Placement By Necessity

The below article was provided by an at-risk youth mentor. They are from his experiences, and are his comments.

When I first started working as an at-risk youth mentor, I have to admit I was a bit judgmental. The youth are in the system for some serious crimes, including burglary, sex offense, drugs, violence, etc. As I got to know some of the youth, I would think “they deserve to be here”. However, as I have familiarized myself with the system and gotten to know the boys, my mindset has changed some.

First, most of our clients come from a dysfunctional family and never learn how to interact on a “normal” level. Additionally, many of the youth we deal with have been in the system for a few years and have spent time in a secured facility (“prison” for minors, what our clients call “lockup”). This means they have spent a significant amount of time around other, more hardened, offenders (including homicidal schizophrenics and rapists). Unfortunately, this means that their peer group mentality and family teachings reflect a skewed outlook on life. I am no scientist, but it appears that this mentality may sometimes foster a quasi-Darwinist approach to living—they have not learned how to live, they have learned how to survive. Upon exiting the system, this same mentality follows the youth into the “real world”.

In conjunction with that, my understanding of the purpose of the system is to “catch them while they are young”, as I once heard on a prison movie. We want to keep them from committing crimes as to keep them from entering the adult prison system. In other words, our goal is to help the at-risk youth learn how to live (not just survive). This is a very difficult task because the majority of our clients come from a dysfunctional family—with parents who never taught them how to live and take care of themselves within the context of any moral framework. It thus becomes our purpose and responsibility to fill in the moral gaps, not only as an at-risk youth program, but as a society, to help these children learn to live. We must help them develop a moral framework compatible and consistent with the “real world” expectations, which will keep them out of the adult system and provide them a better life.

As I mentioned above, my mindset has changed. For the most part, I no longer think that our clients deserve to be in the system. Instead, I say to myself “they need” to be in the system, which is different. Placement by necessity is different than placement by merit. Placement by necessity allots an enormous amount of responsibility to “society” to ensure that the client’s mentality shifts from surviving to living. As society’s mentality shifts from “they deserve” to “they need” to be in the system, I believe our thoughts will turn to the neglectful childhood most of our clients come from. Hopefully, this mentality will foster a greater desire to provide the moral framework the at-risk “deserve.”