Leap Of Faith

Changing Oak Hill's culture has proved more difficult. When Schiraldi asked guards to think of themselves as "youth development specialists," two dozen of them promptly quit. Those who remain aren't necessarily believers in a system designed to reward teenagers for good behavior rather than punish them for bad behavior. And there have been setbacks. Two years ago, an 18-year-old died after a fight with two other teens, raising new questions about the adequacy of Oak Hill's supervision.

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"There still hasn't been a tipping point," Schiraldi says. "Some staff have really bought into [the new approach], but others think that these kids need discipline, discipline, discipline. They want to lock these kids down. Because that's an immediate and visceral response to bad behavior: You know, drag a kid and throw him against a wall. If somebody spit in your face, that's what you used to do. But if somebody spits in your face now, you wipe it off; you take a moment, cool off, and then you sit down and talk with that kid about respect."

Even more radical has been Schiraldi's embrace of outside-the-fence outings for Oak Hill's teens, despite the risk that they might bolt or do something to embarrass the detention center. Over the past year, Oak Hill's junior varsity football team played its first away game at H.D. Woodson High School; a theater group performed "Macbeth" at the Folger Shakespeare Library; groups of teens went into city neighborhoods to plant trees and feed the homeless.

Still, when John proposed flying a group of Oak Hill teens 2,500 miles away from Maryland for a wilderness trip, some detention center staff members thought the idea was nuts. What if a teen was injured, committed a crime or simply ran off? "They thought heads would roll," Schiraldi says.

For his part, Schiraldi had only one problem with John's proposal: It wasn't ambitious enough. Schiraldi wanted several trips, not just one. Heck, let's fill the whole summer with them, he told John.

Authorized to act in loco parentis for Oak Hill's teens, Schiraldi was more than willing to answer to the mayor, and a teen's family, if something backfired. The potential benefits far outweighed the risks, he says. These were kids who'd always found their thrills on the streets. Oak Hill had to find a way to compete with that, to provide positive thrills. Though the travel, gear and food would run almost $75,000, Schiraldi thought the cost of the trips would be well worth it. He asked John to find a river without crazed rapids. He made sure the District notified the proper authorities in both Arizona and Utah that juvenile convicts would be within their state boundaries. But Schiraldi worried little about runaways: Where would they run to, after all? Mexican Hat, Utah?

THE TEENS GREET THE PROSPECT OF A THREE-MILE HIKE INTO THE GRAND CANYON WITH A LITANY OF COMPLAINTS. The kids felt cold the night before, and they don't see any other black people, and they can't, most of all, understand the point of hiking switchbacks for three hours if it only returns them to the point at which they started.

"You hiking in those khakis, Jerome?" John asks.

Even the mid-morning sun here is fierce, he explains. You'll regret not changing into mesh shorts, as the others have done.

"I'm a survivor," Jerome says, simply.

John shrugs. "It's just a recommendation," he says. "You don't have to change. But you'll realize later why you were wrong."

John almost never loses his patient, laid-back manner, though his hyped-up young men are already causing a certain amount of mayhem. Five of them snuck from their tents around 4:30 a.m., gathered at the middle of the campground and serenaded the sleeping public with screams of "Good morning." The night before, armed with flashlights and bubbling sexual desires, several canvassed the canyon rim for female campers. They discovered a group of British tourists and told them that they'd come to Arizona as a football team, with John as their coach. When the tourists found Coach John, they offered some advice: Either find your players some girlfriends, or castrate them.