Jean Carlos Bautista dreams of becoming a police officer. He is not sure what kind. But after a visit to the Suffolk County Jail yesterday morning, the Boston International High School junior knows one thing: He does not want to work for the Department of Correction. Bautista, 19, and a dozen other high school students from Boston visited the jail on Nashua Street as part of a five-month, free Boston Police Explorers Program that shows high school students different aspects of police work. Most of the 17 students participating in the program, which is run from January to May by the Boston Police Department and funded by the Police Athletic League, have expressed some interest in working in law enforcement, said Sergeant Michael P. O'Connor Jr., who coordinates the program. So far, during their bimonthly meetings, the students have watched and discussed a video about drunken driving and visited a police-run center for victims of domestic abuse and a 911 dispatch center. But even compared with that visit, the teenagers said, the trip to Suffolk County Jail, which holds 702 male inmates, was sobering. After Deputy Sheriff Abiezer Ayuso finished urgently relating instructions about how to stay safe during the visit, and explaining, to the students' dismay, that none of the corrections officers inside the facility were armed, Bautista's palms started sweating. "I'm nervous," Bautista whispered, wiping his hands on his baggy jeans after the jail's fortified metal door shut behind him. Around him, other students anxiously studied the door, the security monitors, and the bright red phones with direct lines to the city police, Fire Department, and ambulance. Ayuso led the students through a bleak labyrinth of inhospitable white corridors and metal doors, pointing out austere, empty bathrooms with stainless-steel toilets and a paved outdoor basketball court separated from the free world by thick metal bars. In the jail chapel, one inmate told the hushed teenagers of a violent lifestyle that has led him to spend almost half his life in prison on charges of weapons possession, arms trafficking, and, most recently, two counts of armed assault. "I played football in school, I had a promising career," said the 33-year-old inmate, whose name jail officials asked the Globe not to publish. "But I chose to go down the path of all the males in my family. Every male in my family is an ex-con, or is serving time, or is dead." Shannon Cleary, a 17-year-old junior at Fontbonne Academy in Milton, called his speech "inspirational" and "very eye-opening." The students visited the abandoned common room of Unit 2-1, where inmates are allowed to eat, exercise, play board games, and make calls on pay phones with signs warning that all calls are recorded and may be monitored. "Who would want to be here?" Bautista said, taking in the spartan interior. "Life is so beautiful!" Cells lined the walls, and some of the unit's 66 inmates stared at the teenagers through narrow glass windows on the cells' locked doors. "Bring them in here!" someone yelled. As the silent students scanned the doors, an inmate made an obscene gesture in their direction. "I wouldn't be able to work here," said Benjamin Skelic, 17, a junior at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, who trying to decide between studying economics or criminal justice in college. "Seeing them like that, it's just a depressed feeling." Other teenagers agreed. "You have to be very patient for that," said Bautista, who lives in Hyde Park and said he wants to "end violence in Dorchester and all those places." "I'd rather be working outside, to tell you the truth," said Mike McDonagh, 18, a senior at Boston College High School who also wants to become a police officer. "I'd rather be preventing it."
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