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Cay Shea-Hellervik recently spoke about her program for juvenile offenders in an interview with Tony Moore, a former inmate who now educates community groups on criminal thinking and substance abuse.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Shea-Hellervik, who is CEO of the Shea-Hellervik Global Foundation, emphasized the need for juvenile offenders to change their thinking, if they are to have a chance for decent lives.

She spoke about the importance of young criminals recognizing that what they did is their own fault – and not that of their parents or anyone else.

And she described the pivotal moment when she discovered the work of Stanton E. Samenow, a psychologist whose insights into the criminal mind gave her the basis for a program that – unlike what she had previously tried – worked for serious juvenile offenders.

Here are some highlights of Shea-Hellervik’s remarks (lightly edited):

It’s Not the Parents’ Fault

“Ninety-nine percent of the people that I talk to blame the parents. It’s always the parent’s fault. So, we blame them, then we blame drugs or then we blame the school. We never blame the person who is committing the crime, which is one thing I would really like to convey to other people who are in the field or are thinking about working with these particular youth…Don’t waste your time blaming all these other sources of interaction, because that’s not where it’s at.

“And if you let a child believe that it’s really their parents’ fault or it’s the drug’s fault, then they adopt that thinking. Then they believe it’s really my parents’ fault. So, we stay away from that completely. We go directly to the fact that it’s the person who committed the crime. It’s their fault.

On Finally Discovering an Effective Approach to Treatment

“I did struggle with this for a long time. And one day one of my social workers in the program came to me and said, ‘There’s this new book out, and it’s called “Inside the Criminal Mind”. So, I picked up the phone and called the author of that book (Stanton E. Samenow) and went to a training session that he ran in Chicago the following week. And I walked out of there with my social worker, and we said, ‘This guy knows our kids.’

“Inside the Criminal Mind” established a language in our program…These 52 errors of thinking were so right-on that the kids adopted then, because they said. ‘Hey, that’s who we are.’

“What it’s about is learning these errors in thinking and internalizing them and conceptualizing them, and seeing how they repeatedly affect your whole life – and taking all of that with you when you leave the program.

“I was committed to giving these children something that they could take with them when they left.”

You Are Risking Your Life if You Do Not Change

We told the kids in our program that “a third of you are going to end up dead on the street. A third of you are going to be successful and are going to make it out there, and the other third of you are going to spend your life in prison. So which one would you like to be?“

I was there for the burial of one of our offenders who had been in my program. It was a horrible, horrible situation to find a young person murdered. That child was a person I worked with and that I knew. It was just so hard. We point that (danger) out to these kids, because it is reality. If you are a serious offender and you don’t change there’s a one in three chance that you’re going to be dead on the street. So, you’ve got to change.”