"I used to have trouble in school," Norm says. "I'd hook classes, run around, smoke herb and all that. I didn't known how to approach people with, you know, a big background. Every time I talked to them I came out with a loud-speaking voice." Now Norm says, "I know how to deal with it because people who know--they talk to me."
"At first, when someone said I should come up here, I said: 'Going up to Walpole Prison? You think I'm crazy?' The older dudes I know--if they're not out there dead (in the streets) they're ending up out here. Eight of ten end up here. 'What do I want to go up there before I have to for?' I said."
"I got busted about three weeks before I first visited here--a '75 Continental. Every day was the same, if I ain't in a '71 Ford, I'm in a '76 Cadillac."
Norm has been going out to Walpole every week for over a year now. In October, after being kept back in school for three years, he moved into the 10th grade. His record has been clean for a number of months.
Such stories notwithstanding, Reach-Out has no conclusive statistics to show whether it prevents juvenile crime. The program at present lacks the resources to keep tabs on all those who receive counseling and most who do participate hardly end their waywardness immediately. Still, the relationship with an inmate can have an enormous influence on a juvenile. As one youth put it to his counselor in a recent letter:
You see all the things that were building up inside of me finally let go and I flipped out. I broke into my father's house and stole $400 cash and about $50-100 worth of liquor and I tore the house up....
I really do miss talking with you. You really helped me out a real lot but you do understand what I did to my father. I wanted to do it so don't think anyone fucked me up....
I'm going to make it, Arthur.... You make me think about a lot of things and you have taught me an awful lot and I hope when you're back out on the streets we can be good friends. You one smart motherfucker and some day I'm going to be just as smart. Just you wait and see. I read your letter over and over and you really make me believe in you and I just wish you never made it to where you are now....
Take care of yourself and stay in touch. Your friend always, Billy
Many of the youths come from neighborhoods with racial tensions, which the program helps to ease. "I used to say 'white boy this, white boy that'--but that's the past." Norm says, after he and an inmate break up a fight between two kids before any punches are thrown. Mark, a white 15-year-old from Dorchester, is blunt in his attitude: "I don't like colored people," he declares, munching a Big Mac after the visit had ended. He admits, though, that "some of them out there are really nice." They were, he conceded, the first blacks he ever really talked to.
"We're to a point where we're too old to be playing with crayons," says Dave Spears, a black inmate enormously popular with the kids. He has been talking and listening to a youth who has come in from the Worcester Detention Center, a lock-up for juveniles who have committed violent crimes.
Spears will soon be transferred to a lower security prison. It won't have a Reach-Out program. He describes what the program means to him personally, waxing almost rhapsodically about his "metamorphosis from the beast to the butterfly," his new attitude.
"One day I come out here and found myself dealing with human lives--I realized the wealth I get from dealing with these kids." That, he says, is "when the transition took place."