The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018

by Sam Kean

  The psychologists Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek thought much the same thing when they opened the Mendota facility in 1995, in response to a nationwide epidemic of youth violence in the early 1990s. Instead of placing young offenders in a juvenile prison until they were released to commit more—and more violent—crimes as adults, the Wisconsin legislature set up a new treatment center to try to break the cycle of pathology. Mendota would operate within the Department of Health Services, not the Department of Corrections. It would be run by psychologists and psychiatric-care technicians, not wardens and guards. It would employ one staff member for every three kids—quadruple the ratio at other juvenile-corrections facilities.

  Caldwell and Van Rybroek tell me that the state’s high-security juvenile-corrections facility was supposed to send over its most mentally ill boys between the ages of twelve and seventeen. It did, but what Caldwell and Van Rybroek didn’t anticipate was that the boys the facility transferred were also its most menacing and recalcitrant. They recall their first few assessments. “The kid would walk out, and we would turn to each other and say, ‘That’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Caldwell says. Each one seemed more threatening than the last. “We’re looking at each other and saying, ‘Oh, no. What have we done?’” Van Rybroek adds.

  What they have done, by trial and error, is achieve something most people thought impossible: if they haven’t cured psychopathy, they’ve at least tamed it.

  Many of the teenagers at Mendota grew up on the streets, without parents, and were beaten up or sexually abused. Violence became a defense mechanism. Caldwell and Van Rybroek recall a group-therapy session a few years ago in which one boy described being strung up by his wrists and hung from the ceiling as his father cut him with a knife and rubbed pepper in the wounds. “Hey,” several other kids said, “that’s like what happened to me.” They called themselves the “piñata club.”

  But not everyone at Mendota was “born in hell,” as Van Rybroek puts it. Some of the boys were raised in middle-class homes with parents whose major sin was not abuse but paralysis in the face of their terrifying child. No matter the history, one secret to diverting them from adult psychopathy is to wage an unrelenting war of presence. At Mendota, the staff calls this “decompression.” The idea is to allow a young man who has been living in a state of chaos to slowly rise to the surface and acclimate to the world without resorting to violence.

  Caldwell mentions that, two weeks ago, one patient became furious over some perceived slight or injustice; every time the techs checked on him, he would squirt urine or feces through the door. (This is a popular pastime at Mendota.) The techs would dodge it and return 20 minutes later, and he would do it again. “This went on for several days,” Caldwell says. “But part of the concept of decompression is that the kid’s going to get tired at some point. And one of those times you’re going to come there and he’s going to be tired, or he’s just not going to have any urine left to throw at you. And you’re going to have a little moment where you’re going to have a positive connection there.”

  Cindy Ebsen, the operations director, who is also a registered nurse, gives me a tour of Mendota’s North Hall. As we pass the metal doors with their narrow windows, the boys peer out and the yelling subsides into entreaties. “Cindy, Cindy, can you get me some candy?” “I’m your favorite, aren’t I, Cindy?” “Cindy, why don’t you visit me anymore?”

  She pauses to banter with each of them. The young men who pass through these halls have murdered and maimed, carjacked and robbed at gunpoint. “But they’re still kids. I love working with them, because I see the most success in this population,” as opposed to older offenders, Ebsen says. For many, friendship with her or another staff member is the first safe connection they’ve known.

  Forming attachments with callous kids is important, but it’s not Mendota’s singular insight. The center’s real breakthrough involves deploying the anomalies of the psychopathic brain to one’s advantage—specifically, downplaying punishment and dangling rewards. These boys have been expelled from school, placed in group homes, arrested, and jailed. If punishment were going to rein them in, it would have by now. But their brains do respond, enthusiastically, to rewards. At Mendota, the boys can accumulate points to join ever more prestigious “clubs” (Club 19, Club 23, the VIP Club). As they ascend in status, they earn privileges and treats—candy bars, baseball cards, pizza on Saturdays, the chance to play Xbox or stay up late. Hitting someone, throwing urine, or cussing out the staff costs a boy points—but not for long, since callous and unemotional kids aren’t generally deterred by punishment.

