Leap Of Faith

Gallery
Rough Terrain
Can eight days in the wilderness change anything for a group of troubled teens from a decaying D.C. detention center?

The plane reaches the runway and accelerates for takeoff. Its thrust pushes the teens against their seats, and Jerome broadcasts his anxiety like a preacher delivering a sermon. He chants: "No, no-no, no-no . . . Get it on the ground! Get it on the ground!"

John Mein, sitting three rows in front of Jerome, pays no attention to the commotion. At the appropriate altitude, he unfolds his laptop and double-clicks on a Microsoft Word document.

Eight months into his job as Oak Hill's recreation director, John is the one who conceived of this trip, won approval for it and then set about planning its every detail. This is the fourth group of troubled, mostly African American teens he's led into the wilderness this summer -- a reward for the kids who had improved their behavior. At the end of this final trip, half of Oak Hill's 85 residents, who range in age from 14 to 19, and who have committed crimes from car theft to assault to drug-dealing, will have camped with John under the moonlight. For each journey, John ordered the sleeping bags and water shoes, scouted the campgrounds and obtained the permits. Who distributes the kids' medicine? John. Teaches them to survive the undercurrent of rapids? John. Plans every bite of every meal? Yes, John. And that's why he needs a good hour right now, so he can type out an itemized list so he can walk into Costco on the drive through Flagstaff, Ariz., and buy just enough oatmeal, pasta and lighter fluid to last a week.

The teens know him as the outdoors guy. He's an Eagle Scout, expert kayaker and devout Christian with a voice that never rises. When one teen asks John what he keeps inside his car, the bearded, white 28-year-old deadpans, "My Glock," before bursting into laugher. (He actually keeps a Bible on the center console.) He'll let the kids listen to rapper Jim Jones, but upon hearing a single curse word, he'll skip to the next track.

In a way, John has spent adulthood skipping from track to track, always jumping to the next place where people need him. After college, he worked with inner-city youths at a D.C. church, eventually being ordained as a minister. Then he switched gears, entering the police academy and becoming a D.C. cop. At the beginning of this year, he was patrolling some of the city's toughest streets. Then one evening, a call interrupted his dinner. He was told to head to a homicide scene, where he found a teenager with a bullet in his head. John recognized the kid immediately. It was the same kid he'd stopped three days earlier for being on the streets beyond curfew. John had stopped him, warned him, and it had meant nothing. Soon after, John gave up policing and took the job at Oak Hill. Working inside its fences, he reasoned, would allow him to help kids from a different angle. He'd learn their world. Then, he'd take them someplace new.

John knows that the teens on the plane are skeptical of this wilderness trip. He also knows that they've endured struggles beyond anything they'll face in the next eight days: One boy lost his father in a drive-by shooting; another already has two young children; all have somersaulted for months or years through the justice system. (As juveniles, their crimes are not public record, and The Post has agreed not to reveal how they landed at Oak Hill.) Still, John believes these trips have the power to change the youths' lives. In a prison like Oak Hill, John says, most teens construct a protective facade and refuse to let anyone or anything penetrate it. But in a place where they are uncomfortable, uncertain, they will allow some space for vulnerability. And that's how healing, and learning, begin.

The plane is several thousand feet high now, Baltimore in the distance. Jerome steals a glance at the industrial patchwork below. It's a new perspective. The rooftops look like a bunch of gridlocked school buses, he says. He pulls at the brim of his blue trucker hat, pushing a slight indent against his worming dreadlocks, and says, with a trace of wonder, "We up there with the sun now."

JEROME HAS SPENT MUCH OF THE PAST YEAR INSIDE ONE OF THE COUNTRY'S WORST-REGARDED JUVENILE DETENTION CENTERS, notorious for its dilapidated conditions and long history of dealing with teens as prisoners in need of discipline, rather than as young people in need of help.

Opened 40 years ago, Oak Hill sits on an isolated expanse of land 25 miles north of the District. The winding road leading to its entrance is dotted on all sides by abandoned, vine-covered brick buildings. Barbed wire crawls up 25-foot-high fences in thick, menacing circles. Cockroaches and rats have long infested Oak Hill's classrooms and dormitories (which once housed as many as 250 teenagers but whose numbers have dropped dramatically in the last few years). Conditions were so decrepit that a class-action lawsuit was filed in 1985 on behalf of the kids confined there. That has led to years of legal wrangling, with District officials repeatedly pledging to fix Oak Hill and court-appointed monitors repeatedly finding evidence that the city has failed miserably.

Some teens spent up to 22 hours each day locked down in cells, according to one scathing report in 2004 that called for a court takeover of Oak Hill and the agency that runs it. Residents of Unit 10 stuffed towels in gaps between the floors and toilets to ward off rats. Cells and offices were either unbearably hot or bone-chillingly cold. Drugs and weapons were easy to come by. After witnessing fights that led to broken bones or discovering fifths of gin hidden by teenagers, Oak Hill's staff would fail to file incident reports.

Enter Vince Schiraldi, a well-known juvenile justice advocate who'd once equated Oak Hill to a "dungeon" and demanded that it be shut down. Instead of closing Oak Hill, then-Mayor Anthony Williams hired Schiraldi to fix it. In 2005, Schiraldi took over as director of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services and set out to transform a place long resistant to reform.

Oak Hill's dormitories are being renovated, giving teenagers living rooms with DVD players and overstuffed couches, and bathrooms with shower curtains for privacy. Though Jerome and other residents are still locked behind steel doors at night, their cells now have wooden beds instead of the metal ones that were bolted to the floor.