The melodramatic political commentator Chris Matthews recently posed a question to his viewers that has been on many a Chicagoan’s mind lately: “Why are so many American teenagers out of control?”
He was referring, of course, to the Glenbrook North hazing incident and the spring break-in parties in Hinsdale and Wheaton, which landed the behavior of Chicago-area teens on front pages around the nation and sparked a wave of handwringing about the well-being and future of the American teenager.
That handwringing may or may not be justified, and our teens may or may not be out of control. But amid the occasionally excessive response to the behavior of suburban teens, it has been easy to lose sight of two simple and timeless facts: (1) Teenagers do dumb things, and (2) They usually grow up and get over it.
Take these stories that didn’t make the headlines: A 17-year-old Wyoming youth named Alan Simpson stole .22-caliber rifle shells from a local hardware store and got arrested for driving around and firing off shots from a car.
Terence Hallinan, a 17-year-old from Marin County, Calif., was expelled from high school and made a ward of the Marin County juvenile court system for assaulting a fellow student.
An 11-year-old South Side resident named Terry K. Ray stabbed a student and cut a teacher with scissors.
Simpson spent 18 years as a U.S. senator from Wyoming. Hallinan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, attended the London School of Economics, devoted much of his life to the civil rights movement and is now San Francisco’s district attorney.
And Ray graduated from the Northwestern University School of Law, became an attorney for the Justice Department and runs his private law practice near Dallas.
Their stories are collected in “Second Chances,” a book published jointly by the Justice Policy Institute of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and the Northwestern University School of Law to celebrate the centennial of America’s juvenile justice system, which began in Chicago–the first juvenile court opened on the West Side in July 1899.
Though it was published four years ago, the stories in “Second Chances”–profiles of 25 young men and women who behaved atrociously as teens and wound up leading seemingly healthy and productive lives–serve as a welcome tonic at a time when many argue that the recent suburban teen rampages spell disaster for a generation.
Misplaced comments
“My sense is that those kinds of generalized statements about the state of our youth are misplaced,” said Steve Drizin, the supervising attorney at Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center and one of the authors of “Second Chances.”
“These things happen, and they don’t necessarily reflect any change in the way our youths behave today. And people need to search their own memories of their own youth” before they make severe judgments.
And many of those who choose to follow Drizin’s admonition would find something to be embarrassed about. Studies show practically every American male growing up in the last half-century has broken at least one significant law, and recent research indicates a similar percentage for adolescent girls is rising.
What happened in the suburbs, Drizin said, is one of the oldest stories there is to tell: Teenagers get together in a crowd, get drunk and do really stupid things.
“Alcohol and peer pressure have influenced teen behavior since time immemorial,” said Drizin, who frequently works on behalf of reformed adults who seek to get their criminal records expunged. “These are constants. Left to their own devices, teens can make terrible decisions.”
Gerald Zachar, a social worker for the Village of Deerfield who works with children and families, agreed.
“This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time,” he said. “Anyone who works with youth has not been surprised at this sort of thing. Neither has the police.”
Hollywood’s view
Neither, for that matter, should anyone who has ever seen a movie aimed at teen audiences. That propensity to make terrible decisions is exploited, and often glorified, to comic effect in dozens of movies, many of which have become classics.
Drizin ticked them off: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Clueless,” “The Breakfast Club” (which, like “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink,” was directed by Glenbrook North graduate John Hughes).
“If you think about the movie `Risky Business’–what’s that?” he said. “It’s what happened in Wheaton.”
(Except for one crucial plot point, common to most teen party flicks–Cruise’s character cleaned up the mess just seconds before his parents returned home. If the Wheaton and Hinsdale kids had emulated those movies more closely, they’d only be on the hook for, say, a fractured glass egg, as opposed to felony charges.)
Which isn’t to say that the Glenbrook girls or the spring break partiers are model citizens, or even remotely representative of their peers. It’s just that their behavior isn’t particularly surprising. Granted, it’s not every day that people throw pig entrails and feces at one another, but take away the ritual and the gross-out factor, and the Glenbrook North incident is little more than a bunch of teenagers in a fight. That happens every day, and it’s a local story at best.
