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

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2002 by J. Steven Smith

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.