Armed Robbery:

Two-to-Five

By Gene Mounteer

Jim had been coming to my English class from his cell in the county jail for some time when he came in to talk to me about his life and future. He was serving a two-to-five-year sentence for armed robbery and had served two of the five years when he first came into my classroom. A handsome and personable young man of twenty-three years and an exceptionally fine student, he had been married and divorced, a drug addict, and an ex-con since the age of eighteen, when he was first arrested for possession of marijuana.

As an instructor at one of the local community colleges, I often find myself involved not only in students’ problems in composition, but in their personal lives as well. Jim expected to be paroled by the end of the year, and he was apprehensive about picking up the pieces of his life again.

The importance of his story for us is not in what he said or did, but in pointing up the inefficacies of his parents and teachers as they unwittingly contributed to his failure as a young man; the long years of help he needed to change his attitudes and redirect his life; and, perhaps more importantly, the responsibility of parents, teachers, and leaders of youth in any capacity.

One of the things we need to remember about Jim is that he did not come from the ghetto or from poverty, nor from a broken home or from inept or frustrated and bitter parents. Nor was he an only child; he has other brothers and sisters who are maturing without any of the problems that Jim encountered. Like most of us, he came from the middle class, from parents who loved him, cared for him, respected him, communicated with him—yes, even punished him when necessary. He had had a good relationship with his father: hunting, fishing, camping—all the things boys are supposed to do with fathers; even private conversations with his father were more routine than not until Jim was seventeen. Then their lives and interests began to diverge, and communication, increasingly difficult at first, finally became impossible.

It was during Jim’s junior year in high school that he and his parents lost contact. Typical of many teenager-parent relationships, they simply stopped talking to each other. This didn’t happen all at once, nor was it a conscious desire on the part of either. It was a gradual thing brought on by numerous circumstances. Jim had gotten a job in a filling station the summer before, and he had to work from the time school was out until ten in the evening several nights a week. The money he earned had allowed him to purchase a car of his own, providing him a degree of independence he had never known before. Free time heretofore spent primarily at home with the family was now spent with friends or at work.

Jim’s parents saw no reason for concern about this—after all, he had never before given them any real cause for concern. He continued to do his schoolwork, and besides, he was almost grown up and needed more freedom and independence. Consequently, he was allowed to come and go as he pleased.

Talk, for lack of any real communication, degenerated into casual and routine conversation over the breakfast table and sometimes over the dinner table. Along with perfunctory hellos and good-byes, there were the usual questions: “How’s school going?” or “How’s the job coming?” They asked him superficial questions and he gave them superficial answers. They asked him what he was doing and he told them what they wanted to hear. But no real conversation took place that might have given some sign of the storm clouds gathering.

In short, Jim’s parents, without being consciously aware of it, had stopped being a positive influence in his life. More and more he went his way and his family went theirs. He felt a growing sense of independence and decided he was entirely capable of making his own decisions. He saw no need to take his parents into his confidence. Unfortunately, they too felt that Jim was responsible and adult enough to take care of himself, so they let him. The irony, of course, is that they were all wrong.

As his junior year progressed, Jim began to lose interest in his studies, in his job, even in his friends. He found school boring, repetitious, and, except for the social contacts, dull and irrelevant. American history? How many times had that subject been covered before? And English? P.E.? (Had he been a member of the Church, what might he have thought about Sunday School, MIA, sacrament meeting?) Besides, what did any of it matter anyway, when he would probably die on some battlefield somewhere, or, if not there, suffocate in the world’s pollution.

It was not that Jim was concerned about the state of the world—he wasn’t. He simply could not read or interpret the feelings or changes taking place within himself or the questioning of values that is a normal process of maturation, and there was no one with insight or foresight enough to recognize what he could not recognize himself. All he knew was that school seemed irrelevant and boring, his job routine and time consuming, his old friends square and not “with it.”

His parents, had they been more observant, more critical of Jim’s growing aloofness, more knowledgeable about the frustrations of maturation, might not have mistaken physical maturity for emotional maturity. They might have worked harder to maintain those fragile lines of communication that are so easily severed during the teen years and so difficult to repair.

Similarly, Jim’s teachers, had they been less subject-matter oriented and more student oriented, might also have provided the necessary understanding and insight to prevent the tragic events that were soon to occur. Teachers are not substitutes for parents, it is true, but they share a common responsibility; and whether they teach in the public school or in Sunday School or MIA, they must never forget that they are there to affect lives, not just to present material.

Jim was now nearing the beginning of the fourth quarter, and as his interests changed, so did his friends. He soon fell in with a group who felt more like he did, especially about school. These new friends skipped classes, made fun of the teachers, only rarely did homework assignments, and, more significantly, were users of marijuana and LSD, and some, it was rumored, even used heroin.

His friends’ disrespect for authority, freedom from responsibility, and experimentation with the forbidden seemed exciting and challenging in a way Jim had never experienced before. Unlike his own, their lives were not circumscribed by rules and regulations, by deadlines and time schedules, by long hours at little pay, by the demands and desires of others. Freedom was what he wanted, and freedom is what his new friends offered.

