When mistakes cost you

"Here we go again,” the teenage me thought whenever my dad started in on that whole the-decisions-you-make-now-will-affect-you-for-the-rest-of-your-life routine.

I was a kid. I knew more than adults ever could about - pretty much everything. I had to make my own mistakes and, believe me, some were doozies. Still, I like to think I turned out all right. Most of us do, much to the relief of those patient adults who redrew the lines whenever we crossed them.

“I wish changing behavior was as simple as telling people what they need to know,” Carl Bell, director of the Institute for Juvenile Research, told me once.

It's not, of course. Until our brains' frontal lobes fully develop around age 26, we're “all gas and no brakes,” as Bell, also a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of Illinois, likes to say. Prone to making stupid decisions. Call it a design flaw.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be held accountable for our actions, but it does mean our youthful indiscretions aren't necessarily good predictors of our potential as adults. We just have to get our heads screwed on straight.

According to Erin Jordan's investigation that ran in Friday's Gazette, more than one in 10 spring University of Iowa grads will leave the institution with a diploma in one hand and a rap sheet in the other. Overwhelmingly, for alcohol-related convictions, the kind of “college kids will be college kids” charges - public intoxication, possession of alcohol under the legal age, disorderly house, open container - this culture backhandedly endorses.

But in a tight economy, those kids are being passed over by employers who have plenty of applicants to choose from.

State leaders have recognized the problem, but even last year's change to Iowa Code, which gave 18- 19- and 20-year-olds the chance to wipe first-time alcohol-related status offenses from their record after two years of good behavior, isn't enough for many. Jordan's analysis showed one-third of this weekend's UI graduates have collected two or more convictions by graduation. Is that enough to show a pattern of disregard for the law? Some employers think so.

That's their right. But it's a shame.

“I still have my mother in my head, telling me, ‘Waste not, want not,' and she's been dead for 40 years,” Bell told me the last time we talked. “Back then, I didn't know what she was talking about.”

But then, it clicked. As he'd put it: His brain's hardware finally caught up with the software.

Lucky for Bell, it wasn't too late.

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