44 pages • 1-hour read
Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth
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Part 2, Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Girls”
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Is That Man There?”
The book now shifts its focus to the girls’ COG program. The author examines the differences between the boys’ and girls’ reactions to therapy. In many cases, the girls were subjected to chronic physical and sexual assault from a very young age that continued for years on end, while the boys’ experiences were often episodic or represented isolated incidents. As a result, the girls tend to detach from their emotions to a greater degree than the boys; such dissociation was a survival skill that allowed them to endure chronic abuse. Even after the abuse ends, the emotional numbness endures. This detachment makes the girls’ therapeutic treatment more complex and challenging.
Another major difference is in the group disagreements. Fights break out in both groups, but girls’ hostility is more difficult to control. During one fight that broke out during a therapy session, it took three therapists and four guards to subdue the two female combatants. The author asserts that girls’ aggressive trauma responses are more unpredictable and dangerous than boys’:
When a boy gets knocked down and stays down, it is as if a boxing referee has counted him out. The fight ends […] A girls’ fight is a no-holds-barred mêlée, with biting, eye scratching, and hair pulling. And when a girl hits the ground, the fight doesn’t end (162).
The chapter shifts to the story of the student Elena, who comes from a family of 13 children. She has experienced a succession of stepfathers over the years, and her biological father pointedly estranged himself from her. Elena recalls the one time that her mother tried calling her father and put Elena on the line; instead of her father answering the phone, an unknown woman barked at Elena, “Your dad’s not here, stop calling! He don’t want you!” (172-73).
Elena’s family was heavily involved in the drug trade and gang membership. While Elena’s mother, Lucy, managed to hold down a job, her own erratic behavior harmed her daughter; Lucy not only neglected Elena but ignored her when she pointed out that other caregivers were abusing her siblings.
Lucy’s mother has two sisters, one of whom overcame the dismal family legacy of drugs and violence because she had a mentor who helped her graduate from school. She is known as Elena’s “pro-social” aunt and has taken an active role in raising some of Lucy’s children. A therapist concludes, “The sibling who comes to terms with a tough childhood and turns into a caregiver has almost always found someone to bond with […] Somewhere, somehow, she found a role model. The sister who ends up in prison did not” (179).
Elena had one teacher who briefly mentored her, but Elena’s mother moved the family, and the teacher disappeared from Elena’s life. Her story might have turned out quite differently if someone had been there to care for her. The author points out that social services organizations—not just in Texas but in every state—fail children like Elena every step of the way.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Meeting Katy”
Ric and Judy Nesbit, the parents of a murdered teenager named Katy, belong to an organization called Parents of Murdered Children. Katy was killed during a carjacking, and the two teenage murderers are now serving life sentences. Shortly after their daughter’s death, the Nesbits were forced to relive the nightmare of her murder as her case made its way through the court system. Hubner points out that although the parents in this group “did demand that society, through the criminal justice system, deliver retribution, and with it, some sort of catharsis […] one of many sad and terrible things these people shared was a feeling of being revictimized by the system” (182) as they endured the pain of the trial and sentencing.
When the Nesbits and their fellow group members first visit Giddings, they are outraged: “We are putting flowers on our children’s graves while their killers are planting flowers! How can we ever get justice if this is where they send murderers?” (184). One of the therapists approaches them about sharing their daughter’s story with the COG students through a victim impact panel. Ric Nesbit quickly agrees because his own brother was in and out of trouble all his life, and he believes such a program might have helped his sibling. Over time, the Nesbits become experts at presenting their panel to different COG classes. In this chapter’s panel, they address Elena’s group of female offenders. As the couple tells their family’s story and shows pictures of their daughter from her earliest days to her lifeless body in a morgue, the girls break down and shed tears.
When the Nesbits describe their ordeal and the shattered lives of their family and friends, they are not bitter. Rather, they are trying to help the girls understand the impact of their actions. For many in the group, this is a breakthrough experience. Afterward, a therapist tells the couple, “They’ve only known one way to deal with anger. You are showing them another way. You haven’t used your anger to justify hating” (196).
