Oh Mother, Tell Your Children Not to Do What I Have Done

Anthony Kimberly once stabbed a man on the altar of an abandoned funeral home, using the victim’s money for the cocaine he later injected right on the altar steps. He stole things to keep pace with his runaway drug habit: cars, trucks, motorcycles--even a horse.

Thomas Cruz knifed one robbery victim in the back, slit the throat of another. He dealt drugs, used drugs, threatened a police officer with a loaded gun. For his crimes, he spent 13 years behind prison walls. One-third of his life.

Carlos Olivarez had a death wish. He took his fiancee on a high-speed suicide run on the Simi Valley Freeway because she would not stop freebasing cocaine, a drug that had kidnaped his own life. So he tried to kill them both, weaving across all four lanes, hoping the car would crash and explode.

He failed. They crashed, but survived. Olivarez went to prison.

All three were convicts. Now they are teachers.

They’re former hard-timers who again stepped behind the high walls and concertina wire--this time at Juvenile Hall in Sylmar--to counsel young gangbangers and rough boys likely to follow in their footsteps to the Big House.

They have spent a combined 40 years in lonely, dangerous prisons with names like Soledad, Mill Creek and Folsom. And one named Chuckawalla that convicts call “Chuckie’s House.”

Now this rogue’s gallery sits stoically at a table in a drafty meeting room, facing their audience like solemn preachers, men who had nothing left to prove. Especially to this group.

For here is the newest generation of criminal. Skinny teen-agers, lost inside baggy detention jumpsuits and denim jackets, slouch in their chairs, arms crossed, eyelids heavy, as though they have heard this Big Brother stuff too many times before.

Wise Guys.

But Claudia Ryan would have none of it. She’s the executive director of the Ryan Center in North Hollywood, where 30 ex-convicts live in the process of re-entering society. The granddaughter of a prison warden, Ryan rides a Harley-Davidson and has a particular vision for ex-cons.

They are not bogeymen, but people who have done their time and deserve a second chance. Her guys, she says, spend hours of volunteer time each month proving it. Like these three, they talk to groups at local homes for teen-age criminals. They counsel elderly homeowners on how to avoid becoming The Victim, at home and on the street.

And so, at these meetings, Ryan becomes the sergeant-at-arms. As the men talk, she scans the audience for the first sign of contempt.

“You come in here, you give my guys respect,” she says in a gravelly voice. “You don’t understand the word, that’s cool. Go back to your units. I just don’t want my guys shown any disrespect.”

While the tone is stern, this is no Scared Straight rap where youths are insulted and demoralized in hopes that they will be shocked and terrified into becoming good citizens. This is plain straight talk: men owning up to their mistakes in the hope of influencing someone much younger than them.

“I’m in here talking to you guys because it helps me ,” Kimberly says. A thin man, he resembles a used car salesman with wild eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “It helps keep my mind off the drugs. It helps keep me sober another day.”

Cruz tells the group about a wasted life that--including his incarceration as a juvenile--has kept him locked up for 20 of his 38 years. “I have an 18-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old son who don’t even know me.”

Clad in a white T-shirt, Cruz is a smallish man

with a shaved head and a goatee--the vision of a prison inmate, straight out of Central Casting. He broadcasts an unsettling quietness. His words are few but powerful.

Years ago, he tells the group, he spent time at this very juvenile hall. Looking around, he says the place looks the same. “I’m the one who’s gotten older, warehoused in state prisons for two decades.”

He pauses, allowing silence to grip the room.

“Time behind bars is time you never get back. You’ve lost it. And those bars are always waiting to take you back. Every time you mess up.”

His shiny black hair tucked into a ponytail, Olivarez has the bulging muscles of a man who has spent much of his life lifting weights in exercise yards, where ruthless men can nurse a petty grudge into a murderous hatred. The boys are impressed as he paces the room, detailing murders he has witnessed behind bars, cons cutting cons with makeshift knives.

The trap is set--they’re all inside. Then he springs the real message.

Olivarez did drugs and went to prison because he was angry. He was enraged at being molested by his relatives, and dunked in cold water three times a week.

He talks of the day a relative kicked him in the testicles, robbing him of the chance to have his own children someday. The room goes silent.

Outside, Olivarez admits it was hard to reveal details so intimate to a group of young strangers.

“But that was my problem,” he says. “I had to let it out. I’m telling these kids they’ve got to let out the anger of their own messed-up childhoods.”

Even though the group has received letters from youths--and one former juvenile hall resident has moved into the Ryan Center to straighten out his life--no one knows if any of the straight talk hit home.

“I don’t know,” Cruz says. “All I know is that I tried. That’s all that matters.”

Walking away from the walls and the wire, he shrugs. “Every time I hear the buzzing as the guards close those doors, it brings back memories. And ain’t none of ‘em pretty.”