Kids Who Kill; Dr. Orin Bolstad interview continued

a bit about the relationship with you and Pat and how you work and your strengths and how you play off of one another and that sort of thing. I think what's fundamental is that Pat and I are birds of a feather. We share such fundamental beliefs about treatment. And I think that that makes it possible for he and I to take a lot of risks and to do things that frighten other people who are involved in counseling but we play off of each other because we sort of almost intuitively grasp where the other person is going. Now in some ways we're very different. Patrick I think is very much the father figure around those kids. After all he lives there. He's there every day. And Pat has even arranged his life so that he's there on Sundays. It takes another day off so he's there on Sundays and that's because he wants to be there when families are there because he sees families as a critical part of treatment

and I admire Pat for that. But where Pat is sort of the father figure to these kids and just calls up all kinds of transference issues with these kids by virtue of being a father figure. I mean a lot of kids are very angry at Pat because they don't get enough of him and they see other kids that get too much of him and they get angry with Pat because they think he plays favorites but you see that's a transference issue. Many of those kids come in to SIT having gone through that and they're childhood that one of their brothers got more attention than they did. So he's a natural transference object. Whereas Pat's the father figure I think I'm the visiting uncle. I'm there once a week. I'm not there. I don't live with him the same way. So Pat ends up catching a lot more heat than I do because visiting uncles never catches much heat as the dad and the family. So I think that the dynamic there kind of makes our relationship interesting at times.

But in effect I'm his brother. If I'm the uncle he's my brother and as brothers I think we share a common spirit. Now there's a tremendous amount of time that goes into preparing a marathon. And Pat and I will confer for hours trying to figure out how we are going to make a crime reenactment scene real or how we're going to get a role play with a parent to be real. And we will spend hours and hours figuring out how to do that. And a lot of times Pat and I will come in with a role that's clearly defined for Pat and a role that's very clearly defined for me with respect to a particular child. So I might be the one who is more confrontational for a particular kid. That Pat is struggling to build a closer warmer alliance with. I might be the confrontational one and Pat might take the role of being someone who's going to be somewhat more sympathetic.

And so we'll come in with that kind of a strategy and a plan about how we're going to do it. And usually for every kid we have a plan like that who's going to take what role. And now with Tonya working with us it's become more dynamic and more interesting because she of course has female roles that we have to play. The three of us now have to define our roles pretty carefully. But very little of that is left to chance. I mean we've done a lot of planning and thinking and Pat just does a tremendous amount of homework before every marathon. He goes out and takes pictures of grave sites. He reads a newspaper articles, the obituaries. He chases down all kinds of details that he can get. We did a scene not long ago where we wanted to have, there's three kids in our group who've done a drive by shootings. And so Pat went out and staged a drive by shooting. Went out to an old shack and brought windows because there weren't windows there and he shot into the shack and we taped it and got the sound effects to use in the marathon. That's the kind of thing that Pat will do.

And get the photographs of victims and crime scenes. That's a really important part of a lot of the treatment. So Pat, it takes a lot of time to chase these things down. And a lot of times it's not an easy matter to get those photographs. You've got to go through a lot of bureaucratic hoops before you can pull that off. Pat's the one who does most of the work and he knows these kids and it's a privilege to work with him. It seems there's another layer to Pat besides the parental role. He controls to a certain extent these kids' destiny, and they all know it. How does that fit into treatment? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Well, of course, I think that the youngsters in the program sometimes overplay that. They want to make it sound as if Pat is in control of their destiny. And they project a lot of that on to Pat. And point of fact, I think Pat and I both agree that these kids control a tremendous amount of their destiny. And I think that's Pat's essential message to the kids when they give them a bad time

about that. I mean, you know, I'm going to say what I see. And if that has an effect on your destiny, then so be it. But you have a lot of control on how I see you. So he basically lays it back on them. I want to come back to something you talked about a little earlier. And that's this apparent contradiction when you do evaluations for a kid, when there's a remand hearing or something, and you're essentially saying yourself, I don't see much hope here. Right. And then a year later, you find yourself in group saying, this kid is better than what I thought. I mean, I can admit that I've made mistakes. I can think of three kids that come to my mind that I did not hold out an ounce of hope for them in treatment. And I testified to that effect. Or it was decided not to have me testify because I had that opinion.

And I've come to believe that there's three cases just stand out in my mind that I was wrong about. I'm very pleased I've had the experience of having been humbled by those three cases. I feel terrible because in two of those three cases, those kids were waved to the adult system. And I've seen one of them in the adult system. And I feel terrible about it because I think that particularly I actually made tremendous progress in as I far more so than I would have ever imagined. I couldn't contemplate. I couldn't even imagine if that kid would be treatable. And he proved me very wrong. And I think it is a reflection of the way we underestimate how much these kids can move if they're in the right kind of a treatment environment. And if they have enough years, I mean, a lot of these kids, if you have four or five or six years with these kids and they come to you at 15, 16, I really think you change.