  I am, frankly, skeptical—will a kid who knocked down an elderly lady and stole her Social Security check (as one Mendota resident did) really be motivated by the promise of Pokémon cards? But then I walk down the South Hall with Ebsen. She stops and turns toward a door on our left. “Hey,” she calls, “do I hear internet radio?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m in the VIP Club,” a voice says. “Can I show you my basketball cards?”

  Ebsen unlocks the door to reveal a skinny seventeen-year-old boy with a nascent mustache. He fans out his collection. “This is, like, 50 basketball cards,” he says, and I can almost see his reward centers glowing. “I have the most and best basketball cards here.” Later, he sketches out his history for me: His stepmother had routinely beat him and his stepbrother had used him for sex. When he was still a preteen, he began molesting the younger girl and boy next door. The abuse continued for a few years, until the boy told his mother. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care,” he says. “I just wanted the pleasure.”

  At Mendota, he has begun to see that short-term pleasure could land him in prison as a sex offender, while deferred gratification can confer more-lasting dividends: a family, a job, and most of all, freedom. Unlikely as it sounds, this revelation sprang from his ardent pursuit of basketball cards.

  After he details the center’s point system (a higher math that I cannot follow), the boy tells me that a similar approach should translate into success in the outside world—as if the world, too, operates on a point system. Just as consistent good behavior confers basketball cards and internet radio inside these walls, so—he believes—will it bring promotions at work. “Say you’re a cook; you can [become] a waitress if you’re doing really good,” he says. “That’s the way I look at it.”

  He peers at me, as if searching for confirmation. I nod, hoping that the world will work this way for him. Even more, I hope his insight will endure.

  In fact, the program at Mendota has changed the trajectory for many young men, at least in the short term. Caldwell and Van Rybroek have tracked the public records of 248 juvenile delinquents after their release. One hundred forty-seven of them had been in a juvenile-corrections facility, and 101 of them—the harder, more psychopathic cases—had received treatment at Mendota. In the four and a half years since their release, the Mendota boys have been far less likely to reoffend (64 percent versus 97 percent), and far less likely to commit a violent crime (36 percent versus 60 percent). Most striking, the ordinary delinquents have killed 16 people since their release. The boys from Mendota? Not one.

  “We thought that as soon as they walked out the door, they’d last maybe a week or two and they’d have another felony on their record,” Caldwell says. “And when the data first came back that showed that that wasn’t happening, we figured there was something wrong with the data.” For two years, they tried to find mistakes or alternative explanations, but eventually they concluded that the results were real.

  The question they are trying to answer now is this: can Mendota’s treatment program not only change the behavior of these teens but measurably reshape their brains as well? Researchers are optimistic, in part because the decision-making part of the brain continues to evolve into one’s mid-twenties. The program is like neural weight lifting, Kent Kiehl, at the University of New Mexico, says. “If you exercise this limbic-related circuitry
, it’s going to get better.”

  To test this hypothesis, Kiehl and the staff at Mendota are now asking some 300 young men to slide into a mobile brain scanner. The scanner records the shape and size of key areas of the boys’ brains, as well as how their brains react to tests of decision-making ability, impulsivity, and other qualities that go to the core of psychopathy. Each boy’s brain will be scanned before, during, and at the end of their time in the program, offering researchers insights into whether his improved behavior reflects better functioning inside his brain.

  No one believes that Mendota graduates will develop true empathy or a heartfelt moral conscience. “They may not go from the Joker in The Dark Knight to Mister Rogers,” Caldwell tells me, laughing. But they can develop a cognitive moral conscience, an intellectual awareness that life will be more rewarding if they play by the rules. “We’re just happy if they stay on this side of the law,” Van Rybroek says. “In our world, that’s huge.”

