CYA Course Seeks to Teach Offenders Empathy, Remorse : Penal system: The mandatory six-week class features a series of guest speakers who describe in detail the suffering they have undergone.

Dave was 14 years old when he and some friends got drunk and decided to rob a man in an alley near the boy’s Pacoima home one spring night in 1987. As he recalls it, he took part in beating the man, and then another friend stabbed the man to death.

Dave, who was found guilty of second-degree murder, doesn’t remember feeling a great deal of guilt or remorse at the time. It was just the kind of thing you did running with your home boys, he said.

But now hear him talk.

“I have thought about it and placed myself in my victim’s place and tried to feel what he felt,” said Dave, now 17 and serving a 15-years-to-life sentence at the California Youth Authority’s Fred C. Nelles School in Whittier. “I’ve imagined my family as victims. When I get out, I don’t think I’ll be involved in crime anymore.”

Dave is a recent graduate of a pioneering California Youth Authority course that officials hope will teach youthful offenders to empathize with their victims and feel remorse for their crimes.

“Most of these guys are very oblivious to what the effect of their crime is on other people,” said Sharon English, assistant deputy director for parole services for the CYA, the first youth correctional agency in the United States to offer the course.

“This course is really about values and other people’s rights and personalizing crime,” English said. “Teaching them to read, write and weld is easy. In this course, you teach them how to feel.”

Since it began in 1985, the CYA course has had inquiries from youth correctional agencies in 34 states and Canada, many of which instituted similar programs based on the California effort, English said.

A high-security complex of red brick buildings, Nelles houses 835 male juvenile offenders aged 13 to 20 who committed crimes ranging from petty theft to murder, said the school’s program administrator, James Welke.

Each youth attends the class every weekday for six weeks. The course culminates in a candlelight graduation ceremony to which friends and relatives are invited.

The class features a series of guest speakers who describe in detail the suffering they have undergone as a result of such crimes as rape, child abuse, drunk driving, homicide and robbery.

Typical speakers might include a counselor from a rape crisis center--or even a rape victim, if one is available and willing to talk--describing the lingering trauma a sexual assault causes. A person whose home has been burglarized might tell the class what it is like to lose an irreplaceable family heirloom.

Youths have heard a man paralyzed in a crash caused by a drunk driver describe how difficult it is to perform life’s daily routines, how even going to the bathroom has become an ordeal, how people stare at him and how he has contemplated suicide because of his suffering.

Shelly Wood, who taught the class attended by Dave, likes to tell students that what they think of as innocuous crimes can have an unforeseen “domino effect.” For instance, an auto theft victim can lose his job because he has no transportation to work. His children may go hungry as a result.

“A delinquent who knocks a lady down and steals her purse is only thinking about the money,” English said. Teachers try to make the youths realize that the woman may now be unable to pay her rent, may be hobbled by slow-to-heal injuries and might remain fearful for the rest of her life.

On one recent occasion, Fern Stamps, 49, a frequent guest speaker, told the class what it is like to have had a child murdered.

Kimani Stamps was 15 and, like his identical twin brother, Kwame, was an honors student, active in sports and had no gang affiliation when he was shot for no apparent reason by a gang member, Stamps told the group.

Stamps, who was recruited from a crime victims support group, painstakingly painted a portrait of her slain son, detailing everything from diaper changes to their shopping at the mall for a leather jacket he barely got to wear before he was killed. She showed home movies of her children riding bikes, running through water sprinklers, climbing trees and fishing.

Listening were about 24 youths dressed in blue denim shirts and jeans and tennis shoes. They sat at desks in what appeared to be a typical classroom save for signs such as “The Way We Treat Victims is a Crime.”

Some youths squirmed, looked out the window, scribbled on paper or laid their heads on their desks as Stamps told the class that she was a careful parent who knew her sons’ friends, set curfews and took her sons to parties, making sure they were properly chaperoned.

But on Jan. 15, 1988, because she was ill, she let her twin sons go with their best friend to a party and spend the night at the friend’s house.

