Gregory’s File: A Childhood of Neglect, a Life of Crime : Juveniles: In a Seattle courtroom, one 17-year-old’s case reveals the common threads in tangled young lives.

As 17-year-old Gregory stood before her, charged with drug dealing, King County Superior Court Judge Norma Huggins studied his juvenile record and came to the conclusion that she had reached in so many other cases.

“This kid never even had a chance,” she told herself.

Gregory’s file was filled with ominous details--gang membership, car theft, weapon possession.

But it was filled, too, with evidence that life had stacked the deck against him almost from birth--with abandonment, abuse, poverty and neglect.

To Huggins, it seemed that Gregory had been almost destined for this day when a judge would be trying to protect the community from him while at the same time trying to rescue him from the forces that had shaped him.

Cases like Gregory’s have become a focal point in the country’s juvenile justice system, officials say, because while policies have been tailored to deal with hardened, heartless juvenile offenders, most of the youngsters filing through courtrooms and filling up juvenile prisons are, like him, as much victims as villains.

While their crimes differ and the circumstances vary, officials say that most children being housed in the nation’s juvenile facilities share one experience:

“Neglect,” says Margaret Nickish of St. Gabriel’s School, a suburban Philadelphia custody facility for delinquent boys. “It is the biggest common denominator among the children that we see.”

Judges complain that even as they carry out the nation’s mandate for tougher sentencing, they know that many of the juveniles they are sending to jail are not criminals by choice but the product of abuse, poverty and inattention.

Often, they are children of impoverished, overwhelmed mothers and absentee fathers. Or they are raised by emotionally crippled, chemically dependent parents, by overmatched grandparents, uninterested aunts, uncles or cousins, or by brothers and sisters themselves barely removed from adolescence.

Left With Lockups

They are orphans and foster children, high school dropouts, academic underachievers for whom school holds little hope or relevance. Their childhood has been one long descent through the nation’s porous safety nets to juvenile court, historically the last and most intense stop in a series of rehabilitative efforts.

In today’s juvenile system, however, punishment has moved to center stage. While rehabilitation is still regarded as a goal, public programs designed to offer poor children counseling and other support services have been choked off by a lack of funding.

Consequently, judges increasingly find themselves exercising the only option left: lock them up where they can do no harm and hope that something good will come of it.

So it was to be today for Gregory, whose last name is omitted, as required by juvenile court rules, but whose life offers a case study of many of the circumstances that deliver children to lockup.

Gregory was scarred almost from the beginning. Just before his first birthday, his father, a mentally disturbed and physically disabled Vietnam veteran, killed his mother, starting the boy down a path that would eventually land him in Huggins’ courtroom.

Streetwise Childhood

While his father went to prison, Gregory and his older sister were shuffled to relatives in Seattle, then to Memphis. But their father was paroled five years later, and they were returned to him in Seattle.

There, although poor and often unkempt, they attended school and appeared to be no different from other children of age 6 and 11 in the neighborhood. By night, however, they helped their father peddle marijuana up and down the city’s back streets, usually falling asleep on a makeshift bed in the back of his van as he made the rounds.

“We would help him package it up,” Gregory recalled. “At first, what we mostly did was get all the seeds out. Then he showed us how to weigh it on this scale he had so that you got just the right amount.”

Gregory’s father proved to be his own best customer, and as his drug and alcohol dependency grew, the family lost its home. For nearly four years, Gregory and his sister wandered with their father from homeless shelter to relative to acquaintance to motel to shelter.

When Gregory was 9, he and his sister were taken from their father and placed in separate foster homes. They would never live together again. Over the next four years, Gregory would rotate between foster homes and life with an alcoholic aunt who would tend to him for a few months, then be overwhelmed by the chore.

Gang as Family

And with each foster home there were new rules, new expectations, new people. Gregory became withdrawn, suppressing his real feelings in order to get along, and learning to tell adults what they wanted to hear, not what they needed to know.

At 13, he wandered into a neighborhood gang, which became his real family, protecting, consoling and advising him. Its members taught him to fend for himself, to shoplift, to steal cars, to get guns.

“I just kind of got into it,” Gregory says. “You don’t join a gang because you want to do something bad. Sometimes you just need somebody to watch your back.”

As his gang involvement increased, Gregory--until then a solid B student--began to skip school. His grades fell. His priorities shifted. Money became a near-obsession. “When I don’t have money, I feel bad,” he says. “It’s like I’m nobody, nothing.”