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Bitch This, The Bitch That”
The group gathers to hear Elena’s crime story. Like many other girls at the school, she committed crimes at an unusually young age, stealing things not out of need but for the thrill. By the time she turned 10, her six older siblings and several aunts and uncles were already caught up in gang activity. Even by then, Elena had developed a hatred for her neglectful mother.
The group tries to get Elena to talk about her stepfather, Manny, who raped her many times. She skirts the details, trying to suppress the memory, but her teammates keep pressing her. When Elena finally describes the incidents, it’s clear that she hasn’t yet processed the traumatic emotions. She tried to tell her mother, but Lucy went into denial. Eventually, Elena ran away to live with a series of aunts or siblings. Although the group challenges Elena’s avoidance, she isn’t ready to face the trauma so that she can begin to heal. After the session, one of the therapists says, “The greatest gift we can give her is helping her move her compass to accountability. Doing that tells her that her life has form and she can impact it. If we don’t, she’ll spend her life reacting to primitive injury” (204).
In the next session, Elena talks about the crime that brought her to Giddings. After leaving home for good, Elena moved in with three older gang members associated with her brothers. They wanted to rob an antiques store, and if Elena participated in the theft, the gang would accept her. She was ambivalent because she knew the elderly woman who worked at the store. However, under pressure from the gang, Elena beat the woman and tied her up, giving her a heart attack. Elena watched as the gang assaulted the owner and a customer. Afterward, Elena escaped, but her parole officer later tracked her down.
After listening to her story, the group demands to know why Elena went through with the robbery even though she knew the victim. She makes excuses, saying she had no choice: If she hadn’t participated, the gang would have hunted her down. The rest of the group challenges this lie and Elena’s downplaying, but Elena’s defensiveness only becomes more agitated. Eventually, they get Elena to admit that she wanted more than anything to be accepted by the gang. The author comments, “It is here, finally, that boys and girls do not differ. Boys and girls commit crimes for the same reasons: to gain power, control, and acceptance” (212). Elena finally concedes that she might have handled things differently, even though she was under pressure. She realizes she had a choice in how to act, and she chose to harm others.
Part 2, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Part 2 examines the female students. The author points out some key differences between boys’ and girls’ reactions to therapy, concluding that girls’ trauma is typically more challenging because their abuse was chronic, unlike the isolated incidents that the boys generally experienced. To explain the difference, the author revisits the theme of Legacies of Dysfunction. For the girls, abuse was often sexual, and their caregivers did nothing to intervene. Like Marina’s mother, who denied her husband’s rapist conduct, Elena’s mother, Lucy, failed to protect her. When Lucy refused to believe that one of her many husbands habitually raped Elena, she allowed the abuse to continue indefinitely; both Marina’s mother and Lucy were thus ultimately complicit in the abuse. As an involuntary survival response, Elena has become detached from emotions. The school’s therapists repeatedly assert that healing is impossible for a student who can’t access her own emotions.
An oblique route seems to help students whose traumatized emotions are otherwise inaccessible. The victim impact panel facilitates such treatment: Girls who are too hardened to examine their own behavior can often feel compassion for victims they don’t know. This proves true when the Nesbits tell the story of their murdered daughter, leaving many of the students in tears as they begin to experience empathy for Katy in a way that has not yet been possible for them when reflecting directly on the victims of their own crimes. This may be due to their own lack of involvement in the panel’s stories: Because they know they have no responsibility for these strangers’ suffering, they needn’t resort to thinking errors to justify it and avoid accountability.
Eventually, Elena is required to revisit her past behavior while telling her story of assaulting a woman. Her blame-shifting, deflective tactics evince the importance of recognizing thinking errors. Elena uses most of these cognitive distortions as she defends her behavior, saying she didn’t have any choice and feared gang retaliation. Nevertheless, her teammates don’t enable her lie, and they hold her accountable, although it becomes clear that Elena is unprepared to hold herself accountable. Since the focus in this episode has been on telling rather than showing, the subsequent psychodrama therapy is more likely to facilitate a breakthrough.
While this segment began by examining the differences between the male and female groups, it concludes by pointing out their one similarity—their motivation: Regardless of gender, youths commit crimes to gain social acceptance and support, whether from a gang, a family, or an exploitative authority figure like Jimmie. Often, such affiliations offer the only sense of belonging and affirmation any of these young offenders have ever known.
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