14 is just too young. I can't accept throwing away the key on children

[nolabear]

15. I think he needs help, but I don't think he should not be turned loose. My story:

I may be unique around here in that I once volunteered in the girls' mental health unit of a children's prison. The youngest kid there was about ten, but they could be there up until 18. I used to chuckle when the girls, and some of the most ill ones, would be very concerned that I wear my panic button (It was on a chain and if I pushed the button it transmitted to a siren that would blow the socks off the place, and everyone had to run to their rooms for lockdown). Each knew how dangerous the others were.

Those girls were just girls, and needed everything from meds to counseling - mostly DBT therapy because they couldn't cope with talk therapy - to constant supervision to keep them from harming themselves or someone else. They were funny, charming, talented (one of the best rappers I've ever heard was in there, a 16 year old who'd attacked her mother with a butcher knife and set the house on fire), and some, not all, were very, very dangerous. They were, in spite of being children, broken very badly.

I taught them to write poetry, one of the few somewhat contained ways they could approach feelings. Even then it was dicey, because as I said they couldn't take much. The staff always had to see what they'd written so they couldn't use it to jack up either themselves or anyone else. Some was impossibly bad, but some was outstanding. One of the most memorable moments in the time I was there was when, looking for a way to help them express their pervasive sense of being misunderstood, I played Pete Townsend's "Behind Blue Eyes." They made me play it again and again, and the evening ended in the most tragic singalong I've ever heard, all these deeply disturbed teenaged girls sobbing and singing "But my dreams, they aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be..."

But many if not most were repeat offenders. Since girls don't generally act out in the same ways boys do there weren't a lot of sex offenders or outright killers, but there were a couple of the former, and as to the latter it wasn't for lack of trying. Some you could kind of understand (mom's abusive boyfriend, another girl perceived as a threat or relationship disruptor) but some? Some will never get enough better to be trustworthy.

Sadly, it happens. I wish it was otherwise. I adored some of those girls, and what they were going through no human being should ever have to bear.

But I always wore the panic button.