by Edward Humes
Critics suggest a possible problem with this two-tiered approach is that it does little to prevent juvenile crime in the first place—it just shifts resources and punishments around the criminal justice system, and keeps juvenile criminals locked up longer with fewer efforts to rehabilitate them. There is no evidence that harsher sentences have decreased juvenile crime. Indeed, the crime rate among older juveniles has continued to soar even after laws were passed that place many of them in adult court.
3. In a speech before the U.S. Senate in 1992, Sen. John Glenn of Ohio cited a survey that listed the top school problems listed by principals in 1940: talking out of turn; chewing gum and making a noise; running in halls; cutting in line; dress code infractions; littering. In 1980, a similar survey of principals found their major concerns had shifted: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, assault.
4. According to juvenile delinquency expert Peter W. Greenwood of the RAND Corporation, in testimony before California’s Little Hoover Commission, the justice system has yet to find a satisfactory middle ground in dealing with child criminals. In his February 28, 1994, testimony, Greenwood said:
“Many juvenile killings appear to take place without any rational cause or purpose. It is this latter characteristic that has caused some observers to question the whole concept of rehabilitation upon which the juvenile justice system is presumably based. Another concern expressed by many observers is that, in the name of rehabilitation or protecting the interests of the minor, hardened young criminals are let off much more leniently than would be the case if they were treated as adults. . . . The most difficult aspect of any examination of the juvenile justice system is maintaining the perspective that the subjects being dealt with are both children and criminals at the same time, with all the limitations and vulnerabilities which the first label implies and all of the problems and risks implied by the second. Reconciling these competing demands is the most difficult task confronted by juvenile justice policy makers.”
5. The need for such reform, coupled with the sort of firm treatment of serious offenders envisioned by the DA’s two-tiered plan, has been championed by many juvenile advocates, including Attorney General Janet Reno. The Hoover Commission report urges similar changes: “The challenge is to have a system that functions well for both ends of the spectrum: one that takes strong intervention measures when they are most likely to be productive while at the same time protecting society when the chances of rehabilitation are dim. The present juvenile justice system falls short at both ends of the spectrum. . . . There is little time, attention or remedy for the novice juvenile delinquent” (The Juvenile Crime Challenge, September 1994, p. 69).
6. James Q. Wilson, professor of management and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a nationally recognized expert on crime and delinquency, wrote in the December 30, 1994, New York Times: “There are one million people in prison. We are not going to change them. We have boys on the streets; we can’t change them. So we have to push the intervention back to where we know it is possible to make a difference: in childhood. . . . The crucial turning point is the third grade. It is not an iron law. There are a few late bloomers who turn to crime in their teens. But if kids are going to do badly in school, third grade is where it starts . . . : The main goal in welfare reform ought to be saving the children, not necessarily making mothers work.”
In the same issue of the Times, Judge Judith Sheindlin, supervising judge of the Manhattan Family Court, made a similar point in an essay: “I think by age fifteen there is a small number of kids who, for whatever depravations they have suffered, are cooked, as my grandmother would have said. They are gone. Whatever you do is not going to make a difference. . . . I think the solution is to pare down the money we spend on those kids . . . [and] invest in the vast majority of kids who come from the same environment and are right on the cusp. . . . People will say, You are stigmatizing the bad kids. Well, if you have 36 kids in a classroom and four are throwing chairs at the teacher, you have to excise them. Otherwise, all will be lost. This is war.”
7. Sukoda’s study confirms long-known principles, though his promises to be more detailed and far-reaching than its predecessors. In the 1972 landmark “Wolfgang Study” in Philadelphia, research showed that 18 percent of all juvenile delinquents accounted for 62 percent of all offenses. More recently, a widely publicized study in Orange County, California, just south of LA, found its hard-core repeat offenders were made up of 8 to 12 percent. Orange County is also attempting to use a profile of repeat offenders to identify them early in their delinquency careers, so far with mixed results.
8. By contrast, kids who get arrested who do not fit the 16 percent profile can be released with little or no supervision or court action, the study suggests. Statistically, most of them will never get in trouble again regardless of what the court does—even if the court does nothing. In time, in theory, juvenile crime should decline dramatically with this reordering of priorities. In Sukoda’s vision, the role of Juvenile Court shrinks as prevention programs take hold, not because more kids are booted into the adult system, but because more kids are stopped from committing crimes in the first place.
9. From The Juvenile Crime Challenge: Making Prevention a Priority (California’s Little Hoover Commission, September 1994, p. vii):
“Despite the universal belief among experts that the only hope of halting or diminishing juvenile crime is in taking appropriate steps before a youth is entrenched in a delinquency pattern, early-intervention programs have all but disappeared as fiscally strapped county and state departments have made selective budget cuts in the past decade. Front-line workers decry their inability to cope with the minor juvenile delinquent because of the pressing demands on their time and resources by chronic, violent offenders. This situation is especially distressing since these worst-case juveniles not only soak up resources because of the high cost of their treatment but also are the least likely to be deterred from a life of crime regardless of the treatment options undertaken. Placing a high priority on ‘front-end’ programs is difficult without new funding but is critical to any successful crime prevention effort.”
