The Regrets of Young Men
By Dave Eggers
I was first given these stories many months ago, and since that time, I’ve struggled with what to say about them. Though the stories are often funny, and are poignant without exception, there is a tragedy at the core of every one that is plainly overwhelming. When I read these stories, I forget to breathe. From the beginning I’ve felt powerless to add anything of value to this collection.
All the writers represented here are inmates at San Quentin, a minimum up to maximum-security prison just north of San Francisco. Most were convicted of grave crimes and are serving sentences that will keep them behind bars most of their lives. But these men are unusual in that they committed their crimes as very young men.
No. As teenagers. And most teenaged men are not men at all. They are combustible animals capable of many things, but consistent rational thought is not one of them. Teenaged men have gasoline in their veins and wasps in their skulls, and any teenaged man — especially those who live in poverty and near violence — who survives these years of chaos and fury does so against long odds.
I know few men who did not commit crimes when he was young. Teenaged men drink and do drugs. They drive fast and drive drunk. They break things and fight anyone willing to reciprocate. They yell, curse, and run away, only to come back and start over again — more yelling and more mistakes, more offenses large and small. No matter their socioeconomic background, they feel victimized by the systems that confine them — by their families, by their government and the accident of their birth. Rural kids are bent by their isolation. Urban kids are enraged by their limitations. The original sins teenagers feel have been committed upon them are too many to count, so with righteous indignation they take revenge on people, on unseen forces, on the fact of their lives.
Most of us come through these years laughing. We look back on that period of madness in amused disbelief. As older men we shake our heads, wondering if we really did this, said that, astounded we weren’t caught, didn’t kill ourselves or someone else — didn’t burn in a fiery car wreck, didn’t drown or freeze or fall of a cliff. Two inches more and I would have murdered that guy, we say, and we chuckle and we live on.
The men included in this collections were once teenagers, too, but they were not as lucky as the rest of us. They fell in with the wrong people, as we all did, but they went more than two inches in that wrong direction. Most of them were convicted of murder. The gravity of their crimes permitted the state to try them not as juveniles but as adults, and allowed judges to sentence them as adults, too. Most of the men in this writing group have done twenty years in prison and will do decades more. Some will die behind bars for crimes they committed when they were fifteen and sixteen.
But despite this fact, they write. They write inside San Quentin, one of the most bizarre inventions of our world. It’s an inescapable fortress that happens to be located on a breathtaking piece of land, with the San Francisco Bay on one side, the evergreen mountain called Tamalpais rising gently in the Western distance. Above, California sun shines down upon the San Quentin campus most of the year — a blessing of the local microclimates.
San Quentin has a well-kept baseball diamond in the middle of its main recreation yard, and the waterfront is so close you could toss a stone from home plate and hear it drop into the cobalt blue bay. Just off the yard there are a number of portable classrooms, and in one of these classrooms, a group of men write, meet with volunteers, and discuss their work. It resembles a group of aspiring writers anywhere: copies of stories stapled and ready to be marked up, eager pens and pencils, thoughtful suggestions, sincere mutual encouragement and support.
One bright day I walked across the prison yard and into one of these classrooms, and met these men. I knew nothing about any one of them, and I had no idea what crimes they had been convicted of. We sat at folding tables and the men, graying and thoughtful and soft-spoken, read from their work, and I made comments on what they read. That day, none of their work revealed much about them. Rather, the work they read that day was gentle, soft-edged, frozen in time — affectionate memories of childhood and adolescence. I got it into my head that the writers seemed to be intentionally avoiding the nature of their crimes and convictions. They seemed to prefer to reminisce about the halcyon times before all that.
Some time later, the organizers of Kid C.A.T. sent me all the work from their writing group, the collected stories you find here, and I realized how wrong I was. With the complete collection in hand, I got — and now you will get — a shattering picture of lost hopes, of grave and irrevocable mistakes. You will see the full arcs of their lives. And you will see these men take full responsibility for their crimes. A murder committed on a rival gang member. A drive-by shooting committed to avenge a murdered father. The senselessness of the killings is not surprising. If a teenaged man can drive a car into a tree, certainly if you give him a gun, he can pull the trigger.
Most surprising in this collection is that each story bursts with familial love. Every man was loved by their parents. How boldly that contradicts our idea of the convicted man as one who never had a chance! These men had a chance. They had love and guidance. Anouthinh Pangthong writes beautifully about the tight-knit Laotian culture in which he was raised. Emile DeWeaver was the son of a hardworking doctor — a male role model if there ever was one. Antoine “Aziz” Brown had a young life full of happiness, he writes, full of “birthday parties, picnics, family reunions, holidays…” But when he was fourteen, he followed the footsteps of two cousins who had joined the East Coast Crips.
Invariably, these writers now take responsibility for their crimes. They take responsibility for it all. No one is blamed here. Not a judge, not a prosecutor, not a parent, sibling or peer. These men can see who they were and who they are now, with perfect clarity, and they write with breathtaking honesty. Their writing, the process of being heard, of having an outlet in art, has healed them. “I reverberate harmoniously once again,” Phil Melendez writes, “connecting with the world.”
And so we’re left with questions. How long should a man be imprisoned for something he did as a teenager? Is twenty years enough to satisfy the public’s sense of retribution? Thirty years? Is society as a whole benefiting from these men being permanently removed from civilization, these men who are now gray, who move slowly and wear bifocals and write essays and poetry?
I don’t presume to speak for the victims of their crimes, or for the families of the victims. I don’t know the number of years the perpetrator should spend in prison to heal the chasmic wound of loss. In recent years, there have been many instances of reconciliation between murderers and the families of their victims — cases where the families saw no point in sending a contrite defendant to Death Row, cases where it seemed to compound tragedy upon tragedy.
but I do know that we Americans are a punitive race. We like our punishments quick, harsh and permanent. The idea of parole for someone guilty of murder is abhorrent to all but the most liberal among us. We are, though, alone among civilized countries in our treatment of juvenile offenders. In most industrialized nations juveniles are put on a different track, one involving rehabilitation and re-entry into society. We are an outlier in our willingness to try juveniles as adults, and to keep them behind bars for decades, and sometimes for the rest of their lives.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what the right sentence is. I do know that the day I’m writing this essay, John Hinckley Jr., the man who shot and tried to kill Ronald Reagan, is being released from prison. In his attack on Reagan, Hinckley also shot and paralyzed press secretary James Brady Jr., and wounded a Secret Service agent and a police officer. But after 35 years, he’s being paroled. If the man who shot the president is being released, why are some juvenile offenders doing life?
Humans are nothing if not flawed — capable of extremes, of wild inconsistencies and hypocrisies, so it follows that a system of justice made in our image would similarly constructed. But it’s worth pondering whether our system of sentencing should be both inconsistent and extreme.
Can we value life but feel content to imprison a man for half a century? Can we acknowledge the universally irrational behaviors of teenagers, but hold a fifty-year-old man eternally responsible for the crimes of his fifteen-year-old self? Read these stories and see if your mind isn’t changed. See if you learn something about how we evolve, how we understand each other, how we can learn from our errors, no matter how grave, and how we can forgive.
Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is The What, and Zeitoun, among other titles. He is also the founder of McSweeney’s, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition.
