Adult prisons: no place for kids - Law & Justice - juvenile criminals

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, one of the news feature shows on television had an interviewer talking with a freckle-faced, redheaded 12-year-old boy. The interview was taking place in a maximum-security prison yard.

When asked what he had done to warrant being in the prison, the youngster related how he had been spotted by local police as he drove a stolen car. After a high-speed chase, he crashed into an interstate highway roadblock. Several state and local law enforcement agencies and dozens of police cars were involved.

The interviewer asked if the child was sorry for what he had done because it had resulted in a sentence to an adult maximum-security prison. The boy responded that he would do it again because it was the "greatest day" of his life!

"It was just like `Smokey and the Bandit' [a popular chase film]!" the boy effused. Clearly, he continued after a period of months to be caught up in the childish excitement of his criminal act. A mature sorrow for his actions and the resulting punishment were absent. Children are immature by definition.

This practice of locking up young people with adult criminals harkens back to the policies of the 1700s, when offenders, regardless of age, were thrown together in poorhouses and workhouses. The results were predictable. The young people got worse as a result of exposure to the more-hardened criminals. It is hard to believe that, with the amount of scientific evidence we have generated over the last 100 years, political leaders still believe it is a good idea to lock misbehaving children up with adult criminals.

Today, there are thousands of young people living desperate lives locked away in adult prisons. Across the nation, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates there were about 5,500 juveniles being held in adult prisons in the late 1990s. There is little doubt that there are more than that now. Additionally, there are over 9,000 youths being held in the nation's adult jails.

While most of us would expect that youths in adult prisons were the most-violent and dangerous juvenile offenders, the Department of Justice reported that 39% of the juveniles in adult prisons were sentenced for a nonviolent offense. The most-serious charge for almost 40% of these young Americans was most likely a drug or nonviolent property offense. It is reasonable to propose that seriously violent youths should be held in adult facilities only if they are incapable of being effectively managed in a juvenile facility.

In 1980, Congress passed amendments to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. Chief among these amendments was a requirement to separate juveniles from adults in the nation's jails. This required local jails absolutely to prevent juveniles from seeing or hearing adult offenders. This provision was strictly enforced and required the restructuring of supervision for more than 6,000 juveniles in Indiana alone, for instance. This amendment is still on the books in spite of the ever-increasing use of adult prisons and jails for juvenile offenders.

Many juvenile justice experts believe that locking away youngsters in adult prisons is a response formed out of panic and fear. As William J. Chambliss states in Power, Politics, and Crime, "Panic over youth crime is as persistent in western society as is worry about the stock market, but, like so many other alarms, it is based on political and law enforcement propaganda, not facts" In the late 1990s, another spate of law enforcement-driven propaganda about the "time bomb" of juvenile crime blossomed. That campaign was closely linked to the creation of anxiety over the state of the family in the U.S., where children were said to be growing up "fatherless, jobless, and godless," dependent on "welfare moms."

Elected officials realized that the public wanted something done about the "crime epidemic" that people believed was afflicting the nation. Rather than tell the public that there was not a crime wave, politicians responded with a great effort to "punish offenders back to righteousness." Not only has it been proven beyond any doubt that long prison terms do not reduce the crime rate, but elected officials failed to tell the public that they were safer than they had been since the 1960s. Juvenile crime--in fact, all crime--has been in decline over the last several years.

The percentage of crimes attributable to juveniles has remained stable at just under 20% since the 1980s. There is no scientific reason for a special effort directed at juvenile crime, but there certainly is political advantages to building up crime as a major social problem. "Although the number of juveniles arrested remained relatively stable over the 1990s, there has been an unending public diatribe about the increasing danger posed by juvenile crime" according to Albert J. Mehan in "The Organizational Career of a Statistic: Gang Statistics and the Politics of Policing Gangs," a 1998 report to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The calls from elected officials and law enforcement agencies have been loud and clear. They argue that there is a "tidal wave of juvenile crime" at the edge of American cities and it is threatening to overwhelm communities unless there are tough new laws and penalties to dissuade juvenile offenders. Thus, they maintain, there is only one thing that officials see as a "real" deterrent to juvenile criminals, and that is the adult prison, which is almost universally viewed to be the most serious response available to legislators who are concerned about punishing crime.

In March, 2001, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the "new era" that was begun in the mid 1990s. The politicians promised a tough new policy of cracking down on violent juvenile criminals. No more would "brutal teenagers be coddled" by juvenile courts, thereby encouraging additional misbehavior.

This idea is not supported by the literature on juvenile delinquency. A juvenile offender is typically placed under the supervision of the juvenile court until the age of majority (18-21, depending on the state). Adult courts that try juvenile offenders are often less likely to require intensive treatment and will often call for a much shorter period of court supervision. The juvenile offender looks at the shorter "sentence" from the adult court as a "free pass" to commit additional illegal acts.

