Camp Builds Trust to Rebuild Young Lives

At 15, Jerry was a hardened veteran of a California Youth Authority camp.

A favorite leisure activity, said counselors, was revolting other kids by plucking out a glass eye that replaced the one he lost in a fight years earlier.

The surly, friendless youth might have wound up as part of a grim statistic--60% of teen-agers in Youth Authority camps for serious crimes spend the rest of their lives in and out of the prison system, according to juvenile authorities.

But he entered a program that teaches trust to drug-addicted and abused teens and today, at 23, Jerry holds a full-time job in a college laboratory. “He is still a real pain sometimes,” said Jerry’s former counselor, James Rubins, “but at least he isn’t penitentiary material.”

Rubins’ Napa County program was one of many anti-drug efforts in California spotlighted during Prevention 1990, a statewide alcohol and drug prevention conference which ended Saturday at the Red Lion Hotel in Costa Mesa.

More than 1,000 drug prevention experts attended the four-day event, which included a special focus on the drug and alcohol problems facing today’s youth.

“The thread running through these programs is prevention,” said Paul Wyatt, director of the prevention bureau of the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs. “We have to have our teen-agers and youths involved in alcohol- and drug prevention for these programs to succeed.”

To catch the eye of the high school crowd, many booths and displays on Saturday were decorated in flashy, day-glo colors with anti-drug rap songs echoing through the halls of the hotel conference facilities.

But behind the glitz, several drug prevention professionals were rolling up their sleeves at the series of workshops being offered.

The wide-ranging seminars touched on substance-abuse problems of young minorities, with separate conferences held for blacks, Asians and American Indians. They also dealt with gang awareness, teen suicide, steroids and other drug- and alcohol-related topics.

Developed in Napa County, where it serves more than 1,000 teen-agers annually, Rubins’ program aims at developing trust in youths who have been abused and betrayed by family members.

In a form of group therapy, Rubins gets teen-agers to depend on each other by assigning them individually impossible tasks.

As the youths strain to pull each other over a 15-foot wall, or fall out of trees into the arms of their fellows, bonds of trust are formed, said Rubins, who heads the Napa County Drug and Alcohol Abuse program.

“These kids don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel,” he said. “We do this over and over and sometimes they learn how to communicate again.”

For Jerry, who had spent two months in the group while in youth camp, the breakthrough came after a session of tree-jumping.

“Jerry was in camp for shooting and killing his brother,” said Rubins. “He was always so busy defending himself against others for shooting him that he flatly denied he had ever done it.”

“Jumping out of the trees reminded him of a time he shoved his brother from a tree and something broke inside him. He just kept crying over and over, ‘I killed my brother, I killed my brother.’ But a half-hour later, he could talk about it,” Rubins said.

“Once they have words, are able to express themselves,” he added, “you can use those words instead of destructive actions like drugs and alcohol.”