At the crack of dawn, Mike Roper starts his daily routine with the energy of a man half his age. He motivates himself to show the young adults that he works with what it could be like for them if they make the right choices.
Roper, a crew supervisor and team leader at Roca told MassLive that crime can be addictive. Fast money and the notoriety one gets as a gangster is appealing for many young people as it was for him in his youth, he admits.
“Because of my story and how I was brought up, I can relate to a lot of these young men,” said Roper. “So now my job is to get them to understand that, if I was doing all of that and I’m here now it shows that what I was doing wasn’t working for me and most likely it won’t work for you either.”
During the interview, he exposed his forearm that showed a tattoo. The dark ink showed a Star of David and the letters G and D flanking it. He said that it was the symbol of one of the most notorious street gangs in America, the Gangster Disciples. A permanent reminder of his days as a gangster in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Roper had been shot multiple times during his criminal career. He showed the scars of where the bullets had pierced his skin. Once, Roper said, a bullet skimmed the top of his skull in a street battle with another rival group. He said at first he didn’t notice he’d been shot. It was only when the blood ran into his eyes that he appreciated how lucky he had been not to have died that day.
This was just one of the many near-death experiences Roper has had in the 33 years he has been alive.
Roper served 10 years at the state’s only maximum-security prison, the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster for drug dealing and voluntary manslaughter.
“During my incarceration, I was actually participating in a lot of groups. Anger management, drug treatment. I just took a lot of responsibility towards myself,” Roper said.
During his decade at the prison, he came to realize that the way he was living before
wasn’t a life and that if when he was released and went back to his old habits, he might not see his next birthday.
“I was very young. I was very misguided,” Roper asserted.
Mike Roper leads the landscaping crews and is able to empathis with the young people he leads due to his past mistakes. He spent 10 years atthe state's maximum security prison Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley. (Douglas Hook / MassLive)
As Roper spoke about his former days as a gang member and the crimes he committed his voice changed. He spoke slower. He was more thoughtful in his descriptions and showed awkwardness in retelling his own story.
“I wanted to change my lifestyle when I came home,” said Roper. “That’s why it took me really focusing on myself and asking, ‘do you really want to be like this for the rest of your life? Do you want to spend the rest of your life sitting in the cage being incarcerated? Or do you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor of your freedom?’ That was a real wake-up call.”
Growing up in St. Louis, Roper said that he was constantly in trouble from mixing with people that he saw at the time to be individuals he wanted to emulate — gang members in his community. It was only through spending time locked up that he sought to change his life.
Looking to inform and educate those going down a path that he did, he now works with younger generations who are in the same situation he was. He said that it is hard to make some of the young men, coming through Roca’s doors see that a life of crime isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even if they survive it, they’re forever looking over their shoulder.
“That’s just the reality of living in the streets,” said Roper. “It’s not a lifestyle where you guarantee you’re going to make it or you’re going to be successful. The odds are really stacked against you because what we’re doing is illegal.”
Only having joined the Roca team in May 2021, Roper told MassLive that the best way he can teach people to turn away from a life of crime is by example.
“I’m up at four o’clock. I’m doing my regimen. I worked out and I come straight to work,” said Roper. “I teach my guys to take pride in their work to take honor in your work when you’re doing your work, do it like if you were cutting your back yard or clean it up like if you were cleaning up your house.”
He hopes the young adults see how hard he works and they get something important from that kind of example. He admitted that landscaping is hard work and he personally isn’t making himself financially wealthy. Roca’s youth worker salaries start at $50,000 per year.
“But he still carries himself with so much pride and dignity,” Roper quoted a Roca youth saying about him.
The salaries at Roca are modest with the founder, Molly Baldwin, earning approximately $185,000 annually and Christine M. Judd, director of Roca in Springfield and Holyoke around $120,000. However, money isn’t the motivator for the staff, Roper admitted to MassLive.
Many of the staff see themselves in the young people at the center and want them to make better choices than they did in their youth.
Roper told MassLive that he wished that he had been able to be involved with a program like Emerging Adult Court of Hope (EACH) when he was younger, rather than learning the hard way through prison.
Having a role model, someone that young people can look at and strive to emulate in a positive way is just one of the features Roca provides its troubled young adults that are part of the EACH program.
All the participants are aged 18 through 24 years old. Many of the men enrolled in the EACH program grew up without a male role model or at least a positive one.
All of the EACH program participants are required to attend Roca and take part in the Transitional Employment Program (TEP).
TEP for the EACH participants is 45 days working with the Roca crews doing everything from painting houses to landscaping. It’s hard work and much tougher than serving time, Judd added.
However, once the participant has worked with the crews and shown that they’re able to function in a daily work environment, they can move onto the next stage of the program.
EACH offers those involved a chance to have their criminal offense erased and help in finding a career.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said that when he looks at potential participants for the program, one of the indicators for being considered is their history.
“We really, by design, wanted to disrupt the cycle of incarceration,” said Gulluni. “Again, knowing that these young people very often have somewhat similar backgrounds. You know, they started in poor situations, they started with bad influences, not the right sort of enrichment around them, not the right environment and that led them into situations where they were not learning in school, where they were not doing positive things.”
The DA continued to say that many on the program continue to see negativity and bad role models around them from childhood into their teenage years.
“That of course leads to misbehavior and ultimately crime as kids. Then we see the cycle get more vicious, where they become adults and commit crimes,” Gulluni added.
