The names of the teenagers in this story aren't real, but the kids are -- and they are all killers. They have murdered, some more than once, and are serving time. And they will still be young when they come up for parole. Will they have been rehabilitated? Nationally, about 60% of juvenile offenders end up breaking the law again. The boys below may have a better chance at avoiding that fate. They are part of a $100,000-a-year program started by the Texas Youth Commission at the Giddings State Home and School, a maximum-security correction facility near Austin. In six years only one of the 116 killers to pass the Capital Offender Group program has killed again. But getting through the regimen is psychologically harrowing -- and not all who try succeed. Here are scenes from some of those journeys.
It's easy to see how Arnie Hall, 17, became a criminal. His mother was a dope addict, his stepfather an alcoholic. He grew up in a South Dallas slum, and before he dropped out of fifth grade, he was selling dope and doing drive- by shootings. Arnie is at Giddings for killing a man. He committed the murder when he was 13. He shot the man in the back for cheating him out of $9 in a crack buy.
Arnie sat with three therapists in a tiny, windowless blockhouse at the Giddings facility. In the room with him were seven other teenage killers going through the same 16-week program of grueling talk therapy. The kids are a privileged group. Each year the program can take only 24 criminals, one-fifth of the total who need it. There is no other program quite like it in the rest of the country. Its goals are straightforward but difficult: to break a participant's psychological defenses, to force him to see his victim's suffering, to help him discover his conscience and feel remorse.
In the room the participants peppered Arnie with questions, trying to peel back the layers of his past. Eventually, he would be asked to reenact his crime, playing both himself and his victim, in an attempt to get him to assume responsibility for the murder -- if he doesn't, the therapists believe, he will kill again when he is paroled.
In a monotone, Arnie talked about how he rose from being a small-time thief who shot at cars for fun to a murderer. He readily went over certain secrets: that he was conceived when his mother was raped, that he fathered twin sons when he was 13. But he showed no remorse for his crime and blamed his victim for embarrassing him -- thus deserving to be killed. He said of the murder that it was "no big deal, it was just another crime."
The group tore into Arnie's narrative, interrupting him with sharp questions.
"What did you say to your robbery victims?"
"Was it really worth it?"
"When you beat these people, when was enough?"
"When I saw blood," Arnie replied, "I figured we'd kicked his ass enough."
"How could you look at them? How could you keep from caring?"
Arnie hung his head low and avoided answering.
As the questioning intensified, the boy twisted slightly in his chair but maintained his stiff answers. The revelations poured forth matter-of-factly, but they surprised no one. Arnie claimed that he had actually killed six people, not just one. No details were asked for or furnished. He alluded to dozens of other shootings and to doing 100 drug deals a day.