Troubled Teens Resources

“Once they get in this system, it’s a meat grinder,” said W. Michael Coulson, one of about 25 court-appointed attorneys in the juvenile courts. “For the most part, they’re on a rocket sled headed for TDCJ, unless something really big steps in the way.”

The gentleman above is speaking of the fate of troubled teens who have committed adult crimes in Texas, but the same holds true for any juvenile whose crimes merit the possibility of being charged as an adult. As courts around the country struggle with the increasing number of violent youth offenders, some districts have begun executing harsher sentences, trying more juveniles as adults.

“Texas permits courts to certify juveniles as young as 15 to be tried as adults for murder and other violent crimes.

For the past decade, Harris County has prosecuted more juveniles as adults than Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant and Travis counties combined.

In 1996, Harris County certified 170 juveniles amid a public crackdown on violent youth crime. That number steadily dropped to roughly 55 a year between 2003 and 2005.”

(source)

It makes one appreciate the necessity of early teen crisis intervention when perhaps brat camp programs or some type of training might have made the difference between continuing to break the law or choosing another path. Recently a 16 year old was sentenced to 25 years for aggravated robbery. Is that too severe?

Where do you put such teens if the juvenile system can’t rehabilitate them? It is a debate we will be seeing more and more of as court systems across the country struggle with the most effective methods of saving a teen’s life while keeping the public safe.

Josh had been through the juvenile system twice now, in both cases it was because the troubled teen had been caught stealing in order to finance his growing drug habit. The first time he had been through the juvenile system, Josh had been repentant after coming back home. But the lure of drugs, the need to be with his friends, and his dislike for school had been more pressure then the teen could endure.

The troubled teen age son of a single mother, he had little supervision after school and no father figure to replace the father who abandoned the family early on. So it wasn’t surprising that he ended up back in the system. His mother was growing desperate for a solution .

” Bottoming out ” - that is what the drug therapy counselor had told Josh’s mother. Sometimes the only lesson that taught an addict that it was time to quit was to loose it all. She watched his chest slowly rise and fall as the intravenous needle kept his bodily fluids up. The phone call from the police had come when all such phone call do, in the early morning hours when the sound of the ringing phone could only mean bad news.

The bad news was that her drug abusing teenager had been shot in the course of robbing a store. When he left here he would leave in handcuffs. The only alternative to jail was for Cheryl to find a teen drug treatment program in a boarding school, military school, or teen boot camp.

Cheryl was weary and dead inside. She feared loosing her job. She had missed too many days running intervention for her troubled teen. Where was she to begin and how could she afford it? As she watched Josh’s pale and drawn face, she could imagine no bottom lower than this.

Cheryl is not alone. Thousands of single parents face these dreadful circumstances when raising an at-risk teen alone. If you share a similar experience to Cheryl’s, this page will give you some basic guidelines as you begin the search for the appropriate drug treatment program and boarding school for you troubled teenager.