Legislators even outlawed the traditional fact-finding role of the judge. The Building Blocks for Youth Initiative reports that youths who are tried as adults are not being waived to adult court by the traditional judicial review of the particular facts. Instead, prosecutors or legislators are making 85% of these critical decisions. This practice does not allow a full airing of the facts in a juvenile case and therefore hurts the cause of justice. So, legislators sought not only to treat juveniles more harshly in adult court, but removed the traditional oversight protections of the courtroom judge.

According to the MacArthur Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, "From a developmental perspective, many youths do not have the cognitive, emotional, and social maturity that they will have when they are adults. Moreover, considerable evidence has indicated higher prevalence of mental disorders among youths who come before the courts than among youths in general, including developmental delays, mental illnesses, and mental retardation."

It is not uncommon to see juveniles "showing tough" when they first arrive at any correctional institution, but when they do that at an adult maximum-security institution, it can have disastrous results. As Ronnie Greene and Geoff Dougherty reported in the Miami Herald on Sept. 7, 2001, "Florida's youngest prison inmates are also its most likely victims of reported assaults."

They indicated that juveniles locked up in adult male prisons are four times more likely than adults to report being assaulted, and 21 times more likely to be assaulted than teens held in one of Florida's secure juvenile facilities. They also pointed out the likelihood that one-half of these improperly placed juveniles will be assaulted while incarcerated.

Barbara White Stack of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (March 18, 2001) reported a similar failure of the "get tough on kids" program in Pennsylvania. She noted that these new get-tough laws have been described as being "both unfair and ineffective," increasing the probability a youth would "commit new crimes," and making youths "more likely to commit more serious new offenses."

The children who have been charged with "adult crimes" are among the most vulnerable youngsters in the nation. Of those charged as adults in Pennsylvania, "more than half had suffered abuse or neglect as children, and at least 40% were the children of criminals."

The new get-tough laws aimed at punishing juveniles have been implemented and found wanting on a number of fronts. First, these laws are unnecessary. Juvenile crime is decreasing, and youths continue to represent a small percentage of the crime rate. Almost half of the juveniles who are locked away in dangerous adult prisons committed a nonviolent crime, which could be effectively addressed by the juvenile courts. Second, these laws injure young people. Incarcerated youths run a great risk of being assaulted by adult inmates, and adult prisons become schools of crime for these youngsters.

Based on scientific research and common sense, there are many ideas that will address juvenile crime in a cost-effective fashion while maximizing community safety. There are dozens of organizations across the nation capable of assisting elected officials in the development of more-reasonable responses to juvenile misbehavior. Some well-researched ideas that have been proposed by these groups include:

First and foremost, it is critical for society to move away from the current punishment-oriented philosophies towards a restorative justice model, which focuses on restoring everyone involved to his or her precrime state. Restoration of the victim clearly is first priority. This idea is particularly well-suited to property crimes and, since nonviolent property crimes comprise about 40% of all juvenile crimes, restoring victims would greatly reduce the number of youths incarcerated, while at the same time providing victims with restitution for their losses.

With regard to juvenile crime, communities need to develop and support intensive early childhood intervention programs to promote healthy families. In most communities, schools are the focal point for youths and their families. Accordingly, schools need to be the focus for prevention programs. Since youths show maladaptive signals early in their lives, it is important to assure that intervention is provided in the early grades. Elementary schools need to focus on providing counselors and social service personnel, rather than metal detectors and armed police officers, to stop the violence.

There must be a continuum of sanctions available to local judges, permitting a disposition that will best meet the needs of the juvenile, victim, and community. This continuum should range from fines and community service sanctions to restoration of the victim, probation, in-home detention, and electronic monitoring. Incarceration should be the last resort, and incarceration of a juvenile in an adult facility must be an extremely rare occurrence.

Communities would be well-served to reduce the agency "turf" issues that keep well-coordinated services from families that are in need. In many communities, there is little or no coordination among welfare, juvenile court, state corrections, and law enforcement officials. These agencies have to staff the youth and family service needs together so that a realistic plan can be developed and implemented.

These recommendations are not expensive options when we compare the price to implement them with the costs necessary to fortify our schools and the $30-50,000 per year we spend to keep a child in an adult prison.

Recently, The American Youth Policy Forum, The Child Welfare League of America, The Coalition for Juvenile Justice, the National Collaboration for Youth, the National Crime Prevention Council, the National League of Cities, and the National Urban League copublished Less Hype, More Help: Reducing Juvenile Crime, What Works--and What Doesn't. This major effort makes a number of well-reasoned proposals to reduce the juvenile crime rate, and their overall conclusions are certainly worthy of note:

* End overreliance on corrections and other out-of-home placements.

* Invest in research-based interventions for juvenile offenders, as well as research-based prevention.

* Measure results; find what works; and cut funds to what doesn't work.

* Engage community partners.

* Mobilize whole communities to study, plan, and implement comprehensive strategies for combating youth crime.

J. Steven Smith is professor of justice education, Taylor University, Fort Wayne, Ind.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Advancement of Education
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