‘Bad apples’ breaking the mold
I guess I knew I had crossed some sort of threshold in the aging process when I found myself relating more to Homer Simpson than Bart. When I started to find Bart’s rebellious “eat my shorts” attitude kind of annoying and sympathized with Homer’s frequent need to strangle him. While I haven’t started yelling at kids to get off my lawn yet (mostly because I don’t actually have a lawn), I do sometimes find myself perplexed by teens and kids today.
So when my friend, Steve Nawojczyk with the Arkansas Department of Youth Services, asked me to sit in on one of his sessions with inmates at the Garland County Juvenile Detention Center, I was a little skeptical. I mean, these weren’t just brats. They were criminals, right? Hooligans who hit professional status. Future Bonnie and Clydes. The bad apples.
But Steve is a hard man to refuse. This is a man who turned his disgust with the growing death toll in Little Rock during his time as Pulaski County coroner into a 20-year mission to stop the violence. Most especially, by focusing on young people in an attempt to nip the madness in the bud.
He is perhaps best known for being featured prominently in the 1994 HBO documentary, “Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock,” which focused on the huge gang problem in the state’s capital at the time. That was the same year Nawojczyk retired as coroner and began touring and lecturing about juvenile violence, later becoming program administrator for the DYS.
While talking to the kids at the GCJDC the day I joined him, he related how it was working the accidental shooting
death of an 8-year-old boy at the hands of his 12-year-old brother that was the last straw for him. “I quit after that. I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, noting he was haunted by the words of the children’s parent, “Why couldn’t it be me?”
I came in expecting the kids to be indifferent to his presentation, if not openly hostile. But in fact, the 14 kids gathered in the small classroom were more attentive and respectful than a lot of my friends’ children. A quick poll by Steve revealed they came from all over — Little Rock, Camden, Pine Bluff, even New Orleans as well as Hot Springs — but he didn’t ask any of them why they were there.
He did ask how many personally knew gang members, how many knew someone hurt or killed or who had lost family members to the violence on the streets and I was surprised at the hands that shot up — and stayed up as his questions continued. Then he asked, “How many of you remember the last time you made your mother cry?” and they all raised their hands. “Just remember that someone is happy because you exist,” he told them.
As Steve moved into his PowerPoint-type presentation with videos and photos and graphs, I worried he might lose their interest and probably mine. But the opposite seemed to happen. These kids, whom I had been so prepared to dismiss as damaged goods, (maybe because I normally only see the police report side of things), were engaged in what he was saying. The one time he had to interrupt a private discussion between two of them (as teachers often do) I happened to overhear they were arguing about an earlier quote from Martin Luther King.
During a video of a speech Robert Kennedy Jr. made shortly before his death, you could have heard a pin drop. When he played a music video of Sam Cooke singing “A Change is Gonna Come,” they knew the words — and sang them. And when Steve asked them, “Who’s going to change it?” they answered, “We are!” and I found myself believing them.
He told them to, “Be a peacemaker. That’s the gang you should be in” and that “We’re not each other’s enemies. We’re all U.S. citizens, black or white, Christian or Muslim. Our enemies win if we destroy ourselves from within.”
If I heard this from a politician at a campaign rally I would have dismissed it as so much rhetoric. But coming from Steve, who has been on the front lines in the war raging within our borders, and directed at these kids, whose futures, good or bad, still lay ahead, their choice to make, it seemed like an epiphany.
The boy sitting closest to me who looked to be about 8 years old (I found out later he was 11 and in there for stealing a car) had raised his hand several times during the earlier questioning. I tried to imagine what it was like in his world. What led someone who looked like he should still be playing with Hot Wheels cars to make off with a real one? How did he even see over the steering wheel? I talked to him briefly and he was very soft-spoken and polite. He had finished reading a book Lt. Belinda Cosgrove, who heads the GCJDC, had given him and was pretty proud about it. Everyone there, kids and adults alike, called him “Little Man,” and he seemed to like it. The name suited him, I thought. Maybe that’s what he was trying to be when he took the car. Or maybe he just needed to be somewhere else.
Steve told them that the human brain isn’t fully formed until about the age of 22 and that’s why the military “likes to get you young so they can mold you.”
That’s why Steve is so intent on reaching them now. Getting to them before the world does. It already has to a degree, but it isn’t too late. That’s his message. And while I am well past the age of 22, I realized it wasn’t too late to change my mind, too.