A slap on the wrist for 'naughty' kids

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 1996 | by Woody West

Rarely do you hear the phrase "juvenile delinquency"--a term prevalent decades ago that signified worrisome but not cataclysmic behavior. As ever-younger predators not only violate personal safety and property rights and disregard moral standards, however, "delinquency" seems a quaint label.

Homicide arrests among 14- to 17-year-olds have tripled during the last decade, for grotesque example, and that age group will expand by 20 percent during the next decade. There appears to be a fitful consensus emerging about how to handle these youthful raptors, but it is bitterly controversial.

Across the country, states are making drastic changes in handling juveniles. "The thrust of the new laws is to get more juveniles into the adult criminal-justice system," the New York Times reported recently with faint disapproval, "where they will presumably serve longer sentences under more punitive conditions."

The trend outrages liberals. "We are stepping down a very grim path toward eliminating childhood," frets Lisa Greer of the Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office. Her perspective is odd when you reflect that vicious crimes by teens contradict the meaning of "childhood" in any useful sense. Whether this brutality is due to the usually invoked factors--poverty, family disintegration, violence in the popular culture--is adjunctive, at least. Punishment is culturally imperative for those who murder, maim, rob, burglarize and terrorize.

A principal argument against consigning younger offenders to adult prison holds that incarceration is grad school for criminals. In Florida and New Jersey, studies supposedly have found a lower rate of subsequent offenses among those sentenced as juveniles than as adults. In both states, though, the comparisons cover a relatively short period since laws on sentencing were changed.

This is harsh business. But as a result of what has become a congenitally feeble juvenile criminal justice system-to the extent that not even names, as a rule, can be made public in heinous crimes--the young have learned an ominous lesson: They can get away with breaking the law indefinitely with hardly a risk of swift, sure and stern punishment.

What are the alternatives? There are notions around--"home arrest" with electronic monitoring, for instance. Curfews are in fashion, as are programs to steer "at-risk" youngsters away from the precipice, a vague concept but perhaps with some merit. (What does a community do about a 6-year-old who batters a baby, as in the recent West Coast case? That's probably beyond remediation and can only be accommodated--if that's the word--by recognizing that evil exists.)

The boot-camp technique also is chic, the latest penalogical panacea despite no verdict on its efficacy. There are indications that it delivers less than hoped (Arizona recently dropped the program). Imposing a form of military discipline on first-time offenders for 90 days, with the prospect of probation rather than hard time if they "graduate," is fundamentally flawed, however politically appealing as it may be.

The Marine Corps (the pattern for the civilian boot camp) not only imposes implacable discipline, it enables recruits to become part of a tradition, to join a proud "little platoon," as it were. In addition, this cohesive code will be the standard for young troopers for the rest of their tour--rather than seeming a transient thing. Transgression is not winked at: The institutional adage goes that to err is human, to forgive divine--neither of which is Marine Corps policy.

Clearly, however, in the civil world there is sentiment for stouter bars and tougher terms for teenage criminals. Ernest Tubbs used to sing of a jailbird who lamented, "I'm alone and it's my shame, I'm a number not a name"--a sentiment that hardly would be understood in cell blocks today. That's part of the problem: The concept of shame largely has been jettisoned, as has its first cousin, humiliatian.

The purposes of a criminal justice system must be, in order of priority, to protect the public, to punish (for the sake of the criminal and for society's sense of moral equity), to deter and, if possible, to rehabilitate. The latter is an elusive concept. Likely, the most that can be done is to teach the thugs to read and write--which the public schools seem unable or unwilling to do--and get some of them to recognize that it's them who are out of step, not the rest of us.

Thorny thicket, to be sure. But what can be said bluntly is that when flood waters are ravaging, build the levees higher.