Kids in prison: Young inmates more likely to re-offend after adult prison

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Sep/Oct 2002 by Greene, Ronnie

Young inmates more likely to re-offend after adult prison

It was May 2000, and youthful tragedy struck South Florida once again: On the last day of school, a 13-year-old boy pulled out a .25-caliber pistol, pointed it at his teacher and shot him to death in a school breezeway in Palm Beach County. Less than a year earlier in neighboring Broward County, a 12-year-old boy literally body-slammed his 6-year-old playmate to death, police say.

Suddenly, two school-age children were charged with murder in Florida's adult court system. And just as suddenly, Florida's reputation for cracking down hard on juvenile crime was in the national news. Soon, columnists, experts and advocates were debating the merits of trying Nathaniel Brazill and Lionel Tate in courts once reserved solely for adults.

The Miami Herald decided to turn these two very high-profile cases into a much deeper look at Florida's crackdown against juvenile defendants. While the newspaper continued to closely cover the prosecutions after the killings of teacher Barry Grunow and 6-- year-old Tiffany Eunick, editors Marty Baron and Judy Miller freed colleague Geoff Dougherty and me to examine the broader implications, and broader questions, triggered by the state's juvenile crime campaign.

The effort had actually begun nearly a decade earlier, when infamous tourist crimes by young suspects prompted state legislators to pass sweeping laws giving prosecutors enhanced powers to try children as adults. Since then, the get-tough approach had prompted heavy debate - but little independent analysis.

Our mission was to look beyond the two cases and provide a factual accounting of the larger state crackdown.

Our questions, at least on the surface, were simple: Just how effective has Florida's juvenile crime campaign been? Who has the state targeted under the toughened laws? Once juveniles are prosecuted as adults - and sent off to prison - what happens to them? Do they face a high likelihood of assault behind bars? Are they likely to leave prison as worse criminals, or reformed young adults?

Answering those straightforward questions took well over half a year. Dougherty conducted computer-assisted analysis of millions of court records to systematically address key issues, as I pulled thousands of courthouse records on individual juvenile cases and conducted in-person interviews across Florida with everyone from young criminals serving time in adult prisons to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, advocates and victims.

Ultimately, we found some surprising answers. The hot-button Brazill and Tate prosecutions, for instance, proved to be not at all typical of the types of juvenile cases being tried in Florida's adult courts. But first, a little more detail about the reporting methodology.

Following young inmates

To get a full accounting of the types of crimes that landed young offenders in adult courts, we examined records of juvenile prosecutions in Florida adult courts since 1995. To get a sense of their rap sheets before their forays into the adult court world, we pulled those defendants' prior records. We analyzed both to understand the typical crime, and typical rap sheet, for juveniles being prosecuted in adult courts.

To get a sense of what happened to juvenile defendants once they landed in adult prison, we obtained a computer database from state prison officials listing assault allegations in every state prison over a five-year period. With this information, we created a searchable database that allowed us to examine assault allegations by prison, by the victim's age, or by the type of complaint, such as aggravated assault, aggravated battery or attempted murder. Dougherty used this database to explore how often juveniles complained of abuse in Florida's prison system, and to compare that to the rate at which adult inmates complained of abuse. To fully tell the stories of individual assaults, I obtained state Department of Corrections internal investigative files, such as when a South Florida teenager was murdered behind bars, or when a North Florida teen was scalded in the face with boiling water during another prison flare-up. I interviewed some victims of these assaults, and asked prison officials to explain what happened.

We also wanted to know what happened to juvenile inmates after they left state prison. Are they more likely to continue their criminal ways than juveniles charged with similar crimes routed to rehab programs instead? To answer that question, Dougherty used a statistical technique that allowed for an apples-to-apples comparison of two sets of teens charged with similar crimes but sent to different systems - one to state prison, the other to juvenile detention programs. He followed the teens after release from their respective systems, to see which relapsed into crime more often.

Beyond the computer analysis and paper research, we built our report with the stories of those affected by the state's crackdown. I crisscrossed the state interviewing juveniles tried in adult courts and sent to prison. These were young criminals whose cases had not drawn headlines, but who made up the bulk of the state's prosecution effort.