Teens follow different paths to crime> Seeking solutions to a growing Maine problem

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Editor’s Note: Maine’s juvenile violent crime rate has been increasing slowly but steadily for most of the past decade. This is the second of a three-part series exploring the scope of the problem, its causes and some solutions.

Jason Mann has no illusions about himself.

“I’m the kid people’s mothers warn them about,” the 18-year-old said, grinning.

Serving 2 1/2 years for robbery at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, Mann is no stranger to the inside of a prison. He has spent time in the Maine Youth Center in South Portland and at the Oxford County Jail off and on since he was 15 for aggravated assault, criminal mischief, armed robbery, burglary, theft, home invasion and shoplifting.

Mann can tell you why he turned to crime and violence. The reason is simple. “I just like crime,” he said. “I was hooked after my first burglary. I think it’s fun — hitting, beating, robbing — like a life-sized video game.”

Although his words seem designed to shock, Mann speaks unself-consciously, with no hint of artifice about why he is so violent. Leggy as a colt, slim and good-looking with a thick crop of wavy brown hair, he seems content to sit in the tiny visiting room at the prison and talk about what led him to this point.

He scoffs at the popular notion that his parents were somehow responsible for his behavior.

“I grew up like the Partridge family,” said Mann, who was 15 when he moved out of his home in central Maine and found an apartment in Bangor. “I had a good home life, better than the average kid. My parents were good, churchgoing people. I was a spoiled little bastard. My stepfather worked 60 hours a week so I could have what I wanted.”

But his family was naive.

“My parents should have watched more TV. Then they wouldn’t have been so shocked. They would have realized [crime and violence] happens,” he said. “They haven’t caught up with the times. They’re living in their own world. My stepdad thinks, `My son is an educated, smart kid — how can he go into someone’s house and tie them up?’ And my mom acts like being in here is so heinous.”

Mann recalled the crime last spring that sent him to Windham. Less than two weeks earlier, he had been released from Oxford County Jail, where he had served 20 days for criminal mischief and probation violations. When he got out, he was on top of the world.

“I had the most positive outlook ever, I was feeling lucky,” he recalled. “I was looking for a job, I was gung-ho. I had a personal goal with my girlfriend to make me into a better person.”

But when one of his friends suggested robbing a boy in Bangor, Mann said, “Cool, that kid’s always got money.

“It was in broad daylight in the middle of Broadway,” he said. “We beat him down, dragged him, broke his nose. I didn’t even need the money — at the time I had $200 in my pocket.”

Hurting goes with the territory, according to Mann, who said he once shot a drug dealer in Massachusetts and stabbed someone in Lewiston. “Tying up people, hurting them — it’s all part of the game.”

Still, certain niceties prevail.

“I’m totally against hitting females,” he said. “Growing up we had rules. We wouldn’t steal from friends or from little kids or from women. It’s like, picture robbing your mother.”

With prompting from a reporter, he thinks back to an incident he believes caused him to go wrong. He’s still angry over being rejected for the middle school basketball team.

“That was the turning point right there,” he said. “I should have made it. I was better than everyone else. But the coach said I was too much of a risk, that my image was too bad.

“That’s real nice,” he said bitterly, turning away for a moment. “It kind of pissed me off. He should be judging me on my playing skills, not as a person. Sure, I was a rotten bastard then, but I should have been given the chance.

“Chances are I would have turned out for the better,” he continued. “I’d have done everything to be on the team, I’d have changed everything right there. I’d have kept my grades up, stopped the crime. You never know.”

Toughness and abuse

Experts on youth crime said in interviews that while graphic movies and television shows, drugs and alcohol and the accessibility of guns may contribute to youth violence, they are not the source of the problem. The educators, social workers, sociologists and psychologists said children turn to violence because:

They believe that masculinity is synonymous with toughness.

They consider their wants and needs more important than others’.

They haven’t been taught how to solve their problems peaceably.

They are angry because they have been neglected or abused by their parents.

Youthful offenders often don’t realize how they’re affecting others. They aren’t familiar with the concepts of empathy and caring, said Pat Born of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden.

“They haven’t been taught to understand the other person’s point of view,” she said. “If you don’t care, you’re not going to worry about stealing money, or flashing a gun. But if you can see what it means to them, if you can put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you’ll stop and think.”

Dr. Robert Peddicord, a child psychologist in Bangor, often sees kids who have the attitude that “if you offend my rights, you deserve whatever I do to you.”

“I’ve had young kids saying, `If I hit another kid, that’s OK, but if they hit me, it’s massive disrespect and I’ve got to respond,”‘ he said.

What goes wrong?

Last summer, Cindy and Chuck Smith of Bangor found themselves wondering aloud how things went wrong. In a few days their 18-year-old son, Mike, was to begin an 18-month sentence for robbery at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.