Choosing which end of the system to emphasize is no small issue in a state like California, where the governor is committed to an accelerating prison population, where more per capita is spent on prisons than on public education, and an enormous $2.8 billion penal system sucks hundreds of millions of dollars from grade schools, state colleges, parks, recreation, medical care, everything that might keep kids from getting involved in crime. State universities and public schools, once the envy of the nation, have been severely cut while prison spending in California has grown to record levels every year.
The effectiveness of California’s current order of priorities has long been in question, given the recidivism rates seen in juvenile penal institutions around the nation. In 1978, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals reached this conclusion about juvenile prisons in a report entitled Correctional Institutions: “Institutions do succeed in punishing but they don’t deter. They protect the community temporarily, but the protection does not last. They relieve the community of responsibility by removing the young offender, but they make successful integration unlikely. They change the committed offender, but the change is more likely to be negative than positive.” More recent studies of youth prison systems around the country confirm this viewpoint, showing recidivism rates ranging from 50 to 75 percent.
CHAPTER 10
1. Richard Dent, forty-four, was killed in the attack. Court records and police reports show that two other gang members actually tackled and held Dent, while another knifed him repeatedly—something Elias may not have even known until the police arrested him and told him someone had died. (Still, Elias should have figured out what was about to happen—the same knife-happy gang member who killed Dent had earlier that night dished out a serious but nonfatal stomach wound to someone else they st
opped on the street to rob.) Legally, Elias was still guilty of murder because he participated in the fatal attack, but the DA agreed he deserved less time than those who did the actual killing, particularly as one of them, fourteen-year-old Jane Martin, remained in the juvenile system and would be released at age twenty-five, along with the fifteen-year-old getaway driver, whose participation in the crime was also greater than Elias’s. The two boys most responsible for Dent’s death were over sixteen and will receive twenty-five years to life in prison; a sixth gang member, a girl whose involvement was roughly identical to Elias’s, agreed to testify for the prosecution under a grant of immunity and walked free. Such divergent outcomes are common in a justice system that makes chronological age the primary factor, satisfying neither the proponents of more punishment nor those who seek more attempts at rehabilitation.
2. In Los Angeles, only eight out of every thousand juveniles prosecuted as delinquents are charged with criminal homicide. The ratio is considerably smaller nationwide, just over two out of a thousand—which adds up to 2,700 juvenile murderers out of the 1.5 million kids prosecuted annually in juvenile courts around the country.
These lethal numbers are still shockingly high, of course—the United States is the world capital for teen killers, and LA accounts for nearly one out of ten of them. And the numbers have gotten worse, with the growth of juvenile violent crime rates in recent years (up 68 percent between 1988 and 1992, and 165 percent since 1985) far exceeding violent crime increases by adults. In the past decade, Juvenile Court has seen such an upsurge in acts of extreme violence by young males—and more recently, by young females—that few can doubt the urgent need for solutions.
Still, when all is said and done, murder remains a very small piece of the booming business conducted in Juvenile Court, and cases like Ronald Duncan’s an even tinier part. In Los Angeles, fewer than 6 percent of juvenile murder cases involve kids under age sixteen—about fifteen to twenty cases a year. This represents about .05 percent of delinquency cases in LA—hardly a number on which to base wholesale reform of the system.
Proponents, however, argue that the numbers are high enough to warrant action even though the statistical impact may be small. In the past five years, an average of just under eighty-nine kids a year have been sent to the California Youth Authority by juvenile courts from throughout the state for murders committed when the offender was fourteen or fifteen. If the fitness law had been lower, these kids could have been tried in adult court, supporters of a lower fitness law say.
But there is a flaw in this argument: The proponents assume that such children would be tried in adult court if the fitness age was lowered, an unwarranted assumption, since juvenile judges still have the power to find kids fit even when the law allows transfer to adult court. During the same five-year period, an average of 152 kids a year who were sixteen or seventeen at the time they committed murder—and were therefore eligible for adult sentences under existing laws—were still treated as juveniles and committed to CYA by juvenile courts throughout California. It is reasonable to assume that an even higher percentage of younger juveniles would be found fit.
(Statistics and percentages for Los Angeles County are drawn from 1993 statistics maintained by the Los Angeles County District Attorney. National percentages are based on estimates in Juvenile Court Statistics 1991, by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The California Youth Authority provided statistics on the age of juveniles committed to CYA for homicide.)
