COLUMN ONE : A Nation's Children in Lockup : Political and social pressures have shifted the focus of juvenile justice from rehabilitation to punishment. The result, experts say, is a system that is not working and is open to abuse.

By RON HARRIS

Aug. 22, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In separate cases three years ago, Michael Harris and Walter Biggs, both of Los Angeles, were arrested and charged with robbery. Both Harris and Biggs (whose real names are not used here) were convicted and sentenced to custody. Harris, 16, served 2 1/2 years; Biggs, 25, however, did only 18 months.

It wasn’t that Harris was the more dangerous criminal, nor was the difference merely one of the vagaries of the justice system. Harris did more time because, as a juvenile, he was sentenced to the California Youth Authority, while Biggs was sent to a state prison.

“That’s not uncommon,” one Los Angeles juvenile parole officer said. “Juveniles sent to the Youth Authority normally serve longer sentences than adults in state prison.”

Such is the rougher, tougher world of juvenile justice.

It is a world where some states lock up larger percentages of children than adults, where youngsters who are traditionally denied jury trials may serve longer sentences than their adult counterparts, where youths are often housed in overcrowded facilities and sometimes punished in ways that would be unthinkable in state prisons.

All because people believed something that wasn’t true.

Beginning about 1975, crimes by children in the United States began a steady decline, but the public perception was that juvenile delinquency was going through the roof.

So the United States began to lock up its wayward youngsters at unprecedented rates, eventually transforming the way the nation deals with them.

Once, juvenile crime brought determined attempts to rehabilitate kids, even though that sometimes required keeping them in custody.

Today, virtually all authorities on juvenile justice agree, custody has become largely an end in itself. The pendulum has swung away from rehabilitation and toward punishment.

Recent juvenile crime statistics make it increasingly clear that it has not worked.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the experts say, America decided to get tough with its juvenile delinquents and to separate them from the rest of society, even though Justice Department figures showed juvenile crime declining. From 1978 to 1988, while the per capita rate of crime among youths dropped by 19%, their lockup rate increased by nearly 50%.

“The public got tough-minded, and the elected officials got tough-minded for them,” said Fred Jordan, director of probation for San Francisco County. “We had a series of attorneys general who talked about the ‘juvenile crime wave’ even though the numbers weren’t going up.”

Until this shift began, juvenile court had functioned as society’s stern surrogate parent; the court’s role was to bolster family discipline--or provide discipline where there was none--by applying an additional measure of control and guidance for wayward children.

Children who committed crimes, the court reasoned, were not hardened criminals, but still-forming youngsters who often could be put back on track; they could be admonished, or counseled, or moved from dysfunctional homes to structured, nurturing environments. The court was there to protect and guide them, not to punish.

But in the tough-minded ‘70s and ‘80s, rehabilitation took a back seat. States passed laws calling for more and longer incarceration of the young, and when punishment inside juvenile facilities was deemed too soft, they enacted measures allowing thousands of children to be tried and sentenced as adults.

Few inside the juvenile-justice system believed that longer, stiffer sentences would rehabilitate children. In fact, studies in California show a correlation between longer sentences and how often minors return to crime. The public, however, wanted retribution, and many voices argued that as long as kids were in custody, at least they couldn’t cause more trouble.

Increasingly, as children were locked up in large, prison-like juvenile halls, youth camps, and training schools, the facilities became overcrowded--breeding grounds for abuse and violence.

“The juvenile code now is a punishment model,” said Jerome Wassom, director of the Washington state Division of Juvenile Rehabilitation. “There’s a much greater emphasis on sending kids to state institutions.”

But, despite the harsher penalties, something happened four years ago that caught juvenile officials off guard: The rate of serious crimes among the nation’s children and youths actually began to rise.

In 1991, the most recent year for which figures are available, juvenile homicides, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults climbed to their highest levels in the nation’s history. Although there were still fewer offenses of all kinds per capita than there were 10 years earlier, the upsurge in more violent offenses has caused many in the juvenile-justice system to ask what has gone wrong.

