Criminalization: The Lost Kids of Armenian America, Part 3

“I got suspended,” said Ara when he called his mentor.
“For what?”
“Smoking. A teacher caught me smoking on the street next to the school.”
“Who were you with?”
“Robert and Ronnie.”
“Did they get suspended too?”
“Yeah.”

The following week, Ara got into a fight and was suspended again. His parents were called into the office and there was a meeting with counselors and the other kid’s parents. A couple of years later, with a few more fights and suspensions under his belt, Ara graduated from high school. He went on to college and university and generally made something of himself, having learned a great deal from the indiscretions of his youth. A few years after that he — I — sat down at this computer to write this story.

This is how things were handled as recently as the mid-nineties. The process today is quite different.

In today’s climate, many things that were once handled by the community — teachers, parents, counselors, school principals, pastors, neighbors — are now the domain of the police, courts, and probation departments. If a kid is caught smoking, a cop issues him a ticket. If a kid gets caught ditching class, a cop issues him a ticket. If a kid gets into a schoolyard fight, he might get arrested. In fact, I’ve known a handful of kids who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon following a fight. The weapon in question was their foot. Some overzealous prosecutors consider the leg to be a pendulum — a deadly weapon. Effectively, kids are criminalized for being kids.

So how does this process of criminalization work? Four years ago, a kid named Vazken was smoking a cigarette with his friends in the parking lot of Taco Bell on Colorado Blvd. in Glendale. Some cops drove up to search the kids’ cars and see if they had any drugs or weapons with them. The police found nothing. But, of course, Vazken (a minor) was smoking a cigarette. Keep in mind that a relatively high percentage of Armenians smoke. When I say “Armenians,” that includes adults and children, because, of course, if the adults do it, so do the children; however, it’s illegal for children to smoke. Now, a first ticket for smoking costs about $400.

Three months later, Vazken and his friend decided to ditch fourth period and take an extra long lunch. That day, a couple of cops found him hanging out in front of his friend’s house. It was schooltime so they issued him a ticket for being a truant (about $200-$300).

By this point, the cops in the neighborhood knew Vazken by name, so they were on the lookout for him. Somewhere along the way he got another $400 smoking ticket.

See, the cops figure that giving Vazken tickets is going to “fix” him. A lot of people in the community think the same thing. The mentality is: “If I get a speeding ticket, then I slow down.” The problem with this mentality is that although Vazken is obviously not the most well-behaved kid in the world, he’s not really doing anything terribly wrong. Smoking and ditching class — though certainly not healthy or productive habits — are usual acts of kid mischief in a big city. And they should be dealt with as such. They should meet a community response. The community has all sorts of tools in its toolbox. We have counselors, pastors, parents, neighbors, chambers of commerce, school administrators, youth programs, Boy Scout troops, etc. All of these people represent various tools in the toolbox. Of course, the police are a tool as well — they’re the hammer. Now if a kid “screws up,” so to speak, you can’t unscrew him with a hammer. Hitting a screw with a hammer usually just makes it harder to unscrew. You need to use some of the other tools in the box.

So back to Vazken, within a few months, our 15-year-old Vazken is $1,000 in debt; worse yet, he has now become used to dealing with the cops. The court system doesn’t work all that well so he doesn’t have to pay until he’s 18 or wants to get a driver’s license. In California the driving age is still 16. But, of course, if you’ve got a $1,000 debt and have no way of paying it, you might decide to wait until you’re 18, but then again you might decide that you need to get that money somehow.

Getting money for a teenager in Glendale is easy enough. Cell phones and iPods are easy to steal and sell. Drugs are ubiquitous, and just like cell phones, drugs need salesmen too. Of course there are any number of credit card scams that get you quick money, and stealing your neighbor’s mail isn’t hard. Stealing cigarettes is also lucrative. One of our own mentors who owns a gas station had his shop burglarized twice by Armenian teenagers — the main take was cigarettes. I wish we had gotten those kids in our program five years ago.

The main problem for Vazken here is that he has gotten used to being involved in the system. He’s used to getting tickets, having debts and warrants, seeing judges, being on probation, and maybe even going in and out of custody. Most of our kids would recognize that this is not a normal state of affairs, and with a little bit of support from a caring teacher, a mentor or a patient parent, they’d start turning things around. In Vazken’s case, like too many others, there was another variable to consider.

When Vazken was 17, he was at the house of Varouj — a high school friend.

“Hey, check this out.”
“What is that?”
“It’s my dad’s stuff.”
“Your dad gets high?”
“Sometimes. I can smell it when he does it right before I get home.”
“Have you ever tried it?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
“You want to?”
“Not really.”
“Just a couple of puffs. If we don’t like it, we won’t.”
“You go first.”

See, Vazken grew up in a place (America) where the media glorifies drug use. Unfortunately a lot of commercial rap music, which both Vazken and Varouj listen to, treats drugs like an everyday thing, and Hollywood movies almost always portray drug users in a glorified light. Add to that the fact that Vazken’s parents were too afraid to have a talk about drugs with their son. They figured that they shouldn’t bring up such things. After all, he’s just a child, who shouldn’t be influenced by such talk. Varouj, on the other hand, grew up in a really messed-up family. He had drugs at home.

