Prisoner in Juvenile Hall: "I Have No Hope"

Even in Los Padrinos, students with learning disabilities are enrolled in special ed classes.

Still, the state in all its wisdom insists on cramming ten or more students who need special attention. Which does not factor in that some students have become experts and confounding the experts, acting sick or dysfunction when they really know the game better than the psychologists, psychiatrists, instructors.

On any give day at LP, I would have to send out as many as five kids, sometimes in the same class at once. Being a substitute teacher, I did not get a lot of respect from most kids, at least from those who were meeting me for the first time. On subsequent visits, most students learned not to mess with me, or they would get 24-hour lockdown, otherwise known as "The Box."

(I must digress here. If these kids had a Mom and a Dad who diligently cared for them, instituted time-out, took away privileges, instilled in them the capacity to demonstrate self-control, these kids would not be at the mercy of tired teachers and petulant probation officers who look for the chance to put a kid in his place. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great probation officers who look out for the juvenile inmates as if they were there our children. It's just a shame that the biological parents did not treat these young people the same way when they were entering their formative years.)

On one assignment, I was given a roster with sixteen kids listed, but only about five or six kids showed up.

While sitting at the desk eating my lunch, I noticed that the permanent teacher had posted a hand-written note from one of her previous students/inmates. After a short piece about his life, we he got there, why he liked the teacher, he wrote in a separate sentence at the bottom:

"I have no hope."

Coincidentally enough, I had been talking about hope with the students in class that day.

I told them that I was a prisoner of hope:

אסיר התקוה -- prisoner of hope, from Zechariah 9:12.

I wrote the Hebrew words on the board, but I do not write the reference, because of church-and-state statutes.

I tell them, "I am a prisoner of hope. Hope is a positive expectation of good. No matter what I may be thinking or feeling, no matter what trial I am facing, I know that all things will work for good for me." In my heart, I believe this because of Him who loved me and died for me (Romans 8:28, Galatians 2:20).

Unfortunately, I cannot tell them this. What a tragic shame.