Addicted to drugs since he was 16, Smith had been hanging out with a tough crowd and involved in a series of assaults, thefts and burglaries.

When he was 17, his mother did “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” and begged a judge to send him to the Maine Youth Center in Portland because he was “out of control.”

“I hated myself later,” she recalled. “I felt so bad. For days I wondered if I did the right thing. That night I was finally able to put my head down and sleep. I knew at least that he was safe.”

Three months after he was released, Smith was charged with the crime that led to his sentence in Windham.

During an interview, Smith’s father sat silently smoking in the kitchen, his shoulders hunched, while his wife sat with her hand on their son’s knee, looking imploringly up at him while she talked.

“Basically, Mike’s a good kid,” she said. “Everyone in the family has always been there for him — we’ve done everything. We only want what’s best for him. Mike knows he can talk to me about anything.”

A tall, solidly built youth with a face reminiscent of little-boyhood, Smith played with the cord on his baggy black pants while his parents’ words swirled around him.

They talked about the violent rap music he listened to and the attention deficit disorder with which he had been diagnosed. They said he was a “follower” who allowed his friends to guide his behavior, and they worried about his propensity to “keep things inside” and his need to appear tough. They deplored his “poor communication skills” and his hot temper.

“I have a short fuse,” Smith admitted. “I always think fighting will settle things.”

Chuck Smith looked over at his son, entreating as he must have so often: “Mike, you’ve gotta think first, you’ve gotta let things go, there’s other ways to communicate. If I went and hit everyone I disliked …”

The father has tried to give his son direction, but it’s hard when he has had his own problems. “It’s tough to tell a kid, `Do as I say, don’t do as I do or as I’ve done,”‘ he admitted. “It’s a hard one to swallow.”

His frustration turned to bitterness.

“It’s a lack of respect and a bad attitude, that’s what it is,” said the father. “When he gets to be 40 or 50 and he’s been kicked around, he might have a reason to bitch. But now where is it coming from?”

Smith sat quietly, offering little insight into his behavior. Once, he pointed to some red circles on his arms, describing how he and his friends would hold burning cigarettes against themselves “to see who was the craziest. … You want the girls to think you’re the craziest.”

His mother proudly held out a letter the boy had written while at the Maine Youth Center.

“I am really going to change and I want a better life than I have had the last year,” Smith wrote. “There’s been so many times that I have wanted to talk to you about things but I always think I’m a wimp if I ask you for help.”

His mother sets great store by the letter, which she had laminated.

“I believe he really wants to change, and this letter reminds me of that fact,” she said. “It’s like he’s reaching out for help. But Chuck has turned the other way; he doesn’t think Mike will change.”

Mike Smith shrugs when he thinks about the future.

“I just don’t know, things are coming at me so fast,” he said. “Maybe is the best thing for me, maybe it’s a way to clear my head.”

That leaves Cindy Smith agonizing over the past.

“I blame myself, wondering, did I miss something,” she said.

Raised to be violent

Children who turn to violence may lack impulse control and likely haven’t been taught conflict resolution or how to interact appropriately with people, said Barry Rubin, a licensed clinical social worker in Bangor who works with adolescents who have exhibited anti-social behavior.

Boys are raised to be violent, according to Steve Barkan, a University of Maine sociology professor and criminologist, who said 85 to 90 percent of all violent crime is perpetrated by males.

“Parents, especially fathers, roughhouse and wrestle with boys much more than with girls,” said Barkan. “We hold and comfort little girls far more than we do our boys. Girls get dolls, they play house, they learn to cooperate and to nurture. Boys get action figures which encourage fighting. Our culture teaches that boys should be strong, tough, independent and assertive. But that can easily translate into violence and aggression.”

Boys have a narrow path to walk, agreed Bill Hager, who runs a child care center in Sanford.

“They have three choices,” he said. “They can be a bully, a victim or a loner. We teach our sons that to be masculine, they have to be tough and hard. How do you prove you’re tough and masculine? By being aggressive, by not caring, being sarcastic, detached. It breaks my heart to watch excited, bright 9-year-olds become cynical, hard-hearted 13-year-olds. We destroy any sensitivity, any caring or gentleness in young boys. Then we punish them for being that way.”

Angrier every day

Behind the window in the visiting room at the Penobscot County Jail, Craig Parker, 19, recalled ill-fated escapades with his friends.

“We never went looking for trouble — trouble found us,” said the Skowhegan man, who is serving time for assault, burglary and criminal trespassing.

Parker’s friends were everything to him.

“I felt good around them, they made me feel good,” said Parker, who was 11 or 12 when he first got into trouble “for stealing something stupid.”

“Then I just kept on getting into trouble,” he said. “I was always in the wrong crowd.”

Dark-haired and handsome, Parker proudly sported an onyx ring given to him by his mother who raised him and his younger brother after their father abandoned the family when Parker was 6 years old.

