Book Review: Children of the State

Title: Children of the State 

Author: Jeff Hobbs

Date: 2023

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN: 9781982116385

Length: 384 e-pages 

Quote: “I used to have high hopes for them leaving here and graduating from high school and maybe even college. Now, I mainly just hope that, within five years of leaving, my students aren’t dead."

Though it was written during a sociological study, this book is not the research paper written for the scholarly journal. It tells the stories of three individuals in three programs aimed at rehabilitating teenaged offenders: a boy who serves a somewhat successful term in a traditional reform school, a teacher in a more "progressive" reform school, and a boy who washes out in an even more "progressive" program. It reads like one of those series of three "literary, realistic, not genre-fiction" novelettes everybody seems to be trying to sell on Amazon these days; it will satisfy those who read realistic contemporary YA novels, even if these stories are as true as Hobbs could make them. (There's a detailed explanation of what's true and what's fictionalized at the beginning of the book.)

These stories interest me because Hobbs chose to focus on the people large-scale programs are most likely to fail to serve, the introverts in the target group. He doesn't say "These are a few of the ways introverts adjust to these programs when they have to; these are a few of the ways the programs fail introverts as such," but that's what he has to show us. 

But, but...don't introverts usually steer clear of things and people that would get them into reform schools, at least until they apply for a student loan forgiveness program that requires them to teach math in one? (Qualified people volunteer to teach English, arts, and social studies classes in our "justice" system, but there's always a need for people qualified to teach math.) 

Well, no. Hobbs doesn't focus on the crimes his incarcerated informants probably wouldn't describe accurately if they remembered, but there are things that can interfere with the normal functioning of the introvert conscience. If adults tried to control, regularize, and make use of teenagers' energy surges, the teenagers themselves would be the first to accuse the adults of exploiting child labor; if adults try to control, regularize, and ignore teenagers' energy surges, or "discipline" teenagers to work through energy surges on low-energy tasks like watching educational movies, teenagers become bored and restless and go out looking for things that will use up the intense energy they feel. When teenagers grow up on farms they can often find wholesome ways to use their energy. When they grow up in cities what they find is likely to be vice if not crime. Hobbs' protagonists, under the influence of something or other, get into fights and hurt people more than they mean to do. They've not killed or even disabled a victim, but judges, concerned about the possibility that while under the influence they might kill someone another time, want them in closely supervised programs as "children of the state" anyway.

So one boy is forced to live in a dormitory with an extrovert roommate, whom he "can't stand" but is forced to develop strategies for living with. He really hates any kind of conflict, when sober--probably a factor in his going straight to violence when unable to avoid conflict--and applies his energy to staying out of fights in the institution. He's intelligent, complains of the low-content reform school classes and enlists teachers to help him prepare for college, but...read the book. 

The other boy is allowed to live with his tough-loving father on condition that they live in a different town where the boy can't see his lifelong friends. This, Hobbs seems to feel, is the judge's big mistake; introverts aren't looking for numbers of friends, but they set a high value on friendship and feel bad about anything they regard as disloyalty to friends. While his day program is not terribly restrictive and he likes his new schoolmates well enough, he's obsessed with going home, unwilling to wait. Can a promising romance really keep a boy from wanting to see his lifelong buddies? Actually, yes; at some level teenagers do have to know that their romances are fantasies, flirtations, unlikely to last even into college, much less lead to marriage...but they think, although this is often a mistake, that their same-sex friendships are for life.

The teacher's story offers Hobbs some insight into girls' experience in reform school. While her school is posh, with a cafeteria that introduces students from poor backgrounds to the expensive food people in San Francisco consider essential--and the variety of fresh food may help the students, too--she feels vaguely dissatisfied. What would make her job better? Being able to make more of a difference in her students' lives, of course. But teenagers aren't close to teachers, aren't allowed to get close to teachers if they wanted to do so.

Partisan political influences seem to have blinkered Hobbs to what he's writing about. Teenagers from all demographic backgrounds experiment with drugs and alcohol and do stupid things while under the influence. Often they do more harm to themselves and others than the relatively intelligent and salvageable students Hobbs studies most closely. The ones who land in state reform school, or closely supervised day programs, are usually not of predominantly European or Asian descent--except when they are. Hobbs observes a few White kids at reform school. Yet he persists in diagnosing the reason why only some juvenile offenders go to reform school as "racism" rather than the elitism it so blatantly is: If a teenager has parents who can pay damages and pay for alternatives, that teenager will probably not go to reform school; if the teenager has only one parent and that parent's income is low, that teenager is likely to become a "child of the state." Race is involved only indirectly, in that Black families are still disproportionately likely to be poor families. Poverty is what directly determines their sentencing. Probably more White people should be talking about how offensive it is to have elitist bigotry, which hurts some White people too, misidentified as racism.

Though probably Black people suffer more from this unhelpful left-wing script: If you're blinded to the existence of discrimination against you and others as poor people, stuck in mindless repetition of a demonstrably false claim that you've been discriminated against on the basis of skin color, then you can reasonably be considered less intelligent than other people. 

Apart from the unhelpful "racism" rhetoric and the unfortunate truth that poverty (and single-parent homes) do place teenagers at greater risk of increasing delinquency, what have these stories to teach us? I think they do offer useful insights, especially into why the well-intentioned day program failed the bright, sensitive boy it should have helped. It's always a better idea for adults to welcome (and supervise) the friends teenagers pick up than it is to try to separate teenagers who regard one another as friends. Some teenage friendships are toxic but teenagers need to see this for themselves.

Who should read this book? I think it's written primarily for adults, in support of the controversial belief that "no child belongs in prison." (I'm not sure whether the world wouldn't be better off if aggressive sociopaths were locked up for life at age twelve, but I agree with Hobbs that most juvenile delinquents would be better off with different kinds of intervention.) Government programs aren't likely to do much for the teenagers we meet in this book. Individuals, possibly ministers or family friends but most likely employers, are the ones most likely to give them the "break" from the downward path they need. 

A secondary audience just might be teenagers. I don't think making any book required reading is an ideal strategy, but because introverts were chosen as subjects I think there's a high probability of teenagers discovering this book as a batch of readable, relatable stories. For those teenagers the stories will work as cautionary tales, and might help reduce anxiety they might feel about having former offenders as co-workers or college classmates.