Former U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr says the increases “clearly show that we must enact wholesale reform of the juvenile-justice system so that, for the vast majority of juvenile offenders, their first brush with the law is their last. But the long-term solution falls largely outside of law enforcement. It requires strengthening those basic institutions--family, schools, religious institutions, community groups--that are responsible for instilling values and creating law-abiding citizens.”

Paradoxically--because it was assumed that the role of the juvenile court was to rehabilitate and assist those who came before it--safeguards that the justice system guarantees adults were not afforded to children. Such safeguards were considered unnecessary or undesirable.

Children in juvenile court, for instance, do not have the right to a jury trial, nor, in most states, are they allowed bail. To “protect the reputation of children,” proceedings in juvenile court are closed to the public and the press.

Even the terminology of juvenile court is different--designed, officials say, to spare children the taint of criminal proceedings.

Holding facilities for children prior to court appearances--the equivalent of adult jails--are called “detention.” Instead of findings of guilt or innocence, juvenile courts reach a “disposition” for juvenile offenders. Youngsters are not “sentenced” but “placed.”

“The idea was that you were going to treat these kids,” said Robert Walker, a family law attorney in San Francisco who handles cases in juvenile court. “The children were going to get the services they needed.” But now, he says, “although the terminology remains the same, the court has become much more like a mini-criminal court.”

These days the terms serve as mere euphemisms, said John O’Toole, director of the National Center for Youth Law in San Francisco. “The justification in the past was that what was going to happen to you as a child was not going to be bad,” he said. “That’s just not true anymore. Kids are being punished, and they are being punished very harshly.”

In the late 1970s, states began to amend juvenile codes, often going so far as to write the word “punishment” into sentencing guidelines.

Now, according to the Justice Department, on any given day, about 100,000 juveniles nationwide are in lockup--nearly a fifth of them in California.

As incarceration was mandated for specific offenses, discretion was increasingly taken out of the hands of juvenile-court judges.

Consequently, many judges say they find themselves straitjacketed, like Seattle Judge Norma Huggins, who says she sentenced one 15-year-old to two years in a state juvenile prison “because I had no choice.”

“There was an outcry that children who are accused of crime need to get the same thing that adults get,” said Huggins, who now handles adult cases. “But there is a difference. I see people every day who are professional criminals, who intend to live their lives taking advantage of other people. I don’t think I can say that of a 15-year-old, that he’s made up his mind to be a professional thief or a professional killer.”

Adding to the punishment side of the ledger, many states rewrote laws so that more juveniles could be tried as adults. The result is that thousands are sent to adult prisons.

In New York, any juvenile 16 or older accused of committing a crime is automatically transferred to adult court and, if found guilty, sentenced to an adult facility. In Florida, about 6,000 juveniles are transferred to adult court each year at the sole discretion of the prosecuting attorney. In Illinois and Mississippi, any youth 13 or older can be tried as an adult for any crime. In 17 states, children as young as 14 can be tried in adult court.

In California, the Legislature in 1977 passed provisions so that, under a handful of serious charges such as murder, voluntary manslaughter and armed robbery, children 16 and older could be tried as adults. Each year, however, the list lengthened. Today it has grown to 24 offenses.

“Politicians keep beating their breasts wanting more and more punishment,” said Michael Mahoney, former director of a maximum-security Illinois Youth Center and now executive director of a prison watchdog group in Joliet, Ill. “They seize upon some crime that has caught the public eye. Then they pass a law to make the punishment tougher, and the public nods its approval.

“I’m not arguing that there aren’t some bad kids out there who need to be separated, but I think we have overdone it. I’ve seen 16-year-olds who are thugs, and I’ve seen 16-year-olds who are lost, mixed-up kids. This whole idea of pushing kids into the adult system belies the fact there’s a large disparity in criminality, maturity and mental stability.”