What made the Glenbrook incident an international story, according to Drizin, is that it came conveniently equipped with gripping home video to repeatedly broadcast.
Roll that tape
“Had there not been a video, this would have been a footnote,” he said. And the Wheaton and Hinsdale parties got attention because the revelations about the break-ins happened to follow on the heels of the Glenbrook incident.
In all likelihood, the “out of control” teens in the suburbs will, like all teens, realize the error of their ways and grow out of their lawlessness and stupidity.
There is natural “growing out of it” that can be heightened if the offenders–from an affluent suburb or low-income housing project–grapple with the consequences of disrupting the lives of community members.
For psychologist and researcher June Tangney, the focus is on how that attention plays out for the offenders. She has interviewed thousands of people about what she calls “shame events” and “guilt events” related to breaking the law or otherwise harming others, whether they were formally punished or not.
“It does make a difference how people process those events,” said Tangney, a professor of psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “It will most likely be a positive outcome if people use guilt to make things right, deal with the consequences, make repairs or make changes.”
On the other hand, shaming adolescents–say, by making their screw-ups the stuff of late-night monologue jokes–can lead to continued troubling behavior.
“Shame leads people to be defensive or escapist,” Tangney said. “For instance, if you shame an alcoholic, the person will probably drink more.”
But Simpson, the former senator whose adolescent proclivity for shooting mailboxes from moving cars–“I was a crack shot,” he told the authors of “Second Chances”–landed him in federal court, disagrees with that approach.
“Run the kids’ names in the paper,” Simpson said of the suburban troublemakers in an interview. “Then people come up to those kids to say what they did was kind of stupid. The kid might not react when you say it, but they will go home and later think, `Maybe I’m not so cool after all.'”
Branded for life
Simpson speaks from experience. His run-in with the law made a splash in the small community of Cody, Wyo., and he still hasn’t lived down the notoriety.
“I’m 71 years old,” he said. “People still introduce me as the Mailbox Kid.”
Judging by the stories in “Second Chances,” the mechanism for achieving that positive result–for metamorphosing from a raging, hormone-addled juvenile delinquent to a law-abiding adult–is as simple and as complicated as just plain growing up.
“It’s not that I woke up and decided to be a good boy, or that I wasn’t going to hit the next person who called me a name,” said Terry K. Ray, the Dallas defense attorney who was repeatedly institutionalized for violent behavior growing up on Chicago’s South Side. “I don’t think people change at the core, really.”
Ray differs in many ways from the suburban troublemakers–he was raised in an impoverished and violent home, and much of his youthful lawlessness was committed in self-defense against urban gangs that preyed on him. But he doesn’t see his turnaround from a 13-month stay at the St. Charles Youth Center correctional facility in the mid-1960s to working for the Department of Justice as particularly heroic.
“I think I became a much more mature version of what I already was,” he said.
When he looks at the suburban teens, Ray sees his troubled childhood as an asset. Though it took him a long time, his ordeal led to a concrete sense of his own self-worth, a luxury he said the Glenbrook kids might never have, despite the trappings of their lives.
Citing the $60,000 price tag on goods stolen from the Wheaton break-in party, he said, “I don’t have $60,000 worth of stuff in my house today. I see these kids driving cars that you and I can’t afford. They start to define themselves by the things around them.”
A cocoon of privilege
That trap–being seduced into self-regard by the privilege and protection that surround you–is a dangerous one. Tangney said parents in the Glenbrook case aren’t helping their children by suing the school district to combat expulsion.
Suing the school district, she said, doesn’t “help the community come out of it” and is expecting too much from any group of school administrators.
Zachar, the social worker, agrees that the lawsuits could send the wrong message.
“I think it’s consequences–the ability to own up to what their part in it is,” said Zachar. “I understand parents protecting kids from consequences that will harm them for life. But they might interpret that as feeling special and different from the rest of us.”
“You will find most of that senseless behavior often comes from more affluent adolescents,” said the typically blunt Simpson. “These are privileged children. They are young people thoroughly indulged. We are overprotecting the poor little dears.”