So, when you throw drugs into the mix, you have all of the elements in place to thoroughly criminalize a child. After those simple tickets, Vazken picked up a couple of drug charges as well. At the age of 20 he was calculating for me the value of money versus time in jail. That is, a judge had offered him the opportunity to pay a $2,000 fine or spend 5 nights in county jail. You and I might see that as no decision at all. We’d do whatever we could to get the money together to put up the $2,000. But a kid like Vazken, who had been thoroughly criminalized through this process, told me, “I might as well take the five nights. County is overcrowded, they’ll kick me out in two. Two thousand is a lot of money. I can do two nights standing on my head. Besides, Berj’s older brother is in there. I’ll be cool.”

To be fair, our teenagers are not blameless. Teenagers must test boundaries for their development. Additionally, many of our Armenian boys and girls have a particular problem with authority. This may be a controversial statement, but it’s also a true one. Also, as an inherited characteristic that relates to our very survival, Armenians can be a highly adaptable people. This adaptability can also be applied in negative ways toward figuring out illegal modes of survival. They are brave and ingenious boys and girls. The crimes they come up with are sometimes sophisticated and daring. It’s not uncommon to hear of a fraud case that was dropped because the police and the district attorney couldn’t figure out exactly how the fraud was committed, and thus they couldn’t prove it. With the proper guidance, they can apply those types of skills to achieving great accomplishments — think Karabakh ‘93.

Unfortunately, they often learn their disregard for authority from their parents. In extreme cases (Varouj), they have parents who themselves are involved in crime. In most cases, however, their parents simply have a disregard for the “system,” for police and government, for other ethnicities, for the schools, etc. It’s a common knee-jerk reaction that many immigrants have to assimilation. The parents often don’t realize that although, as adults, we can be cynical and skeptical of authority yet still act in accordance with it, the same hypocrisy is much more difficult for teenagers to accept. “If the system is a failure, then there is no need to act with respect towards it” is the conclusion that many developing minds come to.

Furthermore, there is no one there to guide them. As for school, they attend these behemoth institutions called high schools where 3,500 students crowd into massive campuses fenced in on all sides — well, actually a lot of them end up dropping out of these places.

One might ask: “why are police even on the school campuses?” Fear. The reason is fear. We live in a fearful society. We have let things escape from us to the extent that we fear our own children. These problems have been growing in the Armenian-American community for some 30 years, but they have been around in the larger American society for much longer than that. As these problems grow, horrendous tragedies take place: kids kill kids; there are shootings, beatings, drugs, gangs — all sorts of things that terrify us adults.

The word Columbine may come to mind — a tragic event — that is known to you because it took place in a white community. There are thousands of nameless similar events that have taken place in black, brown, and other minority communities. All of these calamities are the result of our collectively unfulfilled responsibilities.

In a family when the parents — whether due to necessity or greed — become preoccupied with the pursuit of money, their children through neglect often lose their way and get into trouble. In a nation or a world, where we collectively choose the pursuit of material wealth over the well-being of our children, the same happens on a grander scale.

Eventually our children venture so far off the path that they become unrecognizable and fearsome to us. We have allowed this to happen. Our dereliction of our responsibilities has made police in the schools a seeming necessity. What we as adults fail to understand is that whatever issues trouble our children are simply manifestations of our shortcomings as their guides.

The police started off in schools to enforce the safety of the student body and the staff — a noble aim. Along the way, however, they became the go-to guys for problems with the kids. Administrators and counselors used to work at helping kids straighten things out from an otherwise screwed-up situation, while the cops — being the hammers that they are — only excel at smashing problems down.

The legal system is turned on its head. They treat usual kid stuff — smoking, ditching, schoolyard fights — as crimes. Meanwhile sometimes kids who commit serious crimes, such as stabbings and robbery, get off with light sentences or probation.

The community at large cares nothing about them; neighbors, business owners and residents see them as a nuisance and a threat. The Armenian organizations are doing nearly nothing for these kids. If a kid is lucky, a caring teacher takes a liking to him or her and acts as an informal mentor. Many of them, however, are out there on their own.

There is a question here that is always the first point of discussion. What about the parents? Isn’t it their responsibility? It’s an important question to ask and answer thoughtfully. In many of the countries that the Armenian immigrants came from — Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, Iran, Egypt, etc. — there were strong, tight-knit communities. At AGBU I often hear from the old-timers: “If I smoked a cigarette in the next town over from where we lived, my mom knew about it before I got home.” Yes, at one time we had that sort of tight-knit community. In the US, we don’t. So back in those countries, a parent who wasn’t as strong as is necessary could have gotten by. The collective strength of the community helped the vast majority of the youth get by. In this “modern” society, the isolation of families means that weak parents lose their kids easily.

So the answer to the question “Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility?” is: Yes, the parents’ and the community’s responsibility. Throughout all of human history, families have been integral parts of tightly knit communities. It is only in our very recent history (100 years or so) that we have developed this idea that families should develop in isolation and take sole responsibility for their children. That idea, although it seems normal to most of us, is actually a grand departure from how humans have developed. Children have never been the sole responsibility of their parents. They have always been the collective responsibility of the community.

I can say from experience that most parents are trying hard to help their kids. I can also say from experience that the community is doing almost nothing to take responsibility for these kids. As a community we do a great job of working with the kids who are doing well but a terrible job of working with those kids who are doing poorly. They fail because we have failed them. These kids are lost because we are losing them.