New Approach To Teen Crime

At first glance, the Giddings State School looks like an upscale high school campus. Then you meet some of the kids. 48 Hours Correspondent Bernard Goldberg reports.

Mike pistol-whipped a boy for walking through his neighborhood. "That wasn't enough for me," he remembers. "I wanted more. I wanted him to beg me to let him live. So I hit him over the head with the gun. I still didn't feel that was enough. He went down to his knees telling me 'no please I don't want no more.' I hit him again. Then I hit him again."

When she was 13 years old, Yvonne and her boyfriend kidnapped a man: "He was 38 years old and he had a family, wife and two children. Kidnapped him and forced him into his truck at gunpoint. We took his ATM card and we got the number from his ATM card as well. We robbed him of his money. We robbed his truck. Stripped his truck. Then we also shot him. And he died. Shot him in the head."

As you might guess, this is no regular high school. Outside Austin, Texas, Giddings is a fenced-in, secure institution that houses about 400 armed robbers, rapists, murderers and assorted other young criminals.

The people who run Giddings reject what they say is the overly punitive mentality in America these days. They say they can turn bad kids around with a kinder, gentler approach. In law and order Texas, of all places, they're advocating talking, sharing feelings, and even group therapy.

The idea at Giddings: make kids take responsibility for what they did. Those who run the school say their approach does not coddle.

"It's not soft; it's not at all soft," says Stan DeGerolami, the superintendent at Giddings. "It's helping people understand why they felt they could hurt somebody, helping them understand the basis for this rage they have. "

This rage is played out at Giddings in a different way from other juvenile programs around the country. The process starts with talking, which begins the minute they march through the door. The key, DeGerolami says, is getting to the truth, without excuses. "I don't care what you told your mother, what you told your lawyer, all I care about is the truth of what got you in this room."

"It's so easy to say 'I shot some dude, I stabbed somebody,'" " DeGerolami says. "But when you have to realize that indeed you took a weapon and you violated another person, that you stabbed a person, that this person felt intense pain, that this person will be changed forever by what you did. They need to understand that it's a lot more than just that motion. And they have to re-experience it."

That's what makes the Giddings program different. After months of talking about their crimes, some of the most violent offenders here will re-enact them, in gruesome detail.

On this daya 20-year-old named Elena is set to go through the process. She is nervous. "It's one thing to sit there and say it, but it's way, way different when you've got to do it all over again," she says. "It's way different. Talking about it just don't cut it."

If she completes the program successfully, Elena, who tried to kill her best friend's aunt and uncle, will be freed from Giddings before she is 21.

Like many of the kids at Giddings, Elena had a troubled childhood. She came from a broken home, and like a lot of the others, she says she was sexually abused. When she was 16 she left home and moved in with her best friend, a girl named Angela, who was living with her aunt and uncle. It was, by all accounts, a good home. Which did not stop Angela from convincing Elena to attack--with hammers--the aunt and uncle while they slept in their beds. Elena had no problem with the plan. The couple survived, but just barely.

Elena has never really explained why she did it. Her therapist, Corrine Alvarez-Sanders, says that at some point she will have to.

"They just opened their lives to you," Sanders tells Elena. "They opened their hearts to you. They let you in. You'd been like a daughter to then. And they didn't expect anything from you. Nothing." Elena responds by saying that the act was a way to release anger.

Sanders doesn't buy it: "What does that mean, 'way to release my anger?' The way you're describing it right now it's just like going home and turning on the TV and sitting there and watching TV. Just like it's another day. But it's not another day, is it?"

The goal of the exercise, Sanders says, is to bring back all the details of the crime in order to force the criminal to empathize with the victims, and to try to figure out why they did it.

In Elena's case, two of the therapists play the victims. At first nothing happens. Then all hell breaks loose.

"Go after her, go after her," Sanders tells Elena. "Keep hitting her. She doesn't know it's you. She doesn't know it's you."

To make her face the horror of her crime, Sanders shows Elena gruesome crime scene photos which Elena has never seen before. "The last thing they want to do is feel some of the emotions that they let out on someone who was very innocent," says Sanders.

In some cases, kids become physically ill when forced to recreate their offenses. Says DeGerolami: "That's an excellent response and reaction. I want kids to feel sick to their stomachs when they think about what they've done to another human being."

By the end, Elena is crying. She says she tried to kill the couple because she wanted to be loyal to Angela. That's what it comes down to. After four years in confinement, after all the hours in therapy, after all the self-examination, it comes down to this: A young girl desperate for acceptance did it because she wanted a friend's approval.

"I would do anything to prove tAngela that I was there," she says. "I didn't want her to think I didn't care."

Many observers have trouble believing that this sort of therapy really works. DeGerolami understands that, but also defends his program: "Personally I'd rather have as my next door neighbor somebody who has successfully come through this program than someone who was locked up in prison for 10 or 15 or 20 years."

He says that only 12 percent of the kids who complete the program end up back in trouble within a year. The national average is over 50 percent.

Not everyone is convinced. "Therapy? Are you kidding me?" asks Harry Lee Coe, the chief prosecutor in Tampa, Florida. He says that state prison is the answer for young criminals like Elena.

Coe dismisses the argument that teenage criminals deserve a break because they're young. "No victim who's looking up the wrong end of a gun barrel feels any better that the person at the other end holding it is 15 or 16 or 35," he says. "It makes no difference whatsoever."

Coe has a different policy in his office. If a juvenile is charged with a violent crime or is a repeat offender, he or she is tried in adult court, where his prosecutors push for long sentences.

Says Coe: "If they're going to do the crime they're going to do the time. If they're going to play with the big boys, they're going to be with the big boys and they will find out that it's no fun whatsoever. That's the program we have for people like that in Florida. Not therapy."

Elena says that this approach doesn't work: "When you put a kid away for a long time with no treatment, no help, no nothing, those ways of thinking don't go away."

Is Elena saying what she thinks her therapists want to hear? Or has she changed? Having successfully re-enacted her crime, she is on her way to freedom. Her therapists say she'll pose no safety problem, and are planning to let out in the next few months.

"I'm going to always remember what I did to my victims," she says. "That's always going to be in my head. It's a part of me. Who I was. And it's always going to be inside."

produced by David Kohn;