Sobering Lessons for Teen Offenders : Novel Program Shows Real-Life Hazards of Drinking and Driving

Just after midnight, under the bright lights of the hospital trauma room, a 20-year-old man shivered in cold and fear. A few feet away, April Kukuchek, a 17-year-old high school senior who recently had been convicted of drunk driving, stood in silence, watching his agony.

The man’s clothes, every stitch, had been unceremoniously stripped off with scissors when he arrived at UC San Diego Medical Center. Dried blood had stained his pale pink skin a mottled brown. Fresh blood, a vivid red, seeped out of his neck onto a pure white bandage.

Already there were tubes everywhere. An IV had been shunted into a wrist vein. A groin artery had been tapped for yet more blood, for a variety of tests. A catheter drained the six or seven beers the man said he had gulped earlier that night.

Doctors injected a local anesthetic into the man’s belly, then sliced it open, checking for internal bleeding. “That feels crazy,” the 20-year-old man yelled. “Not that I’m not thankful for this, man. But oh! Oh! Oh! Auggh! Damn! Who’s calling my mom? What if I die?”

He did not die. Relieved to know he would live, April finally spoke, jolted by the graphic scene--just as court officials and the organizers of the unique program that brought her to the trauma room had hoped. “This is a good program,” she said. “For the shock. Wow.”

The program, an innovative experiment that aims not just to shock, but to educate teen-agers about the real-life hazards of drinking and driving, has proven to be good, indeed, way beyond expectations. Since it began three years ago in San Diego, 223 teen-agers, all first-time DUI offenders, have been through it. Only one has been rearrested for drunk driving.

The repeat rate for DUI offenders between ages 16 and 21 is widely believed to be about 30%, though there is no definitive statistical study, San Diego court officials said. Judges had hoped the novel program would bring the figure down to 15%.

One of 223 is less than one-half of 1%.

Intrigued, three other California counties--Santa Barbara, San Joaquin and Shasta--are poised this spring to launch their own versions of the program, under the direction of San Diego officials.

“I thought (the program) would be helpful and reach some kids,” said Glen Spearman, supervising traffic hearing officer at the San Diego Juvenile Court. “I didn’t think it would be as effective as it is. We are all pleasantly surprised.”

For taxpayers, the most pleasant surprise is that the San Diego program supports itself. The teen-agers pay $100 apiece for the course, run by a local private nonprofit agency, Corrective Behavior Institute.

That $100 buys an hourlong orientation, four hours at a hospital trauma center, an hour of grisly slides presented by a retired San Diego coroner, and four hours of group counseling.

The $100 fee also pays for an adult guide at the hospital--at $10 per hour--and for a group leader at the counseling session, said Nicki D. Biggs, the institute’s executive director. Whatever is left over goes to program overhead, she said.

Each teen-ager also must write a 500-word essay about the experience for the court.

“Before all of this, I (used) to laugh when they told me don’t drink and drive,” wrote a teen-ager named Sergio, who went through the course last fall. “But everything is different now. I’m the one saying that to my friends. I guess experience is the best teacher.”

Wrote Brian, another recent graduate, “Not too many people get a second chance, and I’m not going to blow it.”

In 1990, the last year for which statistics are available, alcohol-related traffic accidents were the state’s No. 1 killer of people ages 16 to 21, according to the California Highway Patrol, which registered 413 fatalities and 13,800 injuries in that age group.

Those 413 deaths accounted for 17% of all alcohol-related fatalities statewide in 1990, the CHP said.

Authorities in a few California counties, mindful of those numbers, have instituted their own programs.

In Orange County, for instance, Municipal Court judges can sentence first-time DUI offenders age 18 to 25 to probation that includes trips to a trauma center and the county morgue, said Richard Rodriguez, a deputy Orange County coroner.

What sets the San Diego program apart is that it is aimed exclusively at first-time DUI offenders referred from Juvenile Court, meaning teen-agers who are younger than 18 at the time of arrest. It is administered by a private agency that is not strapped for public funds.

And, significantly, every teen-ager who goes through the course is a volunteer. The course is not a part of probation.

A DUI conviction in Juvenile Court means certain automatic penalties--a suspended driver’s license, a fine of up to $725 and a state-mandated, 12-hour alcohol-education course, hearing officer Spearman said. Time spent at the hospital, viewing slides with the coroner and in group counseling is in addition to all that.

To create an incentive for cash-strapped teen-agers to fork over $100 for an additional, 10-hour course on drinking and driving, judges often knock down the fine to as little as $250 in exchange for a promise to attend, Spearman said. The only teen-ager who turned down the offer was moving out of the county, Spearman said.

Because everyone in attendance is initially curious about a program that would prompt a judge to slash a fine, each new group starts off on a good note, Biggs said.

It was the judges who actually came up with the idea of the course. They contacted Biggs, a former San Diego County probation officer, to put it together.