As if sensing that details of her son’s killing were nearing, the youths began listening closely as Stamps told of being awakened at 4 a.m. by a phone call. A police officer told Stamps that her son was being rushed to the hospital after being shot in a gang shooting.

While taking out the trash at the friend’s house, Stamps’ sons and their friend had stopped to talk with two neighbor girls who had been at the party. Two gang members dressed in trench coats walked by and, with no provocation, one shot Kimani three times at close range, Stamps said.

“The bullet went like a dull knife and it just dragged through his brain. The bullet did so much damage we could not even donate his organs,” Stamps said. “This is my son at age 15,” she said, holding up a picture of Kimani in a hospital bed, bandaged and hooked up to life-support systems.

“This is what he looked like after the shooting. This is for real, people. This is blood, not ketchup. Every function is being performed for him by this machine. This could be you. This will be you if you don’t hear me. . . .

“They asked the punk that did it why didn’t he shoot the other boys and he said, ‘I ran out of bullets. It ain’t no thang.’ The boy that killed him was 16 years old. Now how does a kid get to that?” Stamps asked, her soft, maternal manner giving way to anger and jerky gestures.

“How dare he do that? How dare you do that? What is so wrong in your lives that you feel you can do something like that? What gives you the right to take another person’s life?” Stamps demanded of the group, which included Dave and other youths found guilty of murder.

Stamps said her son’s killer was found guilty of second-degree murder but she said “the killer has inflicted a life sentence on me and on my family. Our lives will never be the same. The worst thing I can imagine is walking down the street and seeing my son’s murderer.”

Then her tone took on almost a pleading quality as she explained one of her motivations for speaking to CYA classes. “I need to know about this kid, all there is to know about him. Talk to me. Tell me,” Stamps implored.

Some of the students told Stamps that the boy who killed her son was trying to prove that he was tough. “If he’s so tough and hard . . . why not go after someone like himself? Why an unarmed innocent bystander?” she retorted. “Why do you always have to prove to somebody who you are? Don’t you know who you are?

“I can talk to you like this because I paid a dear price and I care about you. I love you guys. You all have God in you.”

Many wards seemed visibly moved by Stamps’ talk and several sought her out to express their sympathy. Stamps said she frequently receives letters from wards telling her that she has touched them.

“What she said really got to me,” said Larry, a South-Central Los Angeles 17-year-old serving time for a strong-arm robbery and his role in an attempted drive-by shooting.

“I feel bad because I’m in a gang and her son got killed by a gang member. If I’d a been out there, it could have been me that done that. I don’t think I’ll continue that behavior when I get out,” Larry said, but he added that he was not sure he could fulfill his good intentions.

“Right now, in my state of mind, locked up in jail, I know it’s the wrong thing to do,” he said. “But on the outside, your home boys are constantly talking about doing the wrong thing.”

Gauging the effectiveness of the course is difficult. CYA officials are working to develop a method of measuring the recidivism rate in youths who have taken the class. For now, attitude surveys taken by youths before and after taking the class show greater sympathy for victims, English said.

Teachers believe that they are getting through to some youths. A former drug dealer, for instance, told Wood that he spent a sleepless night after she told the class that drug dealers are responsible for drug-addicted and deformed babies born to drug-using mothers.

But other results are less clear-cut. Jason, 18, of Pacoima, who listened to Stamps speak, didn’t seem very convinced when Wood told him that he would be morally responsible if anyone were killed with guns he sold. Jason was sentenced to the CYA for stealing 15 crates of automatic weapons from a San Pedro military base and selling them for $7,000 per crate.

“How would you feel if the man that killed Kimani bought the gun from you?” Wood asked him.

“He didn’t,” Jason shrugged.

“But it probably was used to kill someone similar,” Wood replied.

“I sold the gun. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“What do people buy guns for but to kill?” Wood asked.

“That’s not my problem. I sold guns for my purpose--it made money. If you had a chance to make $21,000 in a day, wouldn’t you do it?”

Later, Fern Stamps sighed when asked about the exchange. “I can’t save the world, I know,” she said. “But if one kid out of all the kids I talk to hears me, my mission is completed.”