  How many can stay the course for a lifetime? Caldwell and Van Rybroek have no idea. They’re barred from contacting former patients—a policy meant to ensure that the staff and former patients maintain appropriate boundaries. But sometimes graduates write or call to share their progress, and among these correspondents, Carl, now thirty-seven, stands out.

  Carl (not his real name) emailed a thankful note to Van Rybroek in 2013. Aside from one assault conviction after he left Mendota, he had stayed out of trouble for a decade and opened his own business—a funeral home near Los Angeles. His success was especially significant because he was one of the harder cases, a boy from a good home who seemed wired for violence.

  Carl was born in a small town in Wisconsin. The middle child of a computer programmer and a special-education teacher, “he came out angry,” his father recalls during a phone conversation. His acts of violence started small—hitting a classmate in kindergarten—but quickly escalated: ripping the head off his favorite teddy bear, slashing the tires on the family car, starting fires, killing his sister’s hamster.

  His sister remembers Carl, when he was about eight, swinging their cat in circles by its tail, faster and faster, and then letting go. “And you hear her hit the wall.” Carl just laughed.

  Looking back, even Carl is puzzled by the rage that coursed through him as a child. “I remember when I bit my mom really hard, and she was bleeding and crying. I remember feeling so happy, so overjoyed—completely fulfilled and satisfied,” he tells me on the phone. “It wasn’t like someone kicked me in the face and I was trying to get him back. It was more like a weird, hard-to-explain feeling of hatred.”

  His behavior confused and eventually terrified his parents. “It just got worse and worse as he got bigger,” his father tells me. “Later, when he was a teenager and occasionally incarcerated, I was happy about it. We knew where he was and that he’d be safe, and that took a load off the mind.”

  By the time Carl arrived at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in November 1995, at age fifteen, he had been placed in a psychiatric hospital, a group home, foster care, or a juvenile-corrections center about a dozen times. His police record listed 18 charges, including armed burglary and 3 “crimes against persons,” one of which sent the victim to the hospital. Lincoln Hills, a high-security juvenile-corrections facility, foisted him on Mendota after he accumulated more than 100 serious infractions in less than four months. On an assessment called the Youth Psychopathy Checklist, he scored 38 out of a possible 40—five points higher than the average for Mendota boys, who were among the most dangerous young men in Wisconsin.

  Carl had a rocky start at Mendota: weeks of abusing staff, smearing feces around his cell, yelling all night, refusing to shower, and spending much of the time locked in his room, not allowed to mix with the other kids. Slowly, though, his psychology began to shift. The staff’s unruffled constancy chipped away at his defenses. “These people were like zombies,” Carl recalls, laughing. “You could punch them in the face and they wouldn’t do anything.”

  He started talking in therapy and in class. He quit mouthing off and settled down. He developed the first real bonds in his young life. “The teachers, the nurses, the staff, they all seemed to have this idea that they could make a difference in us,” he says. “Like, Huh! Something good could come of us. We were believed to have potential.”

  Carl wasn’t exactly in the clear. After two stints at Mendota, he was released just before his eighteenth birthday, got married, and at age twenty was arrested for beating up a police officer. In prison, he wrote a suicide note, fashioned a makeshift noose, and was put on suicide watch in solitary confinement. While there, he began reading the Bible and fasting, and one day, he says, “something very powerful shifted.” He began to believe in God. Carl acknowledges that his lifestyle falls far short of the Christian ideal. But he still attends church every week, and he credits Mendota with paving the way for his conversion. By the time he was released, in 2003, his marriage had dissolved, and he moved away from Wisconsin, eventually settling in California, where he opened his funeral home.

  Carl cheerfully admits that the death business appeals to him. As a child, he says, “I had a deep fascination with knives and cutting and killing, so it’s a harmless way to express some level of what you might call morbid curiosity. And I think that morbid curiosity taken to its extreme—that’s the home of the serial killers, okay? So it’s that same energy. But everything in moderation.”

