Public clamors: Get tough at a tender age
By Karen S. Peterson, USA TODAY
Can youngsters who commit violent crimes — even murder — be rehabilitated?
Some experts who work with kids at the furthest edges of society think many of them can be salvaged. "Absolutely, the record shows that in many instances these kids can be rehabilitated if we can create a pathway for them out of the juvenile justice system, out of their criminality," says Edward Loughran, director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.
But such thinking runs counter to a growing clamor for ever-tougher treatment of the nation's most violent young criminals. States are frantically trying to do something about what the public and politicians fear: a wave of 14-year-old "super-predators." Anxiety levels have risen with the recent rash of shootings in schools.
Critics say the answer mostly has been to get tough. Some states have lowered the age at which a kid can be tried as an adult. Others have given judges more sentencing options, while still others have given the usually ignored victims of youthful crime a role in the punishment process.
Congress is edging toward passage of a bill that would make it easier for courts to prosecute kids as adults. "The reality is that we can no longer sit silently by as children kill children, as teen-agers commit truly heinous offenses," says Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a strong supporter of tougher laws for kids. "It is time for Congress to pass legislation that fixes a broken juvenile justice system."
States already have acted. Between 1992 and 1995, 41 passed laws making it easier for juveniles to be tried as grown-ups, the U.S. Department of Justice says.
But locking kids up with adults horrifies many. Kids who do time in an adult facility are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted than those in juvenile facilities, eight times more likely to commit suicide and twice as likely "to be beaten by the staff," says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice, a research and public policy organization in Washington, D.C. "Adult institutions are a nightmare."
Just what to do about kids who commit serious crimes remains something of a mystery. The patchwork of punishment and rehabilitation programs varies greatly from state to state — so much so that a 1997 Justice Department report cites the possibility of "50 miniature laboratories in which juvenile justice policy is being tried and tested."
Loughran and other juvenile justice experts cite several states trying to be innovative with kids in prison. The Capital Offender Program at Giddings State Home and School in Giddings, Texas, is called a model program by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The most-violent young inmates in Texas end up at Giddings in the charge of Stan DeGerolami — if they're lucky. DeGerolami thinks he can turn many of them around.
His program relies on heavy-duty therapy with several unique features. Violent kids often are in denial: They block out the crime, saying they can't remember it. In the Giddings program, they undergo a probing reality check. A young inmate must re-create his crime in a group-therapy setting.
"What took them 30 seconds to a minute to do will be re-created over 30 minutes to an hour," he says. "The staff will be there to ask, 'When you stabbed him, did you feel the warm air from the body? How did it feel when the knife hit the bone? Did you catch any resistance?' " The prisoner also must recount the crime from the victim's point of view: how it felt to be stabbed repeatedly.
DeGerolami thinks that even the toughest kids can be reached by the right programs in prison. His Capital Offender Treatment Program reduces by 53% the likelihood of kids' being arrested for a violent offense within a year from release. About 230 have gone through it so far.
Ohio, too, has changed the way it deals with its toughest kids. About two years ago, as part of a sweeping reorganization of its juvenile justice system, the state reduced the age kids can be tried as adults to 14. But the legislature also said that whenever possible, children must be housed together, away from adults.
The Madison Correctional Institution in London, Ohio, now separates kids tried as adults from the adjacent adult population, except for times such as meals.
But even this segregated system broke down. Soon after the new arrangement opened in 1996, a 17-year-old was stabbed to death by an adult who managed to breach the checkpoint between kids and grown-ups.
"We were not adequately staffed, for one thing," says Madison's director, Reginald Wilkinson, who has instigated a raft of new, positive programs for the kids. New preventive measures have been put in place.
He also acknowledges that one can't say a repeat performance is impossible. In an adult prison, says another Madison staffer, it does not take much to provoke a murder.
For decades after the first juvenile court opened in Chicago in 1899, it was thought kids do not mindfully commit adult crimes and should not do adult time. But the increases in serious juvenile crime that began in the late 1980s, often linked with the crack cocaine epidemic, changed many minds.
"Not too long ago we lived in a society where the purpose of causing loss of liberty was to turn lives around," says Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University School of Law. "We looked forward to the day they were released. Now we do not think beyond the immediate goal of retribution and punishment."
The total arrests for kids who commit violent crime —murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — actually have gone down in the last couple of years, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. "When you look at crime rates statistically in a given year, only one-half of one percent of juveniles ages 10 to 17 were arrested for a violent crime," notes Shay Bilchik, OJJDP administrator.
Treating kids who can be successfully reclaimed in prison takes money, patience, time and compassionate personnel.
Loughran, a former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, advocates "a continuum of services" during and after prison. Those include educational and counseling programs in prison, transitional time afterward in a group home, and then back home when possible with intense continued supervision from a social worker with a small caseload.
While their programs are disparate, several states are cited as making progress by either Loughran or the U.S. Department of Justice. A thumbnail sketch of three:
Texas. All Texas Youth Commission inmates, not just those in the specialized Giddings program, go through a rigorous "resocialization" program that includes values training, victim empathy exercises and an emphasis on work, education and discipline.
Ohio. In the last two years since the state separated its most violent young offenders from adult inmates, director Reginald Wilkinson has started a Youthful Offender Program at Madison Correctional Institution. So far, the emphasis is on education, literacy training, substance abuse programs, esteem building and anger management.
South Carolina. The state emphasizes prevention, employing programs that include the "Insiders," young inmates who speak to students about getting in trouble; and "Project Right Turn," which provides a prison tour for at-risk kids. Flora Brooks Boyd, director of the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice, talks in terms of "habilitation," not rehabilitation. "Many of these youngsters never had the skills it takes to be successful in society in the first place."
The Risk Factors of Bad Behavior
A child's violent behavior generally results from a mix of factors rooted in the individual, family, school, peer group and community, according to a recent report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquncy Prevention's Study Group on Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders.
The report identifies a number of risk factors that emerge at various stages in a child's life. Kids who display a high number of these factors are five to 20 times more likely than others to become violent juvenile offenders, according to the report.
Risk factors adapted from the study include:
From infancy.
Difficult temperament, hyperactivity, impulsiveness, attention problems, low intelligence, male gender, neurological problems.
Other factors: young mother, parental substance abuse, poor parent-child communication, poverty, marital discord.
From toddler/preschool.
Aggressive behavior, lying, risk taking and sensation seeking, lack of guilt and/or empathy. Other factors: harsh and erratic discipline practices by parents, neglect, exposure to television violence.
From middle childhood.
Stealing and general delinquency, depression, sexual activity and substance use, exposure to violence. Other risk factors: poor parental supervision, poor academic achievement, truancy, peer rejection, delinquent peers and siblings, living in a poor neighborhood.
From middle adolescence.
Gun ownership, drug dealing, dropping out of school, gang membership.
©1998, USA Today
Info taken from
TYC - spotlight on youth
October 21, 1998
|
|