Turning a Life Around
A probation officer and a former gang member recall how his efforts helped change her life. When Ralph Miller met Teresa Avendano 16 years ago, he didn’t think the troubled 15-year-old would get her life on track...
A probation officer and a former gang member recall how his efforts helped change her life.
By Jon Melegrito
When Ralph Miller met Teresa Avendano 16 years ago, he didn’t think the troubled 15-year-old would get her life on track. After 18 years as a Los Angeles County probation officer, he’d seen hundreds of kids like her, with police records of drug-dealing and robbery. Still, Miller was hopeful that Avendano would change for the better.
Avendano, who joined a gang at age 12, had been sentenced to 18 months in a Southern California military-style boot camp for teenage girls. The corrections facility was a “last resort” for youthful offenders. Miller’s job was to straighten her out.
“I was concerned about Teresa’s chances of turning her life around,” recalls Miller, 62, president of AFSCME Local 685 (Council 36), a union of peace officers who oversee and rehabilitate adult and juvenile offenders. “I was more worried about what would happen after she got out.”
After Avendano’s release, Miller lost track of her. Nearly a decade later, they both landed in Las Vegas to do precinct walks for John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. “I had just become an AFSCME activist,” recalls Avendano, now 30, who reintroduced herself to Miller, telling him how she’d returned to school, scored straight A’s and gotten a medical assistant job at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Soon after, Avendano joined Local 3299, becoming a Member Action Team activist and executive board member.
“Ralph helped me get my life together,” she says. “He wanted to make sure this hard punk kid changed and led a more productive life. He was scary but he balanced toughness with lots of counseling and compassion.” He surprised me one day when he brought my sister and her newborn to visit.”
The youngest of three girls, Avendano’s life took a wrong turn after her parents divorced. “Mom and Dad were rarely home because they were always working,” she recalls. “When he left us, it was very painful.” For two years, she hung out with her boyfriend’s gang but she felt guilty hurting people so she turned herself in.
Last year, Avendano lost her job. This year, her husband died, leaving her to raise three children. She’s waiting for placement on a preferential rehire list in the University of California system and to become a union member again. “AFSCME allows me to use my aggressiveness for good and focus on something of lasting value: building a better future for our children.”
Miller was once a football player with the San Diego Chargers. As a high school student living in Selma, Ala. — the focal point for desegregation and voting rights campaigns in the mid-1960s — Miller says he was a “troublemaker.” His life turned around when he helped register voters and led student protests.
Of his interactions with Avendano, he says, “we’re the public’s first and last resort for help. That’s what public service is all about. You’ll never get rich doing it, but the personal rewards are far greater and more satisfying.”