Gulluni created the EACH program to give young people like David and Sedale, as well as the four other young men currently involved in the program a second chance.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni in the conference room on the 28th floor of the Tower Square building. (Douglas Hook / MassLive) Douglas Hook
“I think if you look at the young people right now and you hear their stories, just about every case of our six participants, each one has been very forthcoming and open about his background, about his challenges, or a lack of positive role models,” said Gulluni. “Particularly male role models are a big piece of it. I mean, I think it’s implicit and I think it’s inferential from what we hear from these young people.”
It’s one thing putting the six current participants into the program, but it’s another keeping them on the straight and narrow after they finish the minimum 18 months of work laid out for them if they have no one to look at as an example, the DA said.
For the DA, a partnership with Roca seemed like the obvious choice.
Founded by Baldwin 34 years ago in Chelsea, Roca went on to expand west in 2010. In 2020, the organization served over 900 high-risk young people across 21 communities in Massachusetts. The non-profit most recently expanded to Baltimore, the model’s newest city and where Baldwin, the founder, was raised.
Like Roper, the majority of Roca’s staff and supervisors have personal, lived experience with law enforcement and state systems that the young adults are dealing with when they’re enrolled.
When looking for new staff at the non-profit, that history and experience is exactly what Judd looks for.
“It’s my job and the organization’s job to make sure that these young people have individuals in their lives who look like them, who have a story like theirs, who they can look up to in a positive way and can say, ‘you know what, he used to be me or she used to be me and she’s not where I am right now. She’s where I want to be,’” Judd stated.
Roca is a partially taxpayer-funded, non-profit program established specifically to steer young men away from violence. Roca is the Spanish word meaning rock. In addition to the DA’s Each program, Roca’s referrals mostly come from the courts, probation agencies, jails and police.
“We try our best to try to get behavior change in there,” said Ronald Mitchell, a supervisor at the Springfield Roca. “And that’s why we do the CBT. To try to get them to understand that when they get caught in that spin and that quick decision, that if they pause for a moment and all of a sudden, hopefully, something will come to them to make them decide to do something different.”
Christine Judd, director of Roca in Springfield and Holyoke demonstrates the CBT model that all the Roca young adults follow as well as the participants of the Emerging Adult Court of Hope (EACH) program. (Douglas Hook / MassLive) Douglas Hook
CBT, or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is a staple of the course as laid out by the founder of Roca and as soon as the young adults first attend, they are taught to identify their destructive think-feel-do tendencies.
Judd used the whiteboard in one of the classrooms to show the layout of the CBT program. She then went on to show how a young person can use seven skills to disrupt the negative cycles that landed them at Roca in the first place.
1. Be present
2. Label your feelings
3. Move it
4. Action your values
5. Stick with it
6. Flex your thinking
7. Solve it
These tools are given to help young adults have better judgment. The environment the young adults grew up in is one of the reasons that many are quick to anger or commit crimes. It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT test. According to scientific studies, good judgment isn’t something those under 25 years old can excel at.
The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.
In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
Leah H. Somerville, a Harvard neuroscientist laid out the research in detail in the journal Neuron published in 2016.
According to Somerville, the human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.
Eventually, this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.
The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by 20 years old. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.
As the anatomy of the brain changes, its activity changes as well. In a child’s brain, neighboring regions tend to work together. By adulthood, distant regions start acting in concert. Neuroscientists have speculated that this long-distance harmony lets the adult brain work more efficiently and process more information.
This could be why EACH participant Sedale described an environment where “bad is good and good is bad” and anyone who thinks differently is “lame” or “just old.”
Rational thinking isn’t something that his brain is wired up to process the way older adults do.
There are clear signs that the judicial system is rethinking the way young offenders are being treated when they commit crimes.
“The science behind the brain development isn’t brand new, but we don’t know where we’re catching up with the times, but I also think that, I mean, somebody has started and it’s a risk,” said former District Judge Maureen Walsh. “So, the easiest thing for the district attorney is to say, ‘lock them up. That’s my role. Send them off to jail, or state prison,’ and we all know what will happen. The odds of them succeeding are low with felony convictions and having spent a part of their formative years incarcerated.”
Christine Judd welled up talking to MassLive about changes and the progress the participants have shown on the Emerging Adult Court of Hope (EACH) program.(Douglas Hook / MassLive) Douglas Hook
In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court started to take notice of such psychological research on young adults in an oral argument in court of a 17-year-old who was accused of committing first-degree murder. The Supreme Court referenced this research again in another case in Florida in 2010 and again in Alabama in 2012.
According to the American Psychological Association, a study was conducted looking at the impact of punishment for crimes as a young adult.
“Youths [in the study] all experience the juvenile justice system, but how they experience it has an impact on their subsequent behavior,” said Elizabeth Cauffman, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. “Basically, if you have two youths who have committed the same crime but you formally process one and informally process the other, the one who is formally processed will engage in more criminal behavior and is more likely to be re-arrested.”
The six young men still have to complete the program and are still a little way off finishing their required program. Whether the EACH program is successful or not, the proof is in the pudding when it comes to Roca’s model.
It’s not perfect, as Judd acknowledged in an interview with the Republican in May. In fact, she said that they’re expected to make mistakes.
“In the first year, to expect our young people not to resort to violence ever again is unrealistic,” Judd said.
Time and patience is what is needed.
“It’s like a lot of these guys never got compliments. They never heard they did good at anything,” said Roper. “So, I make sure I let them know that when they’re doing something good.”
Judd is emotionally invested in the program and wells up thinking of the progress made by participants, aged 18 through 25 years old, through the Emerging Adult Court of Hope (EACH) program.
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