wing’s common area, and that’s also where the guys hang out to play cards and watch TV.
The daily grind at Green Hill means school from 8 a.m. until lunch, then back to the housing unit for a while, then back to school until 4 p.m. Kids work on their high school diplomas, GEDs, or pre-college courses, and get vocational training in computers, metal shop, vehicle maintenance, and landscaping. Along with classes, the kids go to various meetings, like AA and NA (Narcotics Anonymous), depending on their issues. Green Hill staff say that about 95 percent of the kids come in with substance-abuse problems. All the boys also take part in therapy.
Washington’s JRA uses the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) treatment model. “Most of the kids we get don’t know how to appropriately interact with people or deal with stress or their own emotions,” says one longtime staffer. “DBT offers one-on-one counseling, skills acquisitions groups, and milieu therapy, which is a monitoring of their activities in the environment to see what other interventions and coaching are needed.”
After school, the kids get one hour of recreation and then they’re sent back to their housing unit, where they can watch TV and play video games until bedtime. Each boy is allowed a ten-minute phone call every night, and can request a second. Parents can call in, and the kids can call out collect. On weekends, they’re allowed outside to play baseball, football, and gang war.
MS-13, Surenos, Nortenos, Bloods, Crips… according to staff and former inmates, Green Hill has “tons of gang activity.” The gangs take part in frequent race-based beat downs, including choreographed events where they’ll start numerous fights at the same time in order to overwhelm the guards’ abilities to respond. Serious infractions of the rules are punished by a timeout in Intense Management Unit (IMU), where bad boys are put on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. Not every kid coming into Green Hill has to pledge to a gang, though. “There are groups of kids that aren’t involved,” says a staff member. “It’s like high school, there are different cliques… like over here you have the cheerleaders, and over here you have the Crips.”
“I stayed out of the gangs, and so did Colt,” says Josh from Point Roberts. “But there were still a lot of fights and lots of people just running up on guys and beating them up.” Josh was sentenced to three years in Green Hill for malicious mischief—“I stole a boat and wrecked it on a beach”—and for intimidating a witness. When Colt arrived at Maple Unit, he and Josh found out they lived not too far away from each other on Puget Sound. “We got pretty tight,” says Josh. Colt told him that his dad had been in the army. “And he said his mom used to be a sheriff, but he didn’t get along with her.”
Josh says Colton stood out among the kids at Green Hill. “Colt was a nice guy and smart, really smart.” Proof, he says, was that Colton read books and studied subjects other than what they were forced to for class. “He knows things, uses a lot of big words.” Staff at Green Hill say the average reading level inside is about fifth grade, so any book learnin’ can come off as smart. According to Josh, Colton had three specific interests he liked to study: “Criminology, psychology, and flying.”
One of Colt’s favorite books while in Green Hill was a psychology text on how to diagnose various disorders. At one point, says Pam, Colt called and diagnosed her with ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder.
According to Josh, a lot of Colton’s airplane research came from the guards. “He talked about wanting to fly a lot. And you could ask the guards to look up stuff for you online. It was up to them whether they’d give it to you or not, but he asked for a bunch of information on flying, and they downloaded it for him.”
The kids don’t have Internet access themselves, but staff members say they’d do research for them as a reward, “a motivational tool to stay in treatment.” One of Green Hill’s computers also had a flight simulator on it, and Colton jumped on that as often as possible.
Another thing about Colt that stood out was his manner. “He didn’t swear at all, which was really rare,” and it wasn’t long before he started having trouble with the other boys. “Guys picked on him a lot in there,” says Josh. “They’d punk him, take his stuff, and push him around, smack him. He wouldn’t fight back, which made it worse.”
In a shark tank milieu like juvie, acting less than tough can get you turned into chum. But it wasn’t just Colton’s atypical big-word vocabulary and his annoying habit of diagnosing other kids’ mental problems that got him punked.