These kids change. They're no longer the same kids six years later. And I attribute it largely to how with the rest of development, if you put the right pieces in place, a lot of these kids are going to become different people. There's been some talk of late about doing something that I think you've done on other programs. And that is actually bring family of victims into group so that they can see the process of talking about a catharsis for everyone. I'd like you to talk about that whole thing and the possibilities of whether it will happen and what its role is in that sort of thing. Well, I mean, I'm a consultant to the program. And I don't make the decisions about what happens. I leave those decisions up to Pat Kirby and the powers that be. But again, it's, you know, Pat and I are brothers of spirit. And he and I have spent a lot of time lately talking about the importance of family.

And it's thrilling to me to see the work that happens in marathons and in our groups manifest itself in the Sunday visits. I mean, there are kids who've role-played dealing with their parents with issues that have never been dealt with. And lo and behold, they come to group next to us and they said, you know, I did it. I brought this up with my family last Sunday. And here's what happened. Staff are around. They watch this happening. It's not as if they're just making up a story. We know that sometimes these kids are confronting their parents about how they feel about they're having spent more time with a bottle than they were did with them. And when a kid can get through that and deal with it and still have the parents stay in their room with them and the parent apologizes and the parents says, I know, I failed you. And I feel terrible about it. And they continue to deal with it and they both share a lot of emotions about that. That's a tremendous thing. I've been doing a lot of that in my work outside of McLaren, especially at Hillcrest.

And years ago I did quite a bit of this work with what we call victim clarification, what we bring the victim of the crime in to a treatment group and have the youngsters talk directly to the victim. And I'm going to continue to angle for that for doing more of that. I would like to get to the point where in a marathon or in our group, we have family memories come right into the group. And instead of just role-playing dealing with your mom and dad, have them deal with your mom and dad. And you could bring Brian Lawler's victim into group, sit in the front of Brian. Theoretically we could. I would never of course ask a victim to do something like that unless they had something that the victim wanted to do. And there are victims out there who do want to confront their abuser, their perpetrator. There are victims who have contacted me or their therapist of the victim has contacted me and say, is there any way we could have this meaning?

Because I have a client here who is tremendously angry at the perpetrator and who would love to have the opportunity and it would be very therapeutic for him to be able to say how angry he is. And you know, if that can be done in a way that's safe for everyone and it's clearly going to be therapeutic for all parties and you've done your homework on it and you've met with people, I'm all for that kind of thing. I've had success with that in the past. Which you have to be careful. Just a couple of other things. I think you can talk. We just did this at Hillcrest not long ago where we had four boys who were all involved in a gang rape but actually there were seven involved but we were treating four of them. And we brought in all four of these kids' mothers. And in the middle of a group we put the four kids across from the mothers and we had

these four kids explained to their mothers what they did. And up until this point the mothers had believed their earlier lies about how it was consensual. But these four kids stood up to their moms and said exactly what really came down. And then we invited the kids to take care of unfinished business with their moms and each one of these kids brought up issues that were unfinished for them. Problems in their relationship with their moms and they began a dialogue on how to do that. These mothers were so blown away by this. This took place for four hours. We could hardly get the mothers to leave Hillcrest. In fact at one point they left and came back. They brought flowers back for their kids and for the staff. They just couldn't give it up. It was so moving and so powerful for these moms to hear their kids speak to them honestly with tears in their eyes, to hear they have guilty and remorseful they were about what they had done.

And then to take up issues that the mothers knew were problematic in their relationship but they never talked about. And this was a powerful thing. Now the next stage that I would like to have gone but we ran out of time is I would have liked to have brought that victim into that same group. If she would have been willing to and if her therapist would have thought that would have been helpful to her I think that would have been incredibly powerful. As it is what we did was we had someone role play that victim who was very, very skillful at doing that. And there is something as you have seen in our groups. There is something that happens in role play that is magical. Unless you are there and experience it, it is hard to understand but there is a quality of magic in role plays. I mean that person becomes the staff person who plays that victim, she becomes the victim. I like to take out a group for a moment and just look at core like we probably will with a camera for a while. That is the one place where kids need to deal with each other on separate issues by themselves. It is the one place where you are reminded that this is a prison where the kids are told

to sit down and shut up, to move left, to move right, to stand up, to be counted, to do it out, to the out of the, and where they interact with staff. What I like you to do is talk about the role of staff that have, that never get into the group, never hear these things from these kids, but what role they play in the treatment of all of this. Well, you have said in a lot of my groups with Crabtree, Darwin Crabtree is an amazing individual. I really love him. I had a youngster who I was treating years after he was out of McLaren who one day we were talking about Mr. Crabtree and here is what he said. He said, you know, I didn't like Crabtree. I didn't like the way he made me line up. I didn't like the way he caught me and punished me and, you know, took away my tag and I just didn't like Crabtree. Spend a lot of years thinking he was mean and arbitrary and it's just funny, you know,

