Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth

Two male students make an escape attempt but are quickly subdued and given a minor punishment. The administrators conclude that penalties need to be stiffer, because the students are faking escape attempts for the thrill of it. The Giddings faculty faces an ongoing battle over discipline versus therapy because “there is always tension between staff members who believe that security is paramount, and youth should be treated as prisoners, and staff who believe that incarceration is an opportunity to deliver treatment (216).

Discipline is necessary because gang activity on campus is a real concern. Some students maintain their gang affiliations and attack other gang members to achieve status or recognition within their peer group. One of the administrators points out that gang activity offers the students a surrogate family: “Gangs are all the good things, going in all the wrong directions. Before a youth will leave a gang, she has to believe that she can achieve ‘the good things’—acceptance, respect, and love—outside her set” (219). The school’s goal is to get these youths to relinquish their gang associations once they are free.

To help the students internalize a belief that they are worthy of these “good things” without gangs, the therapists use role-playing as a powerful tool for self-realization. The chapter shifts focus to Elena’s crime story role-play. In the first segment, she casts all the roles and watches from the sidelines as a therapist prompts her for insight into what she is seeing. This process leads to a breakthrough, and Elena ends up sobbing on the floor. So much of her hardened exterior has been a measure to avoid the pain of empathy, the pain of truly knowing she has hurt someone.

After Elena recovers from the sadness of witnessing her misdeeds, she must play the role of her victim. Afterward, she is even more distraught, concluding that she is a terrible person undeserving of anything good. One of her teammates responds, “Well then, if you really, really, really are sorry, if it hurts so much you won’t never hurt nobody ever again, how can you be a bad person?” (223). This question makes Elena dig deep to examine her damaging assumptions about herself, and she isn’t the only student who has an epiphany. All the girls come to understand the self-defeating nature of their criminal activities. Role-playing allows them to watch from a safe distance and truly evaluate their destructive past behavior.

The rest of the chapter addresses racial disparity in the prison system. Texas is no different from any other state in this respect; youths of color are overrepresented in the system. The book offers no direct answer when the author questions the cause of this disparity: Hubner doesn’t say whether he believes the penal system is racially biased, or whether race itself is a predictive factor in juvenile violent crime. The authorities he interviews agree that race doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but they also do not directly address systemic racism. The chair of the board of directors for the state’s TYC programs, whom the author notes is Black, says, “Poverty or racism does not give anyone the right to perpetuate criminal behavior […] We have to take those conditions into consideration, but we cannot use them to excuse criminal behavior” (226). A senior member of the COG program says, “They make you look at why you are going racial […] They ask you, What do you think going racial is going to accomplish? That’s the question, right there” (229), but they do not clarify the intent of the term “going racial.”