TWe got lucky with our guides. If we got DCF administrators, we would have had a completely different tour. I never would have been able to interact the young man focused in Ji Jaga’s life.

 

Nor could I could have talked to the four teens sitting in front of the television at the on-prison Boys’ Club lounge, where we went after the dormitory experience.

 

I walked over and told them we were QUSL students. I explained how law school takes three to four years to complete, and that we were all in different stages of the process.

 

Anyone can go to law school, I said. Some of us here have even caught charges, I said. They looked at me like I was crazy. Honest, I said, I got nailed for breach of peace and interfering with an officer for standing on a sidewalk taking pictures. I go back to court March 2.

 

They were dumbfounded. Or maybe it was the smell of hot Chinese take out settling across the common area of the Boys and Girls Club on campus. Jamie, a 3L, came over and asked one of them how he thought living in CJTS was.

 

In a word, he said it sucked. I didn’t want to ask him that. I always figured that it wouldn’t be fun to live in a $57 million detention facility for wayward youth, especially where the main movers behind the no-bid contract that built it, including a governor, his chief of staff and a construction magnate, all ended up in jail.

 

While John G. Rowland and his cronies ended up in federal country clubs, and now are all back on the streets, the boys who live in CJTS pay the price of their corruption. The public policy which begat CJTS was avarice and greed.

 

I wish I had the time to sit down and explain all this to the young men in CJTS, sitting in the Boys’ Club salon next to foosball and air hockey tables. But they already know the story, and can fill in the remaining blanks with their own details. Our tour had to move on, to see more in the newly-refurbished Boys Club.

 

The only reason a Boys Club exists on campus is because DCF deemed the highest security of the four dormitories too restrictive for the overall philosophy of the program, which seems to have migrated from punishment to rehabilitation.

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