ORANGE : Lending an Ear to Teens Doing Time

When she decided to volunteer some time meeting with young inmates at the county’s Juvenile Hall, Pamela Jones thought she knew exactly what kinds of people she would encounter.

Tough. Cold. Unwilling to listen. Ready to “lay a lot of heavy stuff on me.”

Then she came face to face with two inmates and everything changed. Behind the teens’ tough shells, Jones recognized a certain vulnerability. And beneath the blue detention uniforms she saw a bit of youthful innocence not measured in their criminal records.

“It really hit me. You think that all the kids are bad and that they deserve to be in jail. . . . Then you see that they are all human and that they have problems,” said Jones, one of about 250 people who over the last decade have spent time in the detention facility, offering friendship and attention to the jailed youths.

Detention Ministry, organized by the St. Vincent de Paul Center for Community Reconciliation in Orange, is a Catholic Church-based program dedicated to the belief that there is more to a teen-ager than his rap sheet, and that any child, even one in jail, can benefit from a sympathetic ear.

For the volunteers, forming a relationship with a troubled youth can be an emotional seesaw, uplifting when the youth carves out a happy life after Juvenile Hall and painful when the incarceration seems to mark the beginning of a lifetime of trouble with the law.

Yet despite the occasional disappointments, about 60 longtime volunteers return to the facility week after week, doing what they can to help guide the youths toward satisfying and productive lives.

Sometimes that means dealing with the deep guilt some inmates feel. Other times it means helping them with their reading lessons.

Dottie and Joseph Volz have been passing through the Juvenile Hall metal detectors for seven years. The Huntington Beach couple’s experiences have ranged from discussing the Bible with a 17-year-old to exchanging letters with a former hall inmate who is now in prison.

“We do it for the kids,” Dottie Volz said. “We like to help.”

Detention Ministry offers inmates a variety of programs, but the one-on-one counseling has long been the most popular service, in part because the inmates’ past crimes are not revealed to the volunteers, who are trained to avoid passing judgment.

“You can’t be angry with someone,” said Sister Cathy Vallejo, director of the program. “They need someone to spend time listening to them. They need people.”

That need was apparent this week, when about 180 inmates requested meetings. Because of a shortage of volunteers, 60 youths went without. Even for those who see volunteers, the future can be uncertain, especially in a detention environment that includes murderers, arsonists and robbers. “We have a more criminally sophisticated group of kids today than 10 years ago,” said Tom Wright, director of the 344-bed facility.

Many inmates come from troubled homes that drove them to gang membership or drug use. In some cases, “we become substitute family members,” Vallejo said.

At times, even the most determined inmates can’t go straight, no matter how much volunteers try to help.

“One (youth) seemed very optimistic about things when he left. I really thought that he had got his thinking together,” said longtime volunteer Jane Foley of Newport Beach. “But he went right back into the same environment, and it all fell apart. . . . That’s very painful.”