CHAPTER 11
1. The crisis in money and manpower in probation is well documented, nationwide and in California, where the Little Hoover Commission reports: “Between 1983 and 1992, adult and juvenile probation caseloads increased 73 percent while the number of probation officers increased only 24 percent . . . [and] the probation department’s share of county funds declined 9 percent.”
2. California, with the highest juvenile incarceration rate of any state (in a nation with the highest rate among developed countries), has a 50 percent rate of return on the fifteen thousand youths it incarcerates in the California Youth Authority at any one time, according to the CYA. Other studies suggest a higher figure. A 1989 survey by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency found that 70 percent of CYA inmates were arrested for a new crime within 12 months of their release, while 61 percent ended up reincarcerated. Other juvenile prison systems report recidivism rates ranging as high as 75 percent in New York State. The effectiveness of juvenile incarceration has been challenged in recent years by studies that suggest probation and other “rehabilitative” programs have better performance with lower cost.
In “Reaffirming Rehabilitation in Juvenile Justice” (Youth & Society, September 1993), Dan Macallair, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, writes: “During the 1980s, new evidence emerged suggesting that the demise of rehabilitation was premature. A growing number of studies indicates the rehabilitative intervention is effective in de-escalating criminal behavior. Various well-designed interventions reduce the severity and frequency of delinquency and alter the cycle that leads to adult crime. . . . Although rehabilitation does not eliminate recidivism, it is more effective than correctional institutions in reducing the rate and seriousness of criminal behavior.”
3. Most California jurisdictions outside Los Angeles County do not have such extensive networks of county-run camps, and so they tend to rely to a greater degree on contracts with private programs and institutions. Supporters of the LA camp system say the program is both cost effective and successful at what it does—placing delinquents in stable, safe, rigorous environments with structure and traditional values. But critics—particularly in the Public Defender’s Office—suggest that LA is missing out on some of the best and most innovative programs for juveniles around the country by sending so many kids to the county-run camps. They point to a highly successful and much-imitated program in Pennsylvania that takes in hardened offenders, educates them with a prep-school-quality program, and has a very low recidivism rate—all for about the same monthly cost as a stay in one of LA’s camps. Yet, Los Angeles will not recommend sending any of its delinquents there.
An apparent conflict of interest does exist within the Probation Department, since POs must recommend a sentence most likely to benefit a delinquent, while the department has a vested interest in sending the most kids possible to its in-house camps, in order to preserve its budget. Sending kids to other programs would be like giving customers to a competing business. The Probation Department has a de facto policy against recommending (and paying for) private programs outside the Los Angeles area. As a result, in most cases, only kids with parents capable of paying for private rehabilitation programs such as the one in Pennsylvania can elude this policy.
4. The September 1994 report by the Little Hoover Commission on California’s juvenile justice system makes this observation about CYA facilities: “Gang activity and individual aggression are able to flourish in crowded dormitory settings. . . . The safety of wards cannot be assured.”
CYA statistics show in 1993, there were 277 assaults by wards on CYA staff (93 with weapons); 1,090 assaults by wards on other wards (140 with weapons); 97 staff injuries; 410 ward injuries. Pepper spray and a chemical warfare agent called CS are used to subdue and incapacitate kids in CYA—some 2,700 kids a year are sprayed with these “chemical restraints.” In the five years leading up to and including 1993, seven kids in CYA have committed suicide.
In interviews with the author, teenagers who have been incarcerated at CYA stated that gang activity, violence, sexual assault, and, to a lesser extent, drug use flourish in the youth prison system. While some of the facilities have the feel of campuses, others are grim, high-security lockups. Waiting lists for substance abuse programs and other therapeutic and rehabilitative services tend to be extremely long—longer than many offenders’ sentences. Most juvenile judges in Los Angeles—as well as caseworkers in the CYA system—view CYA as a last resort
for youths who have little hope of straightening out, a dire alternative that compares favorably only to adult prison.
5. Los Angeles County Juvenile Court makes this admission an average of five times each workday, 1,200 times a year. Out of the 8,664 juveniles housed at CYA at the end of 1993, 42 percent came from LA—a tragically high rate of failure, given that LA County is home to only 30 percent of the state’s children.
6. CYA figures are as of January 1994. Male domination of juvenile crime of all sorts—serious and minor—is also pronounced, though not as overwhelmingly. Eighty-two percent of the nation’s 1.5 million juvenile offenders in 1992 were boys, according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1992 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice).
CHAPTER 12
1. The intake problem in Los Angeles grew worse shortly after Keesha’s arrest, when earthquake damage to Central Juvenile Hall destroyed its ability to perform the intake function. Los Padrinos had to take over, doubling its intake load, accepting new detainees, then shipping some of them later on for housing at Central—a logistical nightmare of delays and misplaced children. Eighteen months after the January 1994 earthquake, Central intake was still down.