Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth

The first chapter begins by describing a new COG starting its first day. The 18 boys will eventually split into two teams of nine, each led by three therapists, and will learn to support and challenge each other during the next six weeks. They will live together in the same dorm facilities and will receive frequent supportive visits from graduates of the COG program.

Before the sessions begin, each boy receives a manual that includes the vocabulary he will use to discuss his life. The manual also includes a “list of nine thinking errors. They are: deceiving, downplaying, avoiding, blaming, making excuses, jumping to conclusions, acting helpless, overreacting, and feeling special” (5). Learning to identify these errors is essential to students’ rehabilitation and their future reintegration into society.

All nine of these behaviors indicate that a student is dodging responsibility. Instead of taking ownership, he uses these thinking errors to justify his crimes. Part of COG’s purpose is to dismantle these thought patterns and build empathy, which the psychologists running the program have identified as the key to changing behavior. People who develop empathy take responsibility for their feelings and can relate to the feelings of others.

The staff is often asked how many COG students have true psychopathy and are incapable of empathy, and the number is only about 5%. Staff member Linda Reyes warns, “We have to be cautious about ruling out kids in the beginning. […] They all come through the gate looking like psychopaths. They’re kids, they can develop, they can change” (10).

First, the program attempts to break down defensive strategies because these boys have learned that their survival depends on “anger and the drive for power” (14). Therapists therefore employ role-playing—psychodrama—to access the students’ other, healthier emotional responses. The students and their teammates act out their life stories and their crimes, and then they play the roles of their victims. Facing such trauma requires the support of the entire group, but students are hungry for the opportunity to discuss their experiences. As the student Ronnie says, “I want to talk about all the shit that’s happened in my life. […] I just really want to get it all out there. I’ve gotten really tired, dragging it around” (17).

The sessions begin with some group members telling their life stories. As their tales of abuse surface, this shared trauma is often a revelation to the other group members who previously assumed no one else had endured the same severity of pain. Hearing the other students’ stories leads them to understand “that not only were they not alone, someone else had had it even worse than they had” (21).

After several other members speak, it’s Ronnie’s turn, and this chapter covers his family history in depth. His father was white, and his mother was Mexican. Both came from troubled families. Ronnie’s two paternal uncles died by suicide, while Ronnie’s mother was sexually abused by her own father and sent to a juvenile home to cover up the scandal. When Ronnie’s parents met, they fell in love, but Ronnie’s paternal grandparents were prejudiced against their Mexican daughter-in-law. Ronnie’s father eventually abandoned his new family and went back to live with his parents.

Ronnie’s mother was left to raise two small sons alone, so she moved in with her sister. Ronnie recalls that their life was fine until his mother, Marina, discovered cocaine. She eventually formed an addiction and spent more and more time partying away from her sons. Ronnie developed severe separation anxiety by the age of five. Tragically, “Ronnie found the answer where troubled children almost always do. It was him: he was the problem. A child lives at the center of a very small universe. If something is really, really wrong in that universe, the fault has to be his” (39).

With Marina often absent, Ronnie drew his aunt’s rage. She began beating him to outlet her own anger. One night, Marina took Ronnie with her to a party where he saw a man getting knifed. This episode made a big impression: “Whenever my aunt would hurt me, I’d think, I want to run and get a knife and put it in her stomach and watch her cry the way she was making me cry […] I don’t want to say it took away the pain, but it was kind of a shield” (44).

After Ronnie tells his story to the group, the therapists confirm the tale with Marina. The intent is not to verify the events but to understand how Ronnie processed them. The COG program aims to explore the feelings behind the anger: “Those feelings are deep down inside and they are going to come out and hurt somebody—a wife or someone else—unless they get dealt with. Feelings will continue to have power until they are expressed” (46).

Ronnie continues his story of childhood neglect. One night, during a rainstorm, his younger brother Kenny cried so loudly that his aunt pitched both boys out the window. They took shelter in a doghouse until their mother came home. Enraged, Marina packed their things and moved the family back to Oklahoma to live with her parents.

Marina was often absent, so childcare fell to the grandparents. On his daily walks to school, Ronnie passed his father’s house. His parent, who had an alcohol addiction, usually sat on the porch and offered only a feeble wave. Initially, Ronnie did quite well in school, but he began abusing other students and his little brother. One of the COG therapists explains to the author, “It’s how you learn to respond to the abuse. There’s an imprecision in our ability to predict that. Who will turn out to be the doctors and the therapists, and who will be the killers? You learn that after the fact” (54). The therapist concludes that empathy is the key factor in predicting behavior.

Back in the COG session, other members challenge Ronnie about why he started beating his younger brother, prompting him to snap, “Life wasn’t fair to me, so why should I be fair to them? […] I got beat up by my aunt and didn’t deserve it. Why should it be any different for my brother or the kids in school?” (57). In the absence of empathy, the victim has become the victimizer as a response to his own childhood trauma. As the session continues, the therapists and other students prompt Ronnie with thought-provoking questions until he realizes he has been indulging the thinking error called “feeling special.”

As he soon learns, other COG members have suffered in the same way that he has. His experience isn’t unique. This realization breaks Ronnie out of his mental loop, and he begins to feel empathy for his brother’s plight. However, a sense of guilt quickly develops in response to this feeling. As a therapist points out, “You want him to get to the sadness beneath the anger. You want a kid to have guilt. You want him to feel awful about what he did” (59).

Ronnie then recalls a Christmas memory. At that point, he hadn’t seen his mother for four years when she arrived unannounced with presents for her sons. In addition to his grandparents, Ronnie’s uncle was there, and when he confronted Marina about her neglect, she indignantly and abruptly left with her new boyfriend. Ronnie ran after the car. Taking hold of the window, he asked when Marina would return. She told him she would never come back to Oklahoma, but the boys could visit her in Amarillo during Easter break. Ronnie says, “I always had to take action to be with my mother […] If I hadn’t of grabbed hold of that Firebird, that would have been the last time I saw her” (67).