“Loss is a big reason why kids end up in trouble,” explains Crystal Davis, speaking from personal experience. She is a youth advisor with the nonprofit Exodus.Life and comes to the Jack Jones Juvenile Detention Center to teach life skills classes.
The youth she works with come from a variety of backgrounds, some with traumatic home lives and others who’ve faced significant losses like the death of a family member. For Crystal, loss was a recurring theme in her life. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father’s sporadic presence left a void she tried to fill with drugs.
“I was always a daddy’s girl and whenever he showed up, I’d run to him. But there were times when I wouldn’t hear from him for years,” she shares.
“I was 12 years old when I started smoking weed, just trying to fit in with my cousins,” Crystal recalls. “As I got older, it escalated into harder drugs —cocaine, meth, fentanyl. I was in addiction for 26 years.”
Today, she uses her life story as a teaching tool for the youth she counsels. “A former colleague of mine told me, ‘Crystal, your life is a lesson—use it.’ Now I walk into a room and I can start talking to young people about anything and it becomes a teaching moment.”
Crystal focuses on imparting crucial life lessons to the kids in her care, emphasizing the importance of thinking before acting and setting goals for their future.
“I tell them to stop and think about the consequences before they do anything. Play the tape all the way through,” she advises.
She also encourages the youth to set small, achievable goals. “You can’t change everything overnight,” she tells them. “Pick one thing to change, then another, and keep going until you’re moving in the right direction.”
“I started working with Exodus.Life in December of 2022, and it’s been an incredible experience. I love it. I call these kids ‘my kids’—I’m really close with them,” she says as she smiles.
Working with at-risk youth is not without its difficulties. Crystal has witnessed many of the kids she mentors return to the justice system, despite their best intentions.
“It’s easy to fall back into old patterns, especially when they return to the same home environments that got them into trouble in the first place,” she explains.
But Crystal remains hopeful. She knows firsthand how difficult it is to break free from a life of addiction and crime, but she also knows that it’s possible.
Her work is more than trying to prevent kids from making mistakes. It’s about giving them the tools and the hope to believe in a different future. One that doesn’t involve jail, drugs, or despair.
“These kids just need someone to care about them, someone to put time and effort into them,” she says. “And that’s what I’m here to do.”
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