My first teaching experience (outside of the Missionary Training Center, which is a world unto itself) was at the Utah State Mental Hospital. I was in the Special Education program at BYU and one of my classmates was a teacher with the 9-12th grade girls (all of the 9-12th grade girls who fell in that age level were all in one “self-contained” class). My friend invited me after a shift of teaching at the MTC to come by and do a practice assessment (required for one of our classes) with some of her students.
I remember sitting across from one girl who had scars up her all up and down the inside of arm from her cutting. My friend asked me what I would come to know as her typical introduce-the-new-person question: “Tell us some little-known fact about you.” It just so happened I had let my sister Liz paint my toesnails at her baby shower a couple weekend before and I had never gotten around to taking it off, so the girls in the class were delighted to see the formally dressed MTC teacher take off his shoes and show them his cracked toenail polish.
I fell in love with the State Hospital, I quit the MTC mid semester (let’s just say I burned a bridge at a job many clammer for) and started working as an aide in my friend’s classroom. In time I was a substitute in the younger (7-9th grade) girls’ classroom, and than was the teacher for 11 months in the 9-12th grade boys’ classroom.
I loved my time there, I love my students, and I for the most part respected the school and hospital staff I worked with. But it was impossible to ignore the fact that even with all of our good intentions and programs, these youth learned very negative behavior spending 24/7 around each other. Now, in this case they had behavior stemming from mental illness as well as, at times, “juvielle delinquent” type behavior likely unconnected to mental illness. But when one clinically depressed student arrives who has never cut before, and they are around someone who has cut or even does cut at the hospital, it not hard to imagine they at least try the behavior.
A recent Newsweek article talked about this phenomenon, s tudy that controlled for family income, single-parent homes, and early behavior problems, they found these startling facts:
*Compared with other kids with a similar history of bad behavior, those who entered the juvenile-justice system were nearly seven times more likely to be arrested for crimes as adults
*Further, those who ended up being sentenced to juvenile prison were 37 times more likely to be arrested again as adults, compared with similarly misbehaved kids who were either not caught or not put into the system.
*Kids who entered the juvenile-justice system even briefly — for example, being sentenced to community service or other penance, with limited exposure to other troubled kids — were twice as likely to be arrested as adults, compared with kids with the same behavior problems who remained outside the system.
*Being put on probation, which involves more contact with misbehaving peers, in counseling groups or even in waiting rooms at probation offices, raised teens’ odds of adult arrest by a factor of 14.
Again, in our desire to crack down out what is truly dangerous or socially unacceptable behavior in a manner than mimics the adult prison system (parole, lock down, etc.) we inadvertently fuel the fire.
What can we do? In the words of the article:
In a 1995 study conducted by Dishion involving 158 high-risk families in Oregon, researchers compared the impact on teens’ behavior of four interventions: parenting groups focused on effective discipline, social-skills-training groups for teens, both the parent- and teen-focused group interventions, or no group treatment at all. Overall, the parent-focused group was most effective, leading to reductions in teen smoking and misbehavior at school. The teen-focused group, by contrast, significantly increased participants’ rate of aggressive behavior and smoking; in the combination group, kids showed no improvement, presumably because the exposure to other teens canceled out the positive effect of the parents.