  Of course, his profession also requires empathy. Carl says that he had to train himself to show empathy for his grieving clients, but that it now comes naturally. His sister agrees that he’s been able to make this emotional leap. “I’ve seen him interact with the families, and he’s phenomenal,” she tells me. “He is amazing at providing empathy and providing that shoulder for them. And it does not fit with my view of him at all. I get confused. Is that true? Does he genuinely feel for them? Is he faking the whole thing? Does he even know at this point?”

  After talking with Carl, I begin to see him as a remarkable success story. “Without [Mendota] and Jesus,” he tells me, “I would have been a Manson-, Bundy-, Dahmer-, or Berkowitz-type of criminal.” Sure, his fascination with the morbid is a little creepy. Yet here he is, now remarried, the father of a one-year-old son he adores, with a flourishing business. After our phone interview, I decide to meet him in person. I want to witness his redemption for myself.

  The night before I’m scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, I receive a frantic email from Carl’s wife. Carl is in police custody. He considers himself polyamorous and had invited one of his girlfriends over to their apartment. They were playing with the baby when his wife returned. She was furious and grabbed their son. Carl responded by pulling her hair, snatching the baby out of her arms, and taking her phone to prevent her from calling the police. She called from a neighbor’s house instead. (Carl says he grabbed the baby to protect him.) Three misdemeanor charges—spousal battery, abandonment and neglect of a child, and intimidation of a witness—and the psychopath who made good is now in jail.

  I go to Los Angeles anyway, in the naive hope that Carl will be released on bail at his hearing the next day. A few minutes before 8:30 a.m., his wife and I meet at the courthouse and begin the long wait. She is 12 years Carl’s junior, a compact woman with long black hair and a weariness that ebbs only when she gazes at her son. She met Carl on OkCupid two years ago while visiting L.A. and—after a romance of just a few months—moved to California to marry him. Now she sits outside the courtroom, one eye on her son, fielding calls from clients of the funeral home and wondering whether she can make bail.

  “I’m so sick of the drama,” she says, as the phone rings again.

  Carl is a tough man to be married to. His wife says he’s funny and charming and a good listener, but he sometimes loses interest in the funeral business, leaving most of the work to her. He brings other women home for sex, even when she’s there. And while he’s never seriously beaten her up, he has slapped her.

  “He
would say sorry, but I don’t know if he was upset or not,” she tells me.

  “So you wondered if he felt genuine remorse?”

  “Honestly, I’m at a point where I don’t really care anymore. I just want my son and myself to be safe.”

  Finally, at 3:15 p.m., Carl shuffles into the courtroom, handcuffed, wearing an orange L.A. County jumpsuit. He gives us a two-handed wave and flashes a carefree smile, which fades when he learns that he will not be released on bail today, despite pleading guilty to assault and battery. He will remain in jail for another three weeks.

  Carl calls me the day after his release. “I really shouldn’t have a girlfriend and a wife,” he says, in what seems an uncharacteristic display of remorse. He insists that he wants to keep his family together, and says that he thinks the domestic-violence classes the court has mandated will help him. He seems sincere.

  When I describe the latest twist in Carl’s story to Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek, they laugh knowingly. “This counts as a good outcome for a Mendota guy,” Caldwell says. “He’s not going to have a fully healthy adjustment to life, but he’s been able to stay mostly within the law. Even this misdemeanor—he’s not committing armed robberies or shooting people.”

  His sister sees her brother’s outcome in a similar light. “This guy got dealt a shittier hand of cards than anybody I’ve ever met,” she tells me. “Who deserves to have started out life that way? And the fact that he’s not a raving lunatic, locked up for the rest of his life, or dead is insane.”

  I ask Carl whether it’s difficult to play by the rules, to simply be normal. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard is it?” he says. “I would say an 8. Because 8’s difficult, very difficult.”