Taming the Killers

By RICHARD WOODBURY/GIDDINGS

The names of the teenagers in this story aren't real, but the kids are -- and they are all killers. They have murdered, some more than once, and are serving time. And they will still be young when they come up for parole. Will they have been rehabilitated? Nationally, about 60% of juvenile offenders end up breaking the law again. The boys below may have a better chance at avoiding that fate. They are part of a $100,000-a-year program started by the Texas Youth Commission at the Giddings State Home and School, a maximum-security correction facility near Austin. In six years only one of the 116 killers to pass the Capital Offender Group program has killed again. But getting through the regimen is psychologically harrowing -- and not all who try succeed. Here are scenes from some of those journeys.

It's easy to see how Arnie Hall, 17, became a criminal. His mother was a dope addict, his stepfather an alcoholic. He grew up in a South Dallas slum, and before he dropped out of fifth grade, he was selling dope and doing drive- by shootings. Arnie is at Giddings for killing a man. He committed the murder when he was 13. He shot the man in the back for cheating him out of $9 in a crack buy.

Arnie sat with three therapists in a tiny, windowless blockhouse at the Giddings facility. In the room with him were seven other teenage killers going through the same 16-week program of grueling talk therapy. The kids are a privileged group. Each year the program can take only 24 criminals, one-fifth of the total who need it. There is no other program quite like it in the rest of the country. Its goals are straightforward but difficult: to break a participant's psychological defenses, to force him to see his victim's suffering, to help him discover his conscience and feel remorse.

In the room the participants peppered Arnie with questions, trying to peel back the layers of his past. Eventually, he would be asked to reenact his crime, playing both himself and his victim, in an attempt to get him to assume responsibility for the murder -- if he doesn't, the therapists believe, he will kill again when he is paroled.

In a monotone, Arnie talked about how he rose from being a small-time thief who shot at cars for fun to a murderer. He readily went over certain secrets: that he was conceived when his mother was raped, that he fathered twin sons when he was 13. But he showed no remorse for his crime and blamed his victim for embarrassing him -- thus deserving to be killed. He said of the murder that it was "no big deal, it was just another crime."

The group tore into Arnie's narrative, interrupting him with sharp questions.

"What did you say to your robbery victims?"

"Was it really worth it?"

"When you beat these people, when was enough?"

"When I saw blood," Arnie replied, "I figured we'd kicked his ass enough."

"How could you look at them? How could you keep from caring?"

Arnie hung his head low and avoided answering.

As the questioning intensified, the boy twisted slightly in his chair but maintained his stiff answers. The revelations poured forth matter-of-factly, but they surprised no one. Arnie claimed that he had actually killed six people, not just one. No details were asked for or furnished. He alluded to dozens of other shootings and to doing 100 drug deals a day.

"You mean you did 6,000 deals?" asked psychologist Corinne Alvarez- Sanders.

"Yeah, I sold crack to 6,000," Arnie replied tersely.

Arnie then revealed that the man he gunned down was not just another street character but a relative of sorts, the uncle of his sons.

"You killed their uncle and forgot to tell us about it?" asked the psychologist. "What were you hiding? You didn't want to deal with that, did you?"

Hall maintained his facade, but as the hours wore on, a hint of remorse flickered. He admitted to feeling "bad" and "shocked" about his many crimes: "I wanted power and control. It was all dumb." Hall broke into tears when another 17-year-old killer forced him to acknowledge that his mother was a "dope fiend" who repeatedly told her son he was a "mistake."

"Your mom was shooting up just like your victims," shouted therapist Lydia Barnard. "Were you taking it out on all of them because of her?"

But Hall's sobbing didn't faze the group. They didn't think he had gone deep enough. "You're not mentally retarded!" snapped Alvarez-Sanders. "You're holding back. You're using a bunch of words to cover up what's inside. Tell us what's made all of your rage."

The therapists wanted Hall to see his rampages as a release of the trauma and pain bubbling from a nightmarish childhood. Seeing this won't excuse his crimes, they told him, but it will set them in clearer context. "The killing is easy," explained Alvarez-Sanders. "But feeling the effect of what happened is much more difficult." Said assistant superintendent Stan DeGerolami: "Getting the boy to understand why he committed the act is essential to preventing him from ever doing it again."

Chairs were pushed back, and Hall was handed a blackboard eraser to simulate the pistol he used in the crack-house murder. Another youth, playing the role of murder victim, begged for his life, leading Hall on: "Please don't kill me; I'm family. Please!" Hall "fired a shot" by flinging the eraser against a wall. He repeated the act again and again. But each time his actions were strained and mechanical. "You're cutting off your feelings, just like when you shot him," shouted a therapist. "You don't look like you give a damn." Kneeling at the side of his dying victim, Arnie was passive. "Call an ambulance, talk to him, do something," another boy shouted. "This is your kids' goddam uncle, man. Is his life worth just $9?"

Arnie could not muster a reply, and afterward, slumped on a bench outside, he admitted that "I hid my feelings. But it was too painful." A fellow prisoner said, "You ain't feeling nothing. You looked like you didn't give a damn." Observed Alvarez-Sanders: "He blew it. He didn't see his victim as a person -- just an object." Said Barnard: "It allowed him to kill once, and it will again."

Other boys in the program, however, seem to have made the connection. Alan Bacon, 17, lived his own private hell -- cigarette burns and memories of a broken arm at the hands of a drunken father, being thrown out of his home when he was 12, living on the streets, dealing cocaine and robbing motorists. "I was taking it all out on these innocent people," he concluded. "I would call them bitch, whore and punk just like I was called. It made me feel powerful. Now I just wish that I could bring back the guy I shot. I never realized how many others I was hurting too."

Such awareness is what Giddings therapists strive for, but it is difficult to rend the veil killers cloak themselves in. During his session, Jerry Morris, 17, hunched over in tears but could not come clean about his crime -- the murder of a gay man. He and Arnie Hall have failed not only their inquisitors but also themselves. The shock-talk therapy comes at the end of the program, most of which has been spent in exercises designed to undo defenses and allow introspection. Arnie and Jerry won't get another crack at the psychodrama. Now they are scheduled to appear in court to hear their fate. Depending on their cases, they may end up with longer terms in prison or be recommitted to a youth facility -- or they may be paroled and returned to the streets.