Even money was easy to come by, through petty thievery and drug pushing. Jim fell easily into line. It was only a matter of time until he too was not only using but pushing marijuana and amphetamines. Following the usual pattern, he graduated to LSD, and before his nineteenth birthday he was mainlining heroin.

Jim’s grades dropped drastically. He stayed in school only because his parents begged, pleaded, and cajoled him into doing so. Ultimately he did graduate, but at the bottom of his class. And graduation simply meant more free time to get into more trouble; he had long since given up his job in favor of easier money. Finally he was arrested for possession of marijuana, the first in a long series of confrontations with the law, ending on the night he tried to hold up a liquor store to support a $250-a-day heroin habit. By his own admission, in the preceding year and a half he had committed every criminal act short of murder to raise money for drugs. Somehow his parents had failed him, his teachers had failed him, and he had failed himself.

Fortunately, however, it was not too late for Jim. Those who were assigned to work with him at the county jail recognized his latent worth and helped him through his long, lonely battle back to humanity. He struggled through the hellish sufferings of withdrawal, through endless psychiatric sessions—ultimately accepting his guilt and himself—and through the successive stages of social criticism, self-justification, self-incrimination, and finally acceptance and reconciliation.

Because of this attitude, through the county rehabilitation program he was allowed to begin classes at the community college. Four hours a day he dressed in street clothes, attended classes, associated with students and teachers as any other student would, then returned to his cell for the remainder of the day and night.

During his second semester at college he registered for my freshman composition class. I talked with him on several occasions during the year, and each time I was more deeply impressed as the details of his story came to light. Just staying off drugs was a trial for him. They presented such an easy escape from the boredom and routine of prison life and the difficulties of school. And they were so plentiful. Marijuana, amphetamines, heroin, they were all readily available at the jail—from a friend on the outside, a cellmate, even a guard or two, if the price was right.

But the greater trial to Jim was the knowledge that regardless of his conduct in jail, and regardless of how well he did in school, he would never be able to overcome his past. He had been convicted of a felony, and that conviction would follow him all the days of his life. Whenever he applied for a job, he would have to indicate his felonious conviction, and then his former drug addiction would come to light as well. He realized, consequently, that any job requiring security clearance was closed to him, as well as any job requiring bonding. He could not work for the government at any level, for any public school system—and teaching would have been his first choice—for most if not all major businesses, or for any company where he was required to handle cash or property.

This was the major trial of Jim’s life at this time, and he suffered many sleepless nights and fits of depression as a result. Fortunately, by now he had been reconciled with his parents and they had discussed the problem at great length. Whatever the outcome or the difficulties that might lie ahead, they were now solidly behind him. There was no communication problem anymore.

I haven’t heard from Jim since he left my class with an A in freshman composition. But his whole story hasn’t been written yet. He was awaiting parole, which his parole officer assured him would be forthcoming this year if he did well in school. He had one more year of junior college work, and then he was going to try for entrance to a university and work toward a degree in law. What will become of him is anybody’s guess. Certainly he is just beginning. But he seems to me to have gained sufficient strength and to have enough strong people behind him to make it this time.

What does this tell us about ourselves as parents, teachers, church workers, and leaders of youth? There are a great many Jims in the Church and out—some with greater need, most with less—who need the patient and prayerful guidance of those charged with their care. We cannot afford to fail them. There are too many young people who find their Sunday School classes, their MIA classes, their schools, and their homes barren and irrelevant.

All who have responsibility for youth must recognize these problems and find the wherewithal to combat them. If we are teachers, we must make our lessons interesting, challenging, and relevant. We must concern ourselves with affecting lives and behavior, not presenting subject matter; with individuals, not with groups; with sons and daughters of God, not with nameless and faceless forms. If we are leaders of youth, we must gain their confidence and their respect and keep the lines of communication open. And if we are parents, we must take time for our youth and teach them constantly, through family home evenings and private, personal conversations, the true purposes and meaning of life and freedom. We must not expect the schools and the Church to do this for us.

Most assuredly, we must also recognize that although our children may seem to be grown-up at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, or twenty, and no longer need us, in reality the need is perhaps greater than at any previous time in their lives, and this at an age when they are less willing to accept or take direction because they too feel they are grown-up. We must never assume that our children are so adult they don’t need us or that our job as parents is ever entirely finished. Our responsibility is to affect their lives in a positive, eternal way.

We will not always save them from heartache and sorrow and sin, but we must do all in our power to try. Some, like Jim, have inside themselves the capacity to overcome and build again, perhaps on a stronger foundation than before. Like Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, these may become more noble because of their adversity. But many human beings, lost as Jim was lost, do not make a comeback; and, like Arthur Dimmesdale, they spend their health and their strength and their lives weighted down by the consequences of sin and guilt.

There will be fewer Jims and Hesters and Arthurs if each of us who have responsibility for youth commit ourselves totally, not only to their physical and material well-being, but to their spiritual growth and development as well.

• Brother Mounteer, instructor in English at West Valley College, Campbell, California, also serves as a counselor in the bishopric of the San Jose Ninth Ward.