Two twenty-somethings who spent a chunk of their lives behind bars were asked by The Denver Gazette why they started acting out at young ages.

Both were of above average intelligence, both were aware they were doing wrong, and both said they turned to crime out of anger due to poor role models and with no one in their lives to set them straight.

Je, 27, was first arrested at age 11 and spent the next 10 years in and out of youth detention and prison for various crimes, most of them assault.

Today, the single father of three girls, is one of the only people in his family who has broken the cycle of incarceration.

“I didn’t have the people around me to tell me anything. My mom worked two jobs and I didn’t always know right from wrong. I had to teach myself a lot of things,” Gonzalez said.

While behind the wire, he learned to cut hair through a career program, a trade he took with him when he was released.

This was perhaps the only time in his life, he said, that anyone cared enough to teach him a positive skill.  “Being locked up gave me the opportunity to show I could take on responsibility,” he said.

Among those who took advantage of his new barbering skills were police officers. Gonzales shook his head at the irony.

Colorado Division of Youth Services Director Anders Jacobson remembers Gonzalez from his time at Lookout Mountain Youth Detention Center as “an example of someone who worked hard in the program and came a long way.”

Gonzalez, who was named Jesus because he was born on Christmas, has been “violence-free” for four years.

He has now paused his barbering because “I want to have time to raise my kids,” Gonzalez said.

During an interview with a reporter, the smallest of his three daughters was on his lap pretending to talk to her mother on a toy phone. The 4-year-old had fallen asleep at his feet.

It was a tough assignment, dragging his girls to an interview, but he wants other people in his situation to know transgenerational trauma can be overcome.

Fighting was Marissa Esquibel’s answer to everything. She was 14 when she was arrested for assault and spent a couple of days in detention.

After that, the stints behind bars started to feel like home.

After that first experience in a holding cell, she returned to detention over and over for a decade. “Once I hit my teens it was a combination of different traumatic events and not having family support. That’s when I started falling into the wrong crowd and getting into trouble,” Esquibel said.

Her father was an abusive alcoholic, and as for her mother … “My mom she was kind of caught up in her own thing, too, with drugs. I love my parents and have respect for them. They did the best they could with what they knew. I love them to this day,” Esquibel sighs. “But it had an effect on me as I was getting older.”

She decided to share her family issues so that other kids who may be going through the same thing might not feel alone.

She received a high school GED at 17 while in a DYS program. Her mom came to the graduation ceremony to see her, but her dad could not make it because he also was incarcerated.

There were times during that volatile period, Marissa admits, she broke the law in order to be sent back into the system because jail was the only place to get the guidance she said she craved.

“I was so angry. But I feel like I grew up here,” said Esquibel, of DYS detention.

In an amazing turn, Esquibel just finished her first year of a master’s program in criminal justice at Colorado State University.

She works at Greeley’s Platte Valley Youth Services Center 30 hours a week.

“We just say Marissa’s in jail…working,” laughed Val Krier, Esquibel’s boss at PVYS. “She was a tough kid. An angry kid.  These days, Marissa’s anger is channeled in the right way.”

Sometimes, Krier has to swallow back tears when she talks about the youth in detention.

Krier remembers that Esquibel was different than a lot of the other young people who come through diversion. “She was mad like a lot of our kids are mad, but Marissa had heart.”