A Rough Profile of Delinquents
For the last few months I have been reading a lot of juvenile Court reports. From all of those case histories I put together a very unscientific profile of the typical juvenile repeat offender, at least those who reside in a medium-sized town in California.
Don’t Tell I Told
When the probation officer returned from lunch, Mrs. R. had left another voice mail message on his telephone. She was always double-dealing regarding her daughter, who was on probation for theft. He had no desire to hear the latest scheme, but he dialed the number anyway.
The One Thing I’ve Learned
I was once asked to describe, in a nutshell, what I had learned from being a probation officer. I couldn’t, at the time, give a concise answer, but now I know what I would say. After close to forty years of working with offenders, trying to assist, coerce, reason and punish them into rehabilitation, I am convinced of one thing. People have free will. Barring a mental or physical inability, they will do any number of things for any number of reasons, but they will, for the most part, do what they want.
The Push-Pull of Teaching Faith
A distraught mother called me one day to ask for advice regarding her teenage daughter. She said the girl was rebelling, mostly over the church they attended, and added, “We can’t get her to come around to our way of thinking, and last week she even ran away for two days.” In trying to explain the family dynamics, she said, “ She thinks we’re awful, that what we believe is totally ridiculous, and we don’t know what to do.”
About Me
Latest Topics
Several years ago a man came to the...
According to a "Mail Online" article of...
We were sipping coffee in Starbuck’s when...
I think our fixation on "self esteem" has...
As stewardesses on an international airline,...
