Story of a Boy

Everyone is doing their best. 

I volunteer in the prison system, and I often think about a young man I used to visit, T.  He was convicted of murder in his early teens and was in prison for life.  Life.  No parole.  He was a quiet kid, in his early 20’s when I knew him.  His serious face still had a baby-soft roundness to it, and his enormous brown eyes were bright and sincere.  As we got to know each other, and we told our stories, I began wondering how his life could have turned out any other way.  Largely ignored by the adults in his life, he was surrounded by drugs and crime from the very beginning.  His entire world was that of drug-dealing gangs in one tiny corner of the city.  He had an uncle with a job; apart from that, he didn’t know anyone who paid taxes.  He stopped going to school in 4th or 5th grade, his mother too involved in her own substance issues to intervene.  

Now really - who would any of us have been in that environment? 

Of course, there are people in those situations who stay in school, make it through, make it out.  But don’t forget that biological factors – how well our brains regulate emotion, for instance – likely play a role in these types of outcomes as well.  For example, people with BPD have noticeable differences in the amygdala, a part of the brain that helps us process fear, aggression and anxiety; the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in self-control; and the orbitofrontal cortex, which affects planning and decision-making.  Put a young kid with those challenges in a situation where someone is shooting at him….and because he’s a young kid on the streets with only a gang for protection, he’s got a gun. Is there a shadow of a doubt how that story turns out?   

We are all a product of the interaction between our brain chemistry and our environment.  So how we can judge?  How can we look down upon?  How can we dismiss and lock away and turn our backs?  Nobody who has the capacity and means to succeed chooses a life of misery.  I wonder what it would look like, a society where everyone who needed help could get it. 

When we realized Eli needed help, we had all the resources we needed to get help, and it still felt like being sucked under by an angry tide and not knowing if we would ever surface.  How did it feel for T’s mother?             

He’s 40 now, by the way.  He’s been locked up for more than half his life, for something he did at age 14.  He was meant to have had several more decades in prison, but I just learned that after accessing mental health and educational services in prison, he is finally going to be granted parole.  Knowing that he has finally gotten some part of what he needed all along fills my heart.  I just wish he had gotten it in the first place.