‘One Last Chance’: Saving Young Criminal

Appropriating the jiggly cameras and you-are-there attitude of the “Cops”-styled crime shows with a blissful disregard for how long it takes to tell the story, the occasional “Before Your Eyes” series is starkly different from anything else in TV news. The latest, the two-hour “One Last Chance” by producer-director Jonathan Klein, should stop making this CBS News project a well-kept secret.

Claiming not to resort to any staged re-creations, Klein bores in on the miserable yet promising young life of Juan Carlos Castro--homeless and parentless at 7, in and out of nearly 40 foster homes and a veteran car thief in the Tampa area by age 14.

Castro is actually given several last chances after he’s arrested for robbery. Tough months in a Florida juvenile boot camp under the watch of Cmdr. Lee Vallier seem to change Castro from a silent tough kid into a bright, smiling boy.

Change is never that easy, however, and even after Castro is lucky to be under the foster care of sociologist Bill Clyburn and his family and goes back to school, he lapses into fighting, angry outbursts and the kind of borderline crime that pushes Clyburn to the limit.

Like all street-smart criminals, Castro is brimming with an intelligence directed the wrong way, but he’s all unrealized potential. It’s why his one-step-forward-two-steps-backward story is frustratingly sad, and why his mentors like Clyburn, Vallier and Tampa detective Carlos Somellan are deeply stirred as they chat around a restaurant table at the report’s end. (Clyburn is even writing a book about his life with Castro.)

Klein’s intrusive camera may or may not have affected the events it records. We wonder if Castro isn’t sometimes playing up to the lens, deceiving it just as he does his elders and authorities. Everyone, though, is amazingly willing for Klein to film them, even at their worst, as when Castro fights with the Clyburn family.

“One Last Chance” may suggest that reform efforts like boot camp can positively change young lives, but the dark, open ending reminds us that good intentions are never enough.

* “One Last Chance” airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).