He began to sell drugs. With that role came money, status and prestige. “Everywhere I went, people knew me,” he said.

Eventually, the police came to know him too. Late one night, when he was again living with his aunt, officers burst into his bedroom and arrested him for auto theft, possession of a gun and drugs. He was 14.

After five weeks in detention, Gregory was found guilty, placed on probation and returned to his aunt. But within six months he was arrested, again for auto theft.

He spent a year and two months in a lockup, then was transferred to a group home where he got psychiatric counseling. By now, his life had left its mark. Counselors noted that his emotional problems included severe depression, mood swings, insomnia, nightmares, low self-esteem, poor coping skills and lack of self-control. They prescribed drugs.

Father Returns

Eventually Gregory’s father, who had remarried, returned and was granted a 60-day trial custody.

“I didn’t really want to go live with my father,” Gregory says. “I mean, I didn’t know what to expect because he had never really taken care of me. . . . But I wanted to get out of that group home, and he is my father.”

At 16, Gregory moved with his new stepmother and his unpredictable father into a small, two-bedroom apartment already occupied by a cousin, her husband and their two children. The three made do on the father’s disability check.

As a provision of Gregory’s release, the court had ordered that he continue psychiatric counseling. He received none.

He attended a nearby school and started off well. Teachers reported him well-mannered, well-liked and disciplined. Within weeks, according to his academic counselor, he had become a favorite tutor among students in the school’s tutorial program.

That brief semblance of order ended quickly. Near the end of the second month, the cousin and her husband, tired of bickering with Gregory’s parents, asked them to leave. Gregory stayed on, and his father promised to send money for his expenses. It never came. Gregory had no bus fare, nothing for lunch or school supplies. He secretly began selling small amounts of marijuana for an adult who lived nearby.

After three weeks, the cousin, angry at the father’s failure to keep his promise, dropped Gregory and a cardboard box with his belongings on the doorstep of a dingy transient motel room that his father now called home. There was one bed. Gregory slept on the floor.

“I could see this pattern starting all over again with my father,” Gregory said. So he began a desperate search. He thought about moving in with his sister, now a 21-year-old welfare recipient who lived in a one-bedroom slum apartment with her two small children and a boyfriend, whom Gregory suspected of crack cocaine addiction. That wouldn’t work. Just weeks earlier, he recalled, his sister had borrowed $40 that he had saved while in custody because she had run out of milk and diapers for the baby.

Finally, Gregory slipped out to a pay phone and called collect to the mother of a friend who had often offered her home if he needed a place to stay. It was cramped, but clean and comfortable. The family welcomed him, gave him his own room, doled out a weekly allowance.

But old habits die hard.

Six weeks later, Gregory was standing before Judge Huggins, accused of selling $100 worth of marijuana to an undercover police officer. While he awaited trial, neither his father, aunt, sister nor any other relative visited him.

Judge Huggins looked at the balance sheet. In Gregory’s favor were good grades and a letter of support from one instructor. Then came the other side of the ledger: No parent present. No other relatives available. Previous adults did not provide proper supervision. Third offense.

There were no alternatives. Gregory was sentenced to up to three years in custody.

Cases like Gregory’s stream through the nation’s juvenile courts in an unending procession, and as a result, many justice officials say, the nation’s juvenile custody facilities have in large part become holding pens for disadvantaged children.

“We’re getting more and more youngsters who are very emotionally upset, youngsters who need a lot more attention and counseling than in previous years,” said Nickish of the suburban Philadelphia school for delinquent boys. “The problems are different out there. Many, many times after reading the records, I say to myself, ‘Thank God I didn’t have to grow up in these days.’ ”

Rising Tensions

A study of 15-year-olds in custody in New York City, for example, found that 75% were from single-parent homes and 35% read at fourth-grade level or below. Social workers say that many of these children feel locked outside, almost as removed from society as foreigners observing America on television. Internal and external pressures have heightened tensions in their homes to a flash point, and as they venture into neighborhoods devoid of recreational activities and services, there is little release.

For some, poverty is so intense and the community so oppressive that being in jail is actually better than being at home, juvenile court officials say.

