Volunteer Prison Teacher Bids Teary Goodby to Her ‘Puppies’ : Ventura School: To some, they’re hardened criminals or gangbangers. But to Pat Taylor, they’re kids who have a choice.

Many people would view them as hardened criminals, these four gang members serving time for offenses ranging from cocaine possession to murder.

But Camarillo resident Pat Taylor, 62, has another name for them.

“Oh, you’re all just puppies,” Taylor said as she greeted the four with hugs at the California Youth Authority’s Ventura School in Camarillo.

The youths are former students of Taylor, previous participants in the various seminars she taught as a volunteer at the Ventura School from 1983 through January of this year.

Taylor stopped teaching the prison classes because she and her husband are retiring to Baja, Mexico, this spring.

Now she’s saying tearful goodbys to some former students still at the prison and others who have been released but who have kept in touch with her by phone.

Several former students agreed last week that Taylor was no ordinary teacher.

“She’s like a mother to me,” said Michael Davis, a ponytailed 18-year-old whose own mother died when he was 2. “She has a way with words. There’s an art with her words in a way that touches your heart and breaks you down inside.”

A native of South-Central Los Angeles, Davis came to the Ventura School in 1991 after being convicted of using an Uzi semiautomatic rifle to rob a liquor store.

Taylor gave him the encouragement he needed to work toward his high school equivalency degree. Up for parole in December, Davis said he hopes to attend college when he is released.

Eddie Elliott of Compton said he was skeptical of Taylor when the youth authority’s CYA parole board ordered him to attend her “Gangbangers Anonymous” class last year.

“I was, like, ‘This woman’s white. She doesn’t know anything about gangs. . . . She doesn’t know anything about Compton,”’ the lanky 19-year-old said. “I had never trusted a white woman before.”

But the class took on meaning for him when Taylor gave the group an unusual assignment: Imagine you have five minutes to live and write a letter to the person you love most.

Elliott wrote to his mother.

Convicted when he was 13 years old of possession of cocaine, Elliott served his term and then returned to prison in 1990 for violating probation.

Elliott will be eligible for parole in June. To stay away from his old gang, the Black Compton Crips, he plans to move to his sister’s home in Hawthorne. “I’m not going back to Compton,” he said.

James McDuffy, security chief at the Ventura School, said former inmates frequently say Taylor’s seminars helped them change their lives.

One of the secrets of Taylor’s success, McDuffy said, was that her students were free to vent frustrations or discuss their gang involvement without worrying that their comments would be noted on their prison record.

“It was an anonymous program,” he said. “They could talk openly.”

Assistant Security Chief Betty Pfeiler agreed that inmates were more inclined to trust Taylor than a staff counselor or guard.

But, she added, “Pat’s just one of those people that can get stuff over to kids. She really does have an impact.”

Taylor began her seminars at the Ventura School after volunteering for six years in a Los Angeles hospital’s wards for terminally ill and psychiatric patients.

She decided she needed a change and, with UCLA psychology courses and years of self-awareness seminars under her belt, she offered her volunteer services to prison authorities.

She was directed to the Ventura School, which has about 800 male and female inmates 10 to 25 years old from throughout California.

Taylor began with a program called “Mindseekers,” aimed at helping youths build self-esteem, discover personal values and improve relationships.

Eventually she developed other classes, including “Gangbangers Anonymous,” which focused on how the inmates’ gang involvement had affected their lives.

Although the classes were generally voluntary, the state Parole Board began ordering some prisoners to Taylor’s gang program in 1990.

Taylor said she was always nervous before she met a new group of inmates.

But, she said, “by the third seminar, they were mine. We were hugging and kissing.”

Rather than telling her students to stay out of gangs, Taylor emphasized that they had a choice and tried to show them the consequences of their decisions, she said.

Carlos Jacquez, 19, a soft-spoken youth from Rosemead serving time for assault with a deadly weapon, said Taylor helped him realize he had joined a gang to feel accepted.

He’s still involved with a gang, he said. “I guess I’m just hardheaded.”

Taylor’s former students said they knew she would love and accept them no matter what they had done in the past and no matter what choices they made.

“She could look past our condition,” said Tim Thomas, a 23-year-old inmate who became blind in one eye and legally blind in the other from a gunshot to the face in 1986.

Thomas, who is in the Ventura School after being convicted of murder, is studying Braille and is eligible for parole next year, he said.

Thomas said he remembers Taylor’s seminars as very emotional. But “she’d never let us cry alone.”

He also recalled her telling stories about her own life.

“She’d tell us about her vacation,” he said. “She’d make us feel we were there, too.”

Although Taylor at one point was holding classes or counseling sessions at Ventura School every day of the week, her life was never empty of other activities.

She and her husband, who have no children, are golfers, and Taylor has played in amateur tournaments around the world, she said.

In addition to sharing her own life, Taylor encouraged her students to talk about theirs, said former inmate Chris Calloway.

“She listened to people,” said Calloway, 25, who was released from the Ventura School in 1990. “Most teachers and staff up there, you can’t really talk to. They don’t take the time. That’s where Pat came in.”

Calloway has returned to his native Pasadena but hasn’t rejoined his old gang, he said.

After working nearly two years for a Sun Valley aerospace company, he was laid off in late 1992 and is still looking for another job, he said.

When he’s feeling down, Calloway said, he sometimes calls Taylor.

But he’s not worried that she’s moving out of the country, he said.

“If it makes her happy, it makes me happy,” he said. “We’ll probably keep in touch.”