Title:
Prison Program Aims to Get Teens to Avoid a Life of
Crime
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
A program in the eastern United States invites young
people into a prison to try to scare them away from
prison. The goal is to teach them to avoid bad
choices and bad influences that could put them
behind bars for life. Students can take a tour of
the prison, in school groups or by themselves. At
the end, the young people sit down for a discussion
with some of the inmates. The program is called
Prisoners Against Teen Tragedy, or PATT. It takes
place at the Maryland Correctional
Institution-Hagerstown, a medium-security prison for
men. Sal Mauriello is a case specialist there. He
says eleven prisoners are in the PATT program. They
tell the students about their crimes. They try to
teach them about bad choices.The Prisoners Against
Teen Tragedy program also includes an essay-writing
contest. Tomi Dare is a seventeen-year-old student
at Hagerstown Community College. She saw an
announcement for the contest on her college website.
To enter, students had to write about pressure from
other students and why they do not use drugs. The
prize: five hundred dollars for school.In her essay,
Ms. Dare wrote about her own experience growing up
as an African-American girl interested in sports.
She wrote that drugs and alcohol slow her down and
do not make her feel like a winner. The scholarship
is presented by the Prisoners Against Teen Tragedy
program. Prison spokesman Mark Vernarelli says most
teens who visit come to understand what even one bad
decision can mean. He says many men and women
serving life in prison in the state of Maryland did
not shoot a gun or plunge a knife into anybody. They
were "accessories to a crime." They drove the
getaway car. They were with the person who did the
main part of the crime. And yet, they got the life
sentence as well. Prisoners Against Teen Tragedy
began in nineteen eighty-eight. PATT is one of
Maryland's oldest programs to keep young people from
a life of crime. But there are also others.Mr.
Vernarelli says there is a special program for girls
only. And there is a program where the students eat
a meal in the prison cafeteria with the inmates.Mark
Vernarelli says the prisoners also gain from the
program. It offers them a chance to help repay
society for their crimes, and keep others from
following in their footsteps.For VOA Special English
I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
