The Good News Is Most Teens; the Rest Are Bad News

Gary Winne works in one of those cramped county government offices in the basement where the sun never shines and where there’s barely enough room for a visitor to wedge a chair between Winne’s desk and the wall. Just another anonymous grunt in a foxhole, waging the noble battle for the rest of us against the breakdown of society.

Winne’s turf is juvenile probation, where the bad boys go after they’ve met the cops and the judge. It’s the place where they get to decide if they want to have a life or keep heading down that long dark road with the twin forks leading to early death or a cellblock. If they want a second chance, Winne will give them one; if they want to play hardball, well, Winne can fit them with a nice pair of handcuffs.

Orange County has about 5,500 juveniles on probation. Five years ago, the number was around 3,900. Every day, we’re bombarded with the violence of teens--they stab someone, they shoot someone, they assault someone. We get the impression that we have a renegade youth brigade destined to bring down society.

Are things as hopeless as they seem? I asked Winne, a probation officer for 28 years, the last 6 1/2 in Orange County. He works in Santa Ana but said much of what he had to say could be applied throughout the county.

He gave me the good news first. A recent Probation Department study indicated that 71% of the first-timers didn’t get in trouble again during the three-year tracking period. The other good news, Winne said, is that most kids don’t get in trouble at all.

But it’s that small percentage, maybe as small as 8% of the juvenile offenders, according to officials, who wreak havoc. The study showed them returning to the system as many as a dozen times, and they often seem impervious to any program society has to offer.

The other bad news is that the violence level is ratcheting upward. “I think kids nowadays are more violent than they were when I began as a probation officer,” Winne, now 51, said. Today’s juvenile offenders are exposed to violence through the media and have no trouble getting guns. Add an increasingly angry and depressed mind-set among that small group of troubled repeaters, Winne said, and you have a recipe for public terror.

Where does the anger and depression come from? “If I would pinpoint my feeling about kids,” Winne said, “it comes from who raised them and how. Let me put it this way: There are millions and millions of interventions that you and I had as children to become what we are. There were many positive and negative reinforcements. For the most part, the real bad kids are the ones who don’t have many positives all their lives.”

Winne doesn’t specifically link the absence of a father figure with juvenile crime, preferring to say it’s just part of the large mix of possible factors.

“I think it’s a question of power versus powerlessness. A kid grows up in a family, he does lousy in school, he’s maybe being abused at home, emotionally or physically, where’s he go? He has to find somebody who’s going to like him. Who’s going to like him? The subgroup members, others who are like him.”

Winne’s territory is Santa Ana, but teen problems aren’t unique to that city. “We have an awful lot of kids in Orange County--in Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Irvine--who are on probation,” Winne said. “High caseloads and a lot of drugs out there are being used by kids all over the county.”

Winne says he can’t help but see the connection between students who show behavior problems in school--often as the outgrowth of learning disabilities or psychological problems--and future lawbreakers.

And while rich kids don’t wind up in the criminal justice system as often as poor kids, Winne said, probation officers see the same symptoms.

“Rich kids have bad parenting too. I’ve worked upper-middle-class to wealthy areas when I was back East and had wealthy kids on the caseload with all the same symptoms. I keep going back to emotional growth. What are you? What is your personality? I think a heckuva lot of rich kids out there now are lonely, unachieving, acting-out kids. . . . They may not draw the attention of police on a street corner in Santa Ana, and they may have more access to buying drugs, but I’ve had as many complications dealing with the wealthy and middle-class children as I have with poorer kids.”

What frustrates me in listening to a career man like Winne is that he’s seeing the same underlying problems he saw a generation ago: parents not up to the job of raising children; youngsters looking for acceptance but finding it in bad peer groups; economic problems adding stress to family life.

It all suggests that our violent recent history is doomed to repeat itself.

Surprisingly, it was Winne, who sees this stuff every day, who told me to buck up.

“I saw the riots in 1965 and everybody said the world was going to end then, and it didn’t,” he said. “I think there are still more good people, more decent people to override these people, eventually. It’s hard to say. We’re always going to have crime.”