I look back on Mr. Crabtree now and I really like him. What I like about him is that he was consistent. He took no gun, he was fair. I didn't like it at the time and a lot of times I thought it wasn't fair but now I look back on it. I think he was fair and I like the fact that he was consistently there, predictable and I thought about that youngster in his history and he never experienced anything remotely consistent or fair in his childhood. And the other great surprise about a guy like Darwin Crabtree is that this guy is pretty gruff and he's big and he looks mean but a lot of these kids will find their way on a Sunday afternoon if their parents don't visit. They'll find themselves walking over to Crabtree and sitting down next to him and the next thing they know they're visiting with Crabtree as if he were a parent.

And all Mr. Crabtree low and behold he listens to him and shows interest in him and I'm just talking about one staff now but there's a lot of staff who have this role. I'm not saying all the staff are good, I mean as you know sometimes the kids in a group want to really talk about how angry they are at a particular staff and how they felt like they weren't dealt with fairly but you know our attitude about that is that happens. That's life too. And some of the staff are pretty traditional corrections people and a lot of them are pretty uncaring and unfeeling and sometimes staff have bad days and I think this is all part of the fabric of reality that these kids need to learn how to deal with. One final question and this is actually you and I have talked about this before and then when the kid comes in to therapy you get them to first admit what they've done. Take ownership for what they've done and to develop empathy for their victim.

And oftentimes in looking at the background of these kids they begin to see themselves as a victim. And then sometimes they can hide behind that. Absolutely. I'd like you to talk about how you keep those things straight sometimes. I wish I could tell you it was possible to always keep straight and clear. Sometimes you get sucker punched on it and sometimes you find that a kid gets into a victim role and starts hiding in it and I've had it happen many times that the kids pointed out before I've even seen it. And it's lovely to see these kids confront their peers about doing that. But what we try to do is keep them separate. We try to hold them accountable for what they did and as far as we're concerned there's no excuse for what they did. And if they want to call up as an excuse the fact that they were abused as a child I hope that I'm sharp enough and I hope the rest of the kids are sharp enough to confront them about that and not let them get away with it.

Now the tricky part of this is it's not just you know I wouldn't want to suggest that having been abused in childhood has nothing to do with the crime that they committed. I think there are some relationships. What I won't accept is that the abuse in childhood justifies their crime or is a reason for it or is an excuse that we will not tolerate. But at the same time we're going to explore what happened in their childhood and my feeling is that there are undoubtedly unresolved aspects of what happened in a childhood that needs to be resolved dealt with and it may even be that it mirrors their crime. But whether it does or not I don't care. I want them to get in touch with what happened to them and to come to an understanding of how it figures into their lives and how because they've never dealt with it and have never dealt with the emotions attached to it that it's affecting their daily life and their future. So it's time to take care of business let's go back and deal with it.

Let's get into a role play with your mom who abused you or your dad who abused you and let's start talking about it. And your next visit with your mom and dad it's time to start bringing it up. As you know we've got one youngster who probably will never agree to be filmed who struggled for the last year to come to a point now where he's now willing to admit that he was abused by his mother and it took a marathon to get him to that point and even in the marathon he wouldn't admit it. He admitted it the week after the marathon but the marathon was the springboard and now he can admit that he was abused and what he's working on right now is getting himself to the point where he can tell his mother that he feels like he was abused and he's getting closer. So on a scale of 1 to 10 he's about a 4 but he'll get there I think and it'll be quite a thing for him when he can actually deal with that for the first time in his life and the fact that he's never dealt with it I believe has something to do with what he did in his crime but it's not an excuse for what he did in his crime. And curiously this sounds all kind of mushmashi but the kids are very clear about it and they're

very quick to point it out when they see someone hiding behind the fact that they were abused and using it as an excuse they won't let them get away with it. So we try to make the distinction Larry there are times that I mean we're human I'm embarrassed sometimes that it's pointed out to me by one of the kids and I go oh my god that's right. It's one of the fun things about working with these kids is they become very good and I'm one of my other goals in addition to getting families more involved centrally instead of on the Sunday visits. One of my other goals is that I think some of these kids by the time they've been through the program they've gotten to where they're at 10 I think at that point a lot of these kids are marvelous co-facilitators for groups and there's other violent defender groups going on on campus and sometimes these kids are so good after six years of this that they're equal to if not better than some of the staff out there who are trying to run those groups.

So I think they could have a great role as co-facilitators. Perhaps that's a topic for another discussion as they say.