"I come up here and listened to some dudes talk. They say: `This ain't no play thing--you getting older and sooner or later you gonna pay.' Before, I was just trying to impress people that I was some kind of big crook. I'd say, hey, I can't do anything without my boys. I gotta hustle. Now, I know that ain't nothing. I was just making my life shorter and shorter."--Norm, a 16-year-old participant in the Reach-Out Juvenile Counseling Program at Walpole.

The van has already stopped in Roxbury to pick up the kids. Now it's rolling through Dedham and into the suburb of Walpole, a placid, ordinary community except for the enormous white structure looming in the dusk: a state prison that shares the town's name--a name that signifies everything wrong with prisons in this part of the country.

Walpole--and the image it conjures--mean a lot to the kids in the van and others like them. Some have relatives out there, most know ex-cons, all are familiar with the often romanticized lore that comes out of such places. Few, however, actually visited the prison before some inmates got together in 1975 and formed, independent of the prison administration and outside groups, a counseling program designed to reach youthful offenders through those who knew about prison life--the prisoners themselves.

Reach-Out, as the program is called, is an attempt to do for juvenile crime what Alcoholics Anonymous does for heavy drinking. The inmates' advice lacks the moralistic admonitions of the parents, judges and probation officers ignored by the kids. It is, indeed, an implicit message of the consequences of crime, brought home by those who alone in society are capable of commanding the respect of others who may be headed in the same direction.

The van is owned by Phillips Brooks House and driven by Christopher Finn '80, who is helping ease the serious shortage of volunteers willing to transport kids to Walpole for the program. The kids hop out in the prison parking lot and run into the anteroom where other youths--both black and white--stand peering into the glass windows of the prison's central command, waiting for the uncooperative guards to find the list that will let them in tonight.

Anxiously, they sign entrance forms, empty what's in their pockets into lockers and check to make sure no one is wearing blue jeans. Blue jeans are prohibited; once inside, the only way to distinguish prisoners from visitors is that inmates alone are allowed to wear jeans. Again, the warning: bring in nothing on your person. Only a few weeks before, someone entering the prison to tutor inmates--a Harvard student, in fact--accidentally left a joint in his coat. The authorities banned him from ever re-visiting Walpole.

The kids move through the countless metal doors. Past the place where visitors have the insides of their shoes checked for contraband, past the detectors, the armed guard in the tower, the massive barbed-wire topped wall. To the right is the maximum end, where brutal conditions recently precipitated yet another hunger strike by inmates. Reach-Out participants head to the left, to what, in a maximum security prison, is euphemistically known as the "minimum" end because prisoners are not locked in their cells all day and prevented from taking part in programs. (Euphemism has taken hold in the prison bureaucracy--inmates are officially called "residents," the warden a "superintendent,")

The kids are in the counseling area now, a series of small rooms filled with wooden desks and chairs. They are greeted warmly by the inmate counselors who offer coffee and cigarettes. (Inmates must buy their own coffee and cigarettes but usually insist on sharing their meager supplies.) Small groups form, or, if the youth has visited before, he may move off into a cubicle with an inmate who has befriended him--often because they are from the same neighborhood--and in the course of a few weekly visits a confidence often develops between them. The inmate then becomes the youth's official counselor and files monthly reports to probation officers. There are, of course, some kids unable to establish a friendship with any inmate, but by and large even a casual observer is struck by the uncanny rapport at work in the counseling area.

That rapport stems from no pat formula. The inmates, with help from Cathy Lowe, a clinical supervisor on the prison staff, learn to use what Lowe calls their "natural counseling talent" in an approach more flexible than traditional counseling.

"Sometimes we have to give them a jolt," says Dennis DeJoinville, who recently left his position of vice chairman of the program when he was transferred to another prison. "One of them will say 'how much time you doing?' I'll ask, 'how old are you?' The kid will say he's 14. I'll say 'I been here since you were nine.' That has an impact." So do the occasional tours each youth takes through the filthy cell blocks.

Appeals to common sense are also frequent, but they come across in a way the kids can understand. Jim Blaikie, DeJoinville's successor, says he tells those with long records that they remind him of the carpenter who constantly cuts off his finger. Both, he contends, are in the wrong business. "When a guy in here tells them it's a dead end, that's got to have an effect," says Blaikie, who served as treasurer of the Massachusetts McGovern campaign before his conviction and now spends a good deal of his time--when he doesn't have to make license plates--trying to secure grants for the program.

So far he's been unsuccessful. Because the program is run entirely within the prison, spreading word of its existence proves difficult. Numerous neighborhood organizations, a few detention centers and one juvenile court judge from Attleboro refer kids to Walpole, but the overall public response is not particularly enthusiastic--either here or in other parts of the country where similar programs are underway. Parents generally don't think too highly of their kids going to prison, even if just for a few hours, and the criminal justice system has yet to accept the idea that prisoners can serve as constructive role models for youthful offenders. The prison bureaucracy in Massachusetts tolerates the program at Walpole but isn't particularly eager to spread the idea to other institutions. Neither is the Department of Youth Services.

Reach-Out, keenly aware of the image problem attached to any activity of its kind, takes pains to strees the trustworthiness of the counselors, all 30 of whom have been through a screening process and 16-week training period. Officers of the program, who have a lot at stake in making sure no counselors abuse their position (parole boards look favorably on participation in the program), occasionally listen in on their fellow inmates' conversations with kids. Reach-Out Chairman Leonard Lacy claims that of the 40 or 50 counselors let out of prison in the past few years, only two have returned--in view of Walpole's recidivism rate of better than 75 per cent.

The crimes the prisoners did commit--the "war stories," as they're called--are supposed to be played down when they talk to the kids. There are, however, few conversations that don't contain personal details. "I'm just trying to understand them for what they are--namely grown men trapped in boys' bodies," Jerry Funderberg says. "They get away with it 99 per cent of the time and think they're slick. I was the same and I can tell them about me," he adds, and proceeds to do so--complete with descriptions of armed robberies and an imaginary slash down the chest of a visitor to represent the attempted murder that explains what brought him to Walpole.

Why the kids are at Walpole--and continue to come back week after week--needs explaining too. Norm, a 16-year-old black from a Roxbury housing project, is willing to do it. He leans back in the swivel chair, crossing his high-top sneakers on the prison guard's desk. The guard--Kevin Glynn--doesn't care. A rare exception among the guards, he's as much a part of Reach-Out as the inmates and kids.