Juvenile-justice officials say that as the nation moved toward punishment, services that nurture children, bolster families or intervene to keep kids out of trouble began to diminish. Now, they say, issues that could or should have been resolved earlier are ending up in juvenile court.

“There aren’t enough community resources to deal with a lot of problems,” said Juvenile Court Judge Sherman Smith in San Francisco. “We should have better recreational systems. Police officers should have more positive interaction with the community. We need better schools. These are the kinds of things we should do. (But now) the court is the primary source of intervention when it comes to children. The court should not be part of the front-end process. The court should be the last resort.”

In the juvenile-justice system, probation officers have long been a force to help delinquent kids get their lives back on track. Their job is to watch over children, monitor their school performance, talk with their instructors, visit their homes, counsel them, review their progress and recommend action.

Over the last 15 years, however, probation departments have seen their budgets slashed and their role changed as the numbers of youngsters assigned to each officer have soared. Like teachers in overcrowded classrooms, they have seen their effectiveness diminish.

In Chicago, Cook County probation officer Angela Pierce struggles to keep track of 60 troubled juveniles from the impoverished Inglewood community. She sees each of them once a month.

“I’m just scratching the surface,” she said. “These kids need a lot more than I can give them.”

In Los Angeles, county probation officer Lisa Cunningham said she envies Pierce. Her caseload is nearly 200 children. “I wanted to be a probation officer to help people, but I have so many people who need help that I don’t have time to give them the attention they need,” she said.

These days, juvenile-court officials say, if minors stay out of trouble, they do so mostly on their own. If they commit another offense, it is usually because the forces that first got them into trouble still exist.

“I had one kid who kept violating his probation,” Chicago Juvenile Court Judge Charles May said. “As a part of his probation, he was supposed to be at home at night by a certain time, but he would always miss his curfew. So, he’s back in court and I tell him that I’m going to have to put him in detention for 30 days.

“He says: ‘Your honor, I just can’t stay at home and watch my father beat up my mother.’ Now what am I supposed to do? I can’t let this kid continue to skip curfew and violate a direct court order. He’s got to go home. But am I supposed to force him into a house where a father is abusing a mother?”

Many of the nation’s juvenile-court judges face a similar quandary--a stream of delinquent children with a horde of contributing problems, and few answers other than incarceration.

“In Pennsylvania, we sometimes cannot come up with the services for kids to stay at home, and because we cannot, we’ll put them in jail,” said Naomi Post, whose job as director of the Philadelphia juvenile court’s Restitution and Resource Planning Unit is to find the most suitable placement for delinquent children. “We can’t just leave the child at home where he or she is not getting any help.”

“Locking up a kid and giving that kid some structure is a valid rehabilitation tool,” said Judge Smith in San Francisco. “Just because you lock a kid up doesn’t mean it’s necessarily something negative. You’re providing structure to show kids what to do right.”

In nearly every state, judges and juvenile-court officials can point to model training schools where delinquent children have turned their lives around. But they admit such facilities are the exception.

Many of today’s juvenile facilities have become overcrowded, often dangerous, sometimes brutal places where children sleep on floors, join gangs for their own protection and receive harsh, sometimes abusive, treatment by those who watch over them.

In Seattle, detention supervisor Ed Woodley described one facility as a “school for crime”; in Pennsylvania, Post said she “wouldn’t send a dog to Cromwell Heights,” one of the state’s facilities for juveniles.

Because of a shortage of facilities, children who commit minor offenses often find themselves mixed in with tougher youths, said James Bell, staff attorney for the Youth Law Center in San Francisco.

There have been many stories of abuses inside juvenile facilities. In Florida, until a court order ended such practices in 1988, 10-year-olds sent to reform school for petty thievery were hogtied and thrown into strip-cell isolation, sometimes for as long as 60 days. In Oklahoma, prior to a court settlement in 1985, children were placed in straitjackets and put in isolation. In Idaho, 13- and 14-year-olds were “given the standing wall,” in which they stood with noses pressed against the wall for as long as 16 hours a day for such infractions as talking.

