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Educating youthful offenders in a youth development center.

Article Excerpt
Educating incarcerated youthful offenders is described from the perspective of a teacher who incorporates W. G|asser's (1998) counseling philosophy into her relationships with students. She reveals the results of her caring, encouraging, and goal-directed behavior with sex offenders and other young inmates.

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A high fence surrounds the youth development center in the southeastern state where I work, a metaphor for the obstacles that exist between the teachers at the facility and the young men who are housed here. Approximately 200 boys between the ages of 11 and 19 years are sent to this facility after committing felonies in three categories: drug offenses, violent offenses, and sex offenses. The facility houses the largest concentration of sex offenders in the state, most of whom remain in the facility for a minimum of 3 years, longer than students in the other categories. These boys spend their adolescent years away from their families, away from teenage girls, and away from the kinds of fun their age-related peers experience.

Therapeutic, Social, and Academic Groupings

The students at the facility are enrolled in treatment groups tailored to the offense that led to the sentence that brought them to the center. They are placed in therapy groups with counselors and psychologists, and they must demonstrate competence in written and behavioral categories in order to complete the program. For the sex offenders, the most difficult hurdle is admitting that they did anything wrong. Once they have accepted responsibility for their crimes, they can move ahead through the treatment protocol. Daily group meetings are supplemented by additional group sessions that address other specific behavioral issues, such as drug abuse treatment for a serious or sex offender.

Aside from their daily counseling sessions, the youths' days consist of long periods of isolation in their rooms, where there is little chance for socialization in the cottages, locked dorms with spartan individual, locked rooms. They enjoy only short recreation activities, and they attend school classes in a school building 220 days a year. School provides them with some relief from life in the cottages. Many of the cottage staff members provide few activities for the students. There is no cable television, and there are few videos, few computers, and limited games. There is no room to play or exercise. In some of the cottages, books that have been provided by grant money are locked away from the boys, and, in general, reading is not encouraged.

When the students come to school, however, they have more freedom than they do in any other aspect of the facility's program. Teachers are more limited than other staff members in the degree to which they can use consequences to encourage or discourage certain behaviors, therefore, inappropriate behavior is common. Students use the school day as a chance to see friends from home who are locked in other cottages and as an opportunity to act on gang-related grievances with members of rival gangs. Violence is an everyday occurrence in the school, and smaller, weaker students are often victimized. Yet, students grumble when we approach a day off from school because they would rather be in the school building than in the cottages.

Institutional Assumptions About Students

I came to this facility 2 years ago, after having worked for 20 years at a private day school in a large southeastern city, where teachers prepared students to succeed at the top tier of colleges and universities in the country. Although each student did not come to school hungry to learn every day, the momentum was generally positive, and students were bright and cooperative. The teachers were able to make many assumptions about each student's educational background and could demand that he or she read and write relatively well. As an English teacher, I would breeze through the discussion of plot in a literary work and concentrate instead on the ideas emphasized by the authors. I expected my students to grasp the basic conventions of grammar and to express their ideas clearly on paper. I emphasized independent thought in writing. Students were expected to formulate their own ideas about issues and literature and to express these in their writing. They were empowered to see the world in their unique ways and to articulate these ideas in their writing.

Paolo Freire (2000) wrote that there are two kinds of schools. The underlying practices and curricula of one kind of school support the status quo in society and ensure that the values are reinforced. The other kind of school creates a climate in which the status quo is challenged and changed....

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