“It strikes you kind of odd on its face,” says Fred Davis, head of a 500-bed juvenile detention facility in Chicago. “But if you’re in a gang environment, there’s shooting constantly in the neighborhood, there’s dope all over the neighborhood. You could be shot or killed. There’s usually just the mother trying to grapple with all these children. You’re living in a raggedy, roach-infested apartment, sleeping four to a bed.

“In detention, you’re in a place that’s clean, it’s safe, it’s quiet, there’s order, you have your own room, your own bed. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the reality for some of these kids. I mean, I’ve actually had kids tell me that being here was better than being at home.”

Ultimately, as America’s inner-city children take on the characteristics of the circumstances in which they live, they regurgitate their daily diet of pain, uncertainty, violence and abuse in delinquent behavior.

“If a child has been raised in a house where different men are coming and going, mother is drinking during the day, often leaving the child to fend for himself, the child having to deal with neighbors in a violence-torn community, that’s the only norm the child knows,” says Dr. John Griffith, director of clinical services at Kedren Mental Health Center in South-Central Los Angeles.

“Someone born into that neighborhood, with that kind of conditioning--his perception of the world would be anxiety-provoking and hostile. That child feels he has to defend and protect himself.”

A Familiar Cycle

Cary Quashen, who counsels juveniles at Avalon Treatment Program in North Hollywood, says: “I’m working with a 14-year-old girl whose dad was killed by police in a robbery before she was born, and her mother has been a drug addict all her life. So the kid is being raised by her grandmother. The mom goes to prison for prostitution and cocaine, and when she gets out she moves in with the grandmother, where she is staying in the same room with her daughter.

“The mother is still getting loaded, bringing in all kinds of men, disappearing for days at a time, hiding drugs in the kid’s clothes. The kid is watching all of this. So the kid starts running away, stealing and getting loaded.

“Now she’s committed a crime, but really what she’s doing is acting out the pain at home. She’s a victim of circumstances. That doesn’t give her an excuse to do what she’s doing, but that’s why she’s doing it.”

Judge Walter Williams said that the relationship between neglect, abuse and delinquency became crystal clear to him when, after 10 years of handling cases of child abuse and neglect in Chicago’s Juvenile Dependency Court, he moved last year to Delinquency Court.

“Many of the kids that I was seeing over there as abused and neglected kids, I’m seeing over here now as delinquent kids charged with crimes,” Williams says, “I mean the exact same kids.”

When those children come to court in a criminal case, however, the abuse and neglect seldom have relevance to what happens to them.

A Hamstrung System

“Sometimes our systems fails these children,” says Naomi M. Post, whose job it is to find the most suitable placements for many of Philadelphia’s juvenile offenders.

“When we get a kid on the delinquent side, we deal with him strictly on that. It doesn’t matter that the child has these dependent issues that may be influencing his behavior. This is one of the problems that the system has failed to recognize for years. We didn’t understand that family dysfunction played a major role in the behavior of these children.”

Orville Armstrong, presiding juvenile judge in Los Angeles’ East Lake Division, describes the frustration he experiences every time that he reviews a progress report before deciding whether to release youngsters he has sentenced to stints at one of Los Angeles County’s youth camps.

“The report will usually read something like this: In the first weeks or so, the kid was uncooperative and showed no progress. In the next few weeks, he still had problems but showed signs of improvement. In the third month, he was really doing well, his grades had picked up, he was beginning to be more involved. By the end, he is just great, he’s an active leader among the boys, he’s making exceptional grades. He’s really cleaned up his act and is doing wonderful things.

Missing the Roots

“So, he’s standing before me in court and I’m getting ready to release this kid and I will give him a lecture. I tell him how he has really improved, how he should be proud of his accomplishments. I talk about how he has laid down this strong foundation on which to go forward and build a strong, productive future.

“And even as the last words trail off my lips, I know that in all likelihood he’ll be back, because we’re sending him back to the same environment, the same structure, the same streets that got him here in the first place.”

Nationally, an estimated 7 in 10 children who are placed in long-term custody will be back, juvenile delinquency officials say. Consequently, many officials have begun to question the nation’s emphasis on simply putting children, without additional therapy, where they can do no harm for the moment.

“Right now we’re just simply punishing kids,” says Huggins, the judge who sentenced Gregory. “We are addressing their delinquent behavior, but we are not addressing the problems that spawned these children, the same problems we are going to send them back to when they are out of custody.

TOMORROW: Why are so many black juveniles behind bars?