“He made a bad name for himself with his mouth,” says Josh. “He’d say some really creepy things, like that when he got out his plan was ‘I’m going to take over the world.’ Everyone would laugh at him, but he was totally serious about it. It was kind of mad scientist stuff. He didn’t quite have the plan together, not many details—he was still plotting—but he was going big, getting a lot of money, and he didn’t want to earn it, just wanted to steal it all.”
Colt, says Josh, made no secret of his plans—or anything else that popped into his mind—and that’s what caused problems. “He just told people all of his thoughts and they’d turn around and tell him he was stupid and should shut up.” Colton would back off for a bit, “but then he’d run his mouth back at them. He’d keep at it when they told him to stop, so then when he’d go back to his room, someone would run in right behind him and pound him. This went on the entire time he was in there. He’s smart, but he has his mind in the wrong place.”
Colt’s battles with the other kids stayed below the radar of the guards and counselors, which was important, because getting caught fighting meant a bad mark on his all-important CRA. The one part of his master plan for taking over the world that Colt did already have plotted was getting out of high-security Green Hill and into a fenceless group home as soon as possible. And for that, he needed those consecutive good report cards.
“He always went to school and always did what you told him,” says a Green Hill staff member. “In a lot of respects he was a pleasure to deal with. You’d say bedtime is nine p.m. and he’d always be in his room at nine. He was always friendly with the staff… but you just had this feeling about him.” The staffer says they could sense the wheels turning in Colton’s head. “He was pretty quick, bright, but also criminally sophisticated in that he was a planner, a thinker… he was heads and shoulders above the other kids in those respects.”
The majority of boys at Green Hill had crappy upbringings, coming from broken homes often darkened by neglect, abuse, and substance problems. Many were fighting mental health issues along with their own booze or drug monkeys, and plenty had run wild on the streets from a young age. The programs and therapies in JRA are designed to break through to those kids able and/or willing to be salvaged.
Colton’s particular makeup, though, made him difficult to treat. “He was psychologically and intellectually very mature, but emotionally immature,” says one staff member who worked with him. “He never took any of our ‘shaping the future’ stuff seriously. In therapy, he would always have smart answers, never true answers.”
They say that Colton wouldn’t open up to the counselors, which was an integral part of getting him help. “He’d never truly say this is the kind of home life I had, or this is what I was lacking growing up and so I want to change this, deal with this to move on… I think that by the time Colton got to us he was past the point of being able to open those floodgates and tell you what he wanted.”
Instead, staffers say Colton put his efforts toward manipulation. “It was as if he had this intense grudge against the system and felt that however he could beat it he’d beat it instead of working within it to better himself.”
Beating the juvenile prison system meant one thing for Colton: getting two good CRAs. And the way that’s set up, it was a piece of cake for him. The CRA is a simple form asking nine “yes” or “no” questions along with two that have a third option: “moderate.” Depending on the question, each answer coincides with a point score—0 for a no and up to 12 points for a yes. Inmates shoot for scores under 20 to go home, under 25 to go to a community facility/group home.
The questions that staff have input on are: In the previous ninety days, has the “client” escaped or attempted escape? Assaulted anyone? Not complied with core requirements (gone to school, etc.)? Not shown appropriate response to problems? Had hostile responses to frustration? Used chemicals or alcohol? Victimized peers? At least moderately participated in specialized programming? Been charged with another crime in prison?
By the CRA scorecard, a “client” could commit multiple assaults, victimize other kids, or get caught using drugs and still score low enough to go home. For Colton, who did none of those things, it was a walk in the park.
“We couldn’t give Colt points to keep him here,” says a staff member who saw him every shift. “There’s no middle ground on any of the questions, and the worst part about that form is that there’s no place for subjective comments.”
The staff didn’t want to keep Colton around just because he was such a pleasure to deal with. “We all knew what was going to happen. We knew he was just acting good so he could get to a group home and escape.”
This wasn’t just a gut feeling. Colton hadn’t kept his escape plan secret, and the information made its way to
