I don’t often write of my jail/prison experience, which is now 14 years in the rearview mirror, but recent developments prompted a memory that may be relevant to discussion.

When I turned myself in on my DUI change in March, 2007, I was sent to Durango Jail in Phoenix to await sentencing. For the next 34 days, Building 2, Pod A was my home.

One of the first inmates I met was Sammy. By the time we met, Sammy had been in Durango for a year awaiting sentencing on his first adult charge (weapons and drugs), but he had been in custody pretty much constantly since he was 12 years old.

He did not seem at all uncomfortable in jail. Being locked up was a family tradition, Sammy told me. His father, who he had not seen since he was 5, was the No. 2 in the Arizona prison system’s Aryan Brotherhood, a rank he acquired by murdering another inmate.

Sammy and I had some long talks over the month I was with him in Durango. I was 46 years old, and I think Sammy came to view me as  something of a father figure. With me, he admitted things you knew he would never tell anyone else. As poisoned as his mind had become, as violent as his life had been, he confided that he had hopes for a different life. He was the father of a two-year-old boy, and I think Sammy wanted something better for both himself and his son.

Mainly, I listened and when I did speak, I chose my words carefully. Slowly, Sammy began to unpack his life, which appeared to be punctuated by violence. I asked him about his own explosive temper and why even the thought of a fight seemed to have so much appeal.

He traced it not to his father, who was too soon gone to have much of an influence, but on his experiences in Arizona’s juvenile detention program or, as Sammy called it “gladiator school.”

It was, he said, where violence was a constant part of life, a place where even the youngest kids learned to fight, to exploit the weak, to be merciless.

Last week, we learned that there is plenty of space in the Lowndes County Juvenile Detention Center, which seems to me a great “problem” to have, given what I learned of Sammy’s experience. To remedy that, the county may work out an agreement with the city of Starkville to provide space in the center for the city’s presumably unmanageable youth, children deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

Officials say juvenile detention centers are a place where troubled kids can be placed where they’ll have access to programs and education apart from adult inmates.

Increasing the number of kids at the detention center may be viewed as an improvement in cost-efficiency, I suppose, but it’s hardly worth celebrating. I have no reason to believe that Mississippi is any more enlightened than Arizona, another conservative state that is tough on crime and even tougher on offenders. Education and mental health services may be a possibility, but punishment and cruelty are certainties.

Sammy never mentioned the programs he had had access to, but he learned a great deal about violence there.

Maybe it’s different at the Lowndes County Juvenile Detention Center. For the kids’ sake — for society’s sake — I hope that’s true.

But if it is, as Sammy described it, “gladiator school,” it doesn’t trouble me at all if there is low attendance.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].