It works because authority figures are there to teach, not preach, said Biggs, 54, who has a master’s degree in psychology and an avid interest in teen-agers’ self-esteem.

“It’s clear from the moment they enter (the program) that they are liked,” Biggs said. “We smile. We’re not dreary with them. They’re not treated like they’re Al Capone. That is how some of them expect they’re going to be treated. We throw them off guard. They expect something. And we don’t give it to them.”

Many of the teen-agers were arrested with blood-alcohol levels well above the legal limit of 0.08%, Biggs said. One of the teen-agers in this month’s course blacked out behind the wheel at 0.19%, she said. Without exception, she said, the teen-agers report that alcohol is easily available from older friends.

So the orientation and counseling sessions stress personal responsibility, especially the importance of choices, and the possible consequences of choosing to drink and drive, Biggs said.

“What we say to them is: ‘Have you liked what’s happened to you since you’ve had your DUI? You’ve gone to court. Some of you paid for an attorney. You lost your license for a year. Now you’re in this program, requiring you to give up your Saturdays, your nights, your school days. You have to ask, sometimes beg, someone to drive you. You are inconvenienced.’

“When they come to our class, they have lost a lot,” Biggs said. “We work backward from that. We ask, ‘Are you happy where you are right now? Is this where you want to be?’ Probably without exception, everyone says something like, ‘No. This has been a real drag, a real awful experience. My parents are totally bummed out at me.’

“These kids are ready to consider a change,” Biggs said. “We get them at a good time.”

By the end of the course, at the counseling sessions, it becomes apparent that the things the teen-agers have observed with the coroner or at the hospital has affected them.

Jason, who attended the program late last year, wrote in his essay that the four-hour counseling session was actually “the most educational” part of the program.

“Everyone was comfortable talking with each other,” he wrote. “This is the part I learned most with, because everyone was truthful and legitimate about what they (were) saying.”

He added: “I won’t drink and drive again.”

That’s the conclusion retired San Diego Coroner David J. Stark hopes the teen-agers reach. He shows a series of slides of gory traffic accidents. The idea, Stark said two weeks ago at his most recent presentation, is to highlight the grim realities of the influence of alcohol on decision-making.

One slide shows a motorcycle driver with a gaping wound in his chest. He ran into the back of a truck and was gored on a load of hard plastic pipe sticking out from the truck bed, Stark said.

Another slide showed a side view of a souped-up red sports car. It appeared to be in perfect shape.

The next photo showed the car from the other side--it had flipped, hit an embankment, slid back onto the road, “ground off its top and the upper bodies of the occupants of the car” before flipping again and coming to rest in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway, Stark said.

“As young people, we think, ‘What I do is nobody’s business. Nobody cares.’ Teen-agers think their parents don’t care. They think there’s no love,” Stark said to the teen-agers. “Let me tell you. They love and care for you when we (deputy coroners) knock on that door.”

As dramatic as the slide show is, the trip to the hospital is vastly more powerful, the teen-agers consistently report in the essays.

For four hours--from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night--the teen-agers watch the drama in the trauma room. About 77% of trauma accidents statewide involve alcohol, Biggs said, meaning the odds of seeing an alcohol-related accident are high.

During down time at the trauma room, each teen-ager sees patients recovering in intensive care from alcohol-related crashes, visits with paramedics, or checks out a Life Flight helicopter and crew. Each teen-ager also spends time rolling about the hospital in a wheelchair to get a sense of the obstacles that people with disabilities face.

“If the sight of mangled bodies in the slides, and (the) actual sight of accident victims in the hospital whose lives may never be the same didn’t change my mind about drinking and driving, the thought of being in an accident and probes going through my body sure did,” a teen-ager named Andrew wrote in his essay. “I was finally realizing what a mistake I had made.”

For all the gore, not one parent has ever complained about the program, Spearman said.

“The parents have all said it was great,” Spearman said. “They say, ‘I don’t know what happened at the hospital, but my kid talked about it for weeks.’ ”

If things get too grim at the trauma room, Spearman said, the teen-ager is always allowed to exit to a nearby hallway--no questions asked. But that almost never happens because the teen-agers are so fascinated, he said.

Two weeks ago, on the Friday night she visited to the hospital, April, a senior at Bonita High School, stepped out of the trauma room for a bit. But she came right back.

Later, as the clock neared 2 in the morning, she said, “I thought I would be able to handle the gory stuff. I don’t know. It was almost too much.

“Maybe it’s the age I’m at, but you need to see it for real, the shock. If it’s on TV, you can just change the channel or talk to your friend, you know, if you’re uncomfortable. Here you can’t.”

“Thank you,” she said to Kristi Sheppard, 23, of Ramona, an intensive-care technician who had ushered her around the hospital. “I’m going to think about a lot of things.”