Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth

As the narrative moves through the students’ tragic life stories, one fact emerges clearly: These youths did not develop their criminal tendencies in a vacuum. They all came from families that had been dysfunctional for generations. In Ronnie’s case, his mother had already experienced her own neglectful and abusive childhood: “Marina was one of eleven children […] Marina’s father was a Pentecostal minister who had a small congregation. In the pulpit, he led his flock through hail, fire, and brimstone to salvation. At home, he was hail, fire, and brimstone” (27).

Marina’s father beat her mother and sexually assaulted Marina from the time she was 11 years old. As so often happens in such cases, Marina’s mother refused to believe the abuse allegations. Instead, Marina was sent to a youth facility. As an adult, she developed a cocaine addiction that exacerbated her own neglectful parenting of her two young sons. Marina says, “After that, it was nothing but coke. Coke, coke, coke. I was going to college, I wanted to be a registered nurse. I had grants, every two weeks I got a check for five hundred dollars. We used that money to buy drugs” (35).

The other adult in Ronnie’s life, his stepfather, Jimmie, came from a family that was just as dysfunctional as Marina’s. Ronnie describes a family picnic at Jimmie’s where kids drank beer while the adults set off large firecrackers and used automatic weapons during target practice. Jimmie also tried to instigate a fist fight between Ronnie and another boy for the adults’ amusement. In later years, Ronnie bonded with Jimmie over drugs and guns, which pulled Ronnie into Jimmie’s familial crime ring.

As for Elena, her family was just as dysfunctional as Ronnie’s. Nearly all her extended family have criminal records. Her mother exhibited the same poor parenting skills that Marina did toward Ronnie:

Elena despised her mother. It wasn’t so much that Lucy was always away, working at one menial job or another; or that she drank and used drugs and was often unstable; or even that her reaction to most problems, large or small, was to hit the child who presented them. She didn’t listen to Elena; did not respond to things she told her, like how badly the spray-addicted neighbors were treating her and her sisters (198).

Given the wrenching conditions under which these children developed, they would naturally gravitate to gangs. Gang membership often gives COG students the only sense of family stability and emotional attachment they have ever known. As a therapist points out, “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). Young people who are trapped in a legacy of dysfunction often don’t understand that others are also being traumatized in similar ways. They have endured multiple rejections, betrayals of trust, and physical and emotional violations perpetrated by their own family members, many of whom were treated similarly by their own families. Craving security, identity, and a place of belonging, vulnerable youths can find a proxy family in gangs, but this family is also riddled with violence and abuse, similar to the inherited cycles of dysfunction that they are trying to flee. The COG attempts to teach students to break this cycle by breaking their inherited behavioral, mental, and emotional patterns.