The young man insisted that his father’s absence affected him minimally.

“I’m not angry with him — I forgot about him years ago,” he said.

Still, he wondered if things would have been different if a father had been in his life.

“Maybe then I would have had sterner rules,” he said. “I took advantage of my mother — I feel bad about disrespecting her.”

Parker, who “would never in my life hit a woman,” has no compunction about hurting men, “if I was drunk or if they brought on a conflict by antagonizing me, taunting me, stealing my stuff, or messing with my people.”

“I feel like I have to protect my people,” Parker said.

Parker largely blames drugs and alcohol for his actions.

“When I look back, the only time I got into trouble was when I was drunk — I’d get violent and stupid,” said the young man. “All I did was blow school off, get into trouble, mess everything up. I embarrassed my mother — she taught me better.”

When he gets out of jail, Parker plans to join Alcoholics Anonymous and hang out with `the right people.”

“I’m learning from my mistakes,” he said, “but it’s a hard way to learn.”

Meanwhile, he gets “angrier every day.”

“All it does is piss you off being here,” he said.

Reservoirs of hate

“Kids want structure, consistency and predictability, and when they don’t get them, they get angry toward people who don’t love them enough to parent them,” said Charlie Lyons, president of the University of Maine at Fort Kent. He has been a consultant to the Biddeford and Westbrook school systems and has done preschool screenings and evaluations of children and families.

Children develop a “reservoir of hate” when they feel unloved and abandoned, said Lyons, using a term coined almost 50 years ago by Fritz Redl, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, who wrote about angry children. “Kids who feel powerless because their parents don’t treat them like people do things that make them feel powerful,” like rape, assault and arson, he said.

Harsh, coercive, inconsistent discipline can set children on the path toward violence, said Dr. Jonathan Siegel, a clinical psychologist in Bangor who evaluates child maltreatment cases referred by the courts and the Department of Human Services.

“Every day I see parents who attend to children only when their level of outcry or distress is unavoidable, only when the parents can’t ignore it,” he said. “These parents have taught their children that the only way people get their needs met is to create a fuss. The child learns early on to continue screaming and having the tantrums and angry outbursts that characterized him as an infant.

“As he gets older, if he never learns any more sophisticated, intimate way to deal with internal tension, he’ll continue to thrash, tantrum and yell to get his needs met,” Siegel said. “Only now he’s more physically able to direct the aggression.”

Robert Sherman, a professor at Bangor Theological Seminary, believes juvenile aggression has increased because of two things: the questioning of authority “in a radical, egocentric, individualistic way,” and the loss of the “unreflective” moral guidelines that family and community once mutually reinforced.

Once, “the strongest check on people’s behavior was their mama’s voice saying, `You just don’t do that,”‘ said Sherman. “Now, with the breakdown of the family, school and church, everybody’s left to their own devices, to sort of determine for themselves what their ethical norms are.”

Robert Cobb, dean of the College of Education at the University of Maine, said the idea that one can do what one wants to do when one wants to do it affects children in different ways.

“For some youngsters it goes no further than obnoxiousness and selfish behavior,” he said. “But for others it escalates into an intolerance of other students, those who appear different. That intolerance can lead to physical aggression and that can lead to use of weaponry.”

Feeling bad

The world confounds Jason Mann.

“I hear more about that f—–g bitch Monica Lewinsky than I do about the nuclear warheads aimed at us,” said Mann, as he waited to be taken back to his cell at the Maine Correctional Center at Windham.

Mann, who spends much of his time reading the Bible and books about communism, Adolf Hitler and Nostradamus, often finds himself overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness.

“I kind of want to change, but it seems like everything’s going to come to an end anyway — the whole world’s going to fall apart,” he said. “By the time I get a job and I’m doing good, someone will come in and tell me we’re being invaded, or my boss will tell me I’m fired.”

Still, he has plans.

He and his girlfriend might head to Florida where “more felons get hired.” And he’d like to look up his father, who left when he was 2.

“I’m going to find out where he lives and watch him — just for closure. I always wonder what he’s like, what he dresses like, what he looks like.”

Mann wants to be a father himself, vowing to keep his children from crime by “involving them in activities, steering them away” from trouble. His parents tried to do that, but “there were things they didn’t know about crime.”

“I realize what’s going on,” he said.

Mann knows the fallout he has left in his wake.

“I feel bad about my parents,” he said. “I know people whisper. I don’t like my mom going through that. I’m going to do something right so I’ll prove everybody wrong.”

Anyway, he said, “I’ve done pretty much all there is to do — shot people, knifed them, tied them up, robbed them. There’s nothing left — this s—‘s getting boring.”

Finally the guard materialized, and Mann walked slowly back to his cell, where memories of his past and dreams for his future collide.

Tomorrow: How can society stem the increase in youth violence?