In Arizona, children were handcuffed naked to beds or had their feet and hands handcuffed to the four corners of their bunk. In New Orleans, juvenile offenders complain that they are routinely beaten by sheriff’s deputies at the local detention facility.

“We’re talking about kinds of physical and mental punishment that don’t go on even in adult institutions,” said David Lambert, an attorney for the Youth Law Center, which has filed and won numerous cases regarding the treatment of juveniles in state facilities.

“Kids need to be held accountable, but not by punishing them by putting them in a brutal dehumanizing institution for six to eight months, where they continually learn to survive by intimidating other people, where they lose more respect for authority, which, in turn, increases the odds that when they are released from that institution they are going to engage in similar or worse criminal activity,” he said.

It is clear, say those who monitor the juvenile-court system, that more and longer incarceration does not appear to be working. As the incarceration rate has gone up, so has the percentage of juveniles who are rearrested for crimes after their release.

“The way the system is set up now, they’re coming out worse than when they went in,” said Lambert of the Youth Law Center. “They come out embittered, hardened.”

Consequently, some states are beginning to re-evaluate the way they handle children, and are seeking more cost-effective methods.

Currently, the nation is spending more than $3.2 billion annually to keep children in custody, and the annual price tag for one youngster’s incarceration averages more than $30,000.

“The amount of money we’re spending on them, we could almost pay them to stay out of trouble,” said Dan MacAllair of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. “I mean, that’s more than a year’s tuition to Stanford or Harvard.”

Increasingly, juvenile-justice officials themselves have begun to see an overriding correlation between juvenile delinquency and such factors as poverty, physical and emotional abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and educational deficiencies. Consequently, many have concluded that just locking up youths is not the answer.

In Philadelphia, presiding Juvenile Court Judge Frank Reynolds says that “until you deal positively with these children, particularly those of the urban poor, you’re going to suffer. The less time and energy a city spends on those children, the more miserable a city will become. If the major cities of this country do not begin to grasp that as an ever-present reality, their communities will continue to decline.”

NEXT: Who are the children in custody?

Youths Serve Longer

Adults in California Department of Corrections facilities serve far less time than juveniles convicted of the same or similar crimes.

MONTHS SERVED Adults Youths Homicide 41 60 Kidnaping 42 49 Robbery 25 30 Assault 21 29 Burglary 18 21 Theft (except auto) 11 18 Auto theft 13 17 Forcible rape 43 58 Other sex crimes 34 40 Narcotics 14 22 Other offenses 11 20 Average 16 26

Sources: Figures for adults from California Department of Corrections; figures for youths from California Youth Authority

Arrests vs. Jail

While arrest rates for juveniles dropped in the early 1980s, incarceration rates shot up. The trend in jail and prison rates for young offenders reflected growing public frustration with crime.

Number of arrests per 100,000 ‘91: 1,315 *

Jail and prison per 100,000 ‘91: 370 Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Report; 1979-1989 Census of Public and Private Juvenile Detention, Correctional and Shelter Facilities; U.S. Census

From Arrest to Incarceration: Juvenile Court in Action

Here is how juvenile suspects move through the system. This model, based on a cross-section of procedures, captures the major elements of most systems around the nation.

ARREST: Police bring youth to some type of screening office

SCREENING: Screening office:

A) Resolve the matter informally--through a social service agency, voluntary restitution or informal probation

B) Send the case ahead for a court date

C) Dismiss the case for lack of merit

JUDGE: If the case is sent on for a hearing, a judge reviews the case and determines the final step

DECISION

A) If the offense is severe, send the case to adult court so youth can be tried as an adult

B) Commit the youth to a prison-like institute for delinquents

C) Place youth on probation or in a group home, foster home or some type of treatment facility

D) Dismiss the case

Among the differences in juvenile court: