).  

Where are there opportunities in juvenile justice today (2019) for creativity to express itself despite our restrictive culture?

The Second Chance Act (SCA) offers funding to programs that encourage and facilitate continuing therapeutic connections between juveniles in congregate care and their home communities.  Current programs often have resource staff from the home county visit regularly (monthly) with teens living 24/7 in confinement.  Home passes are used to reinforce the relationship.

This is all well and good.  But what would be even more impactful for a teen?

How about regular visits from other teens as well as the adults?  Teens who were in a continuing (weekly) group therapeutic process in their home county designed to keep them from also ending up in costly congregate care?

What if the locked-up teen was also part of a similar group at the confinement level?  Would this kill more than one bird with the same stone?

A seamless transition for the away teen back to his home community when he was ready?

A natural integration into his “home” group from his “away” group?

A direct physical lesson to visiting teens about what life without freedom is really like?

Part of the Glen Mills defense (so far) has been that so many public and professional people visited so often that the alleged staff behavior would surely have been discovered long ago.

Do you suppose that teens who are a part of a larger group culture might communicate amongst themselves if punitive physical incidents were in any way part of the congregate culture?  And so such visits could and would be a clear Glen Mills preventive?

This is the kind of creativity that flourished during the early VisionQuest days when up-from-the-grassroots applied sociology dominated juvenile justice.  This is what enabled the state of Massachusetts to abruptly close all its juvenile reform schools.  Can we bring it back to today's world or have we gone too far in the other direction?

Is creative thinking still welcomed in juvenile justice?

The Second Chance Act (SCA) as currently constituted offers federal funding to local jurisdictions (counties) to reduce recidivism in juvenile justice by promoting togetherness, stability, continuity and a culture of “working together” when it becomes necessary to send a teen into congregate care (confinement).

Current models of practice are limited to visitations by adults from the home county provider agencies to the congregate care facility and the incarcerated teen and also to the teen (and perhaps) family when the teen earns a home pass.

This is nice. And can be productive.

But what if —in addition to an adult staff member we also took other teens who participated in weekly group therapy as part of their probation supervision in the home country?

Would that be almost a night-and-day difference from an adult-only visit?

What if teens were given mid-week home passes so they could personally participate in the weekly group meetings (Positive Peer Integration©) they will be joining upon release?

And what if we offer these teens a concrete, visible token of group identity just as negative teen “gangs” use permanent tattoos? Such as matching tee shirts?

All of this is based on how teens think which we know from science is different from how we adults think because teens do not yet have an adult brain.

What are the obstacles to such an approach?

Would the Feds and the State decide that this is somehow a violation of a contract to participate in the SCA? Or would they welcome it as a distinct improvement over current practice?

What about the logistics?

How difficult would it be for congregate care facilities run for the benefit of the kids to—on an individual basis—offer mid-week rather that weekend home passes? (The author ran two state institutions for delinquent teens and did this sort of thing at both—it's a temporarily-disruptive-to-the-status-quo minor administrative procedure).

Could an individual county—purchasing service from a private provider—clearly demand that the facility offer such flexibility in exchange for county business?

CCI is perhaps the only entity in the state (and perhaps the entire nation) that can offer such a significant upgrade of the SCA because we—unlike most others—practice applied sociology—the power of group process—with teenagers.  See our documents Teenagers and Trouble and The Power of Group Process, and our related writings The Core Science That Big Research Left Behind and Do Our Evidence Based Practices Shortchange Teenagers?

TEENAGERS and TROUBLE

The process by which we force teenagers to take responsibility for negative and even violent behavior comes to us from the ultra-turbulent 1960s when teens basically ran amok. Under Juvenile Court jurisdiction teens can be required to participate in what are called "community" meetings run by knowledgeable adults.

As the meetings begin, the adults are silent. Teens can't handle silence, especially in group situations. Initially, they will go through a series of negative statements, often blaming others

(teachers, the police, etc.). Teens also can't handle adults who refuse to be drawn into any contentious dialogue and who make no judgmental statements. Basically, they will begin by competing with each other to see who can emerge as a (negative) leader. (Teen leadership is always initially negative—they're teenagers!)

As teens realize that the meetings can and will go on indefinitely, they begin to drop their negative facades. Slowly, they begin to be "real" (honest). Slowly, they begin to accept responsibility for what they have done. Positive teen leaders begin to emerge. There will now be a critical turning point in this sociological (not psychological) group process. Initially, positive teen leaders may and usually do begin to subtly manipulate the group ("power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"). The solution here is to immediately isolate the offender(s) and individually confront them through the "silent treatment", withhold privileges or impose sanctions until they come clean, and then, when they are ready, force them to “own up" to the entire group in order to participate further in the community meetings.

The negative teen culture is now ready to begin the process of becoming relentlessly positive. The teens all know what the excluded teen has been doing but they are waiting to see if the adults catch on. As the teens realize that the adults will not be taken in by negative teen leadership masquerading as a positive, real trust begins to develop. Teens now openly share personal issues, take full responsibility for their behavior, and help others to do the same. They become remorseful over what they have done and seek advice from the adults about how they can begin to change.

The final step in this process (called Therapeutic Community (TC) —not reached by all teens—comes as they contemplate a return to freedom. Rather than seeing it as a welcome relief from (usually) congregate care, they struggle to conceptualize how they can ever successfully handle the specific issues they know will await them (family discord, poverty, drugs, societal attitudes and expectations, race, the compelling influence of influential peers “on the outside", etc.). Teens like this are now ready for release provided a strong reentry plan is formulated. Despite the best of intentions, many teens slowly but surely crumble under the relentless pressure that contributed to their becoming a delinquent statistic in the first place.

Reentry needs to include weekly group meetings similar to those that finally helped them "get it together"; hopefully with at least some of the same teens in the original delinquent cohort. Such reentry groups will continually and consistently challenge the teens to maintain and practice the sociological skills and understandings they learned through the TC process. Being able to maintain and foster the positive culture of the “inside" group through the reentry group is critical in preventing relapse.

This is the approach we need to employ in our management of teenagers in trouble.  All teenagers struggle daily to learn social constraints on their behavior. When we as the adults fail to use sociology—the science of group behavior—as well as psychology, the science of individual behavior, in their care and upbringing, we make a difficult task even more difficult.  

The Power of Group Process I

The Power of Group Process

Creating a Positive Culture Out of Nothing

The Process

When we as the adults give even the most disruptive of teens the opportunity to participate in building a positive group culture from scratch it often becomes a transformative experience. Teens discover qualities within themselves they never knew they had.

They develop compassion and caring.

They share group leadership.

They absorb advice and constructive criticism from others.

They gradually create a culture of group trust.

Why?

Because the dialogue is all peer-driven, not adult--driven.

And this is what enables knowledgeable adults to penetrate the teen peer culture itself.

How It Works

How is this done?

Begin the group with 10-12 of the most difficult students. They are teenagers, go to the same school, and are all disruptive students under school discipline. They may or may not know each other. These are the commonalities.

Q.  "What are you all doing here?     

Say nothing further until there is a response (teens cannot handle silence especially in a group situation).

Do not respond until the students ultimately provide a coherent answer

" We all got in trouble in school, etc."

" So you were all sent here because you all messed up?"

" Yes"

" So what do you all want to do about it"?

Force the responses/answers to come from them. not you as the Leader/Educator.

The teens all know that if they're there in a group situation for getting into trouble they're there to talk about it. They gradually learn through the group interaction that the Leader will give no answers, no directions and that it all must come from themselves.

" Do you want us to talk about why we got in trouble?"

" What do you think"?

The teens will now--perhaps slowly-- begin to talk about the circumstances that gave rise to their troubles at school. And, being teenagers, they usually begin by blaming others. The Leader now begins to separate the sheep from the goats.

" So it's all someone else, not you, huh? You are a helpless victim of what other people do?

" Other people run your life, not you, right?"

" Life is just too tough for you to handle, huh?

Very few teenagers will agree with that last question.

This is the point where positive teen leaders begin to emerge by challenging others still looking for excuses for their behavioral mistakes.

A positive culture now begins within the group.

Ultimately, prodded by their peers, virtually all group members will be able to take full responsibility for themselves and their behavior.

The final group development stage--not reached by every group --is when--rather than denial--there is a discussion of what each teen has to address in his daily life and how on earth will he/she be able to do it successfully?

The Power of Group Process II

“Increasing awareness demands increasing responsibility”

When 12 complete strangers are suddenly thrown together and forced to deal with each other because they have been selected to serve as a jury in a criminal court case, what happens?  How do they elect a foreman?  How do they sort each other out into leaders, followers and those “in the middle”?  

This is group process.  They have to check each other out. Each member has to form an opinion about each other member in relationship to himself/herself.  This is how the process of group power works.

Ditto teenagers.

Consider what each teenager faces as a member of such a group.  (They may or may not know each other.)

They are given no individual guidance from the adults running the group.  

           “What are all you guys doing here?”

            “Well, you know….”

   “I know?  So, you can read my mind?  If you can read people's minds what are you doing wasting your time around here???  Why aren't you making tons of money in the big city?”

Silence.

Teenagers – especially in a group situation – cannot handle silence.

And so, eventually, teens will initiate conversation on their own.

Provided that the adults make no judgments.

And continue to – basically – ask questions rather than make statements.

Just as in a jury, teen leaders will emerge.

But, almost always, teen leadership is initially negative.  (They're teenagers!)  They will, through their participation, try and discover what will please the adults.  And, since by this time, the focus of the group – why they are all there together – has clearly been recognized (by the kids themselves because the adults gave them no clue) and usually involves disruptive behavior by all of them, the initial teen leadership often features the strong (leaders) sharply questioning the weak (quiet teen followers).

But the teens all know that this is negative teen leadership masquerading as a positive.  When the adults make it clear – through their questioning – that they are not taken in by this (again without making any judgments), real group trust begins to emerge.  They begin to share and discuss their life issues with each other.   And the rest is all downhill.

Now – consider what each teen is faced with in such a group.  At each moment.

“Should I say something or not?”

“Should I try and please the adults or not?”

What if…what if…what if?

When teenagers participate with each other in building a positive group culture, it becomes a transformative experience.

Most likely, they have never done anything like it.  Ever.

Because the experience itself forces them to make so many decisions about themselves in relationship to others and because they eventually learn what real trust feels like, it opens the door for them to reconsider all the beliefs they have about themselves and their place in life.

It forces them to address their (emerging) self-identity and self-image. Like no other intervention can.

This is the transformative experience that can change lives.

This is “mental health” treatment at its best.  And, for most struggling teens it can become a superior approach to even the best of one-on-one therapeutic initiatives.

The Power of Group Process III

During one of our Dorney Amusement Park escapades in Allentown (Pa) – I believe in 2016 – one of the kids got busted for pot by park security (this is why we had them all wear identical tee shirts).  Only the security people got the wrong man.  The (completely innocent) teen took the hit for another teen whose juvenile record could not have withstood another marijuana charge.  The arrested teen went through the Juvenile Court process in Lehigh, was referred back to Bucks, and was given a weekend disciplinary confinement at the youth center.  All without saying a word about what really happened even to his family.

Such is the nature of the “teen peer subculture”.  And the power of applied sociology to actually penetrate that culture through trained Youthworkers.

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