The much publicized assault on "youth crime" has taken a particularly harsh turn with laws that allow juveniles to be tried and sentenced as adults. This means that some very young offenders face life in prison. In this first of two parts, PNS associate editor Joe Loya talks of his own experience with some of these young people. The second part features essays by young people facing the possibility of a life in prison. Loya is a California writer currently at work on a memoir.

What advice would you offer a 15 year old boy being sent to prison?

I help conduct writing classes for young offenders in juvenile hall. A published writer now, I began writing in prison, using the pen to discover more about myself while learning a craft. I try to help the boys discover how to turn the solitude of the cell into a liberating writing experience.

But this is difficult for me. One reason is that visiting an institution that locks human beings in cages is not good nostalgia. I too often hear echoes from my past confinement as I walk down those thick-walled corridors.

I'm embarrassed to confess this, but I am still tempted -- only a year and a half out of prison -- to regard these juvenile hall boys with a convict's eye. My imagination has been altered by my prison experience, so that my points of reference sometimes compete with my perspective on ethics -- I can either evaluate a man using the standards of a free citizen or the prisoner's code of behavior.

Sometimes, in juvenile hall, I feel the same Darwinian detachment that served me well as a prisoner. Watching the boys from a distance, with a poker player's eye on their "tells," gauging who among them has the stronger hand, who is fittest to survive. Like the mythical Cassandra (this time with a criminal pedigree) I can envision a tragic prison future for a boy.

Sometimes I size up the core rage of the young offenders in my class, imagine the men they will become after many years in prison, and wonder which of these I would have befriended in my old milieu. After all, my prison friends -- Angel, Payaso, Shorty -- share a common background with the boys locked up in the hall. Frankly, I've already met some of these boys as adults.

Placing the boys in that reservoir dog context strikes me as profoundly pessimistic. As if I've already consigned them forever to a mean region behind bars. Doing what one writer advised against -- shipwrecking them before they are aboard.

I see clearly the plight of these boys. Part of me is tempted to school them on the various intrigues of prison. Warn them of this or that Mafia's influence behind bars, or tell them how to win respect early to escape the misfortune that awaits imprisoned men perceived as weak.

But because of their age -- their inability to listen for the nuances of sorrow in an ex-convict's voice coupled with their unusual willingness to emulate those they consider tough men -- they will almost certainly admire tactics in what I intend to be a cautionary tale.

Some boys have only a romantic notion of violence. I did, when I first started doing time. I glamorized the prison legends -- the martyrs, the hardcore convicts who fought back. The quiet ones who could silently kill their enemies behind bars and get away with it. I fear the boys' attraction to all that.

It's the fear that conservative adults have about teaching sex in schools. I'm afraid that explaining the etiquette of prison will only embellish their imaginations about how best to fit into the culture of that incarcerated world. My experience tells me I should begin treating those prison-bound boys the way they should expect to be treated initially in prison -- ignore them and leave them to their own devices.

I never greeted a young inmate when he first arrived at the prison. Not out of spite mind you, more out of respect.

The best way to treat someone in prison is to allow them their space. Infringing on someone's space is the number one cause of inmate-to-inmate violence. And I don't mean just elbow room. Giving someone space means allowing them to initiate a conversation. Which means I never asked a fellow inmate what crime they committed, or inquired as to the progress of their court case.

Another part of me, the part of me that fears what awaits them, is inclined to be preachy, to intervene. That's what most people assume is the best way to help these boys. Get all up in their business.

But I also know that intervention in the lives of boys full of rage becomes counter-productive at a certain point. The logic of the self-loather goes: "If I hate myself and you tend to love me, then you are stupid for loving a loathsome person, which means I can't love or respect you, so I'll refuse your foolish affection."

On the surface, I seem to be best suited to affect these boys -- which explains the riddle of my guilt for feeling mostly paralyzed just when I should become a more challenging presence in their lives. I admit that I do not have any pity for the boy going off to prison, but for a reason that is both personal and respectful: when I was in prison I saw pity as a sanitized version of contempt.

So why am I ambivalent about the role I should play in the life of that 15 year old boy going off to prison?

Maybe the origin of my reticence may be found in a recent, private recollection: Everyday that I woke up in prison, even on the final morning of my incarceration, I never really knew whether I was waking to an end, or a beginning.