Should Young Criminals Grow Old in Prison? : With Increasing Numbers of Youths Being Arrested for Violent Crimes, a Growing Chorus of Get-Tough Advocates Is Calling for Stiffer Penalties

At age 15, Shawn Fudge was convicted of second-degree murder for a gang-related shooting in Watts. The victim was 12 years old.

Incarcerated at the California Youth Authority prison in Chino, Fudge, now 23, still remembers turning his head away as detectives waved a photograph of the murder scene in his face. Lying in a puddle of blood was the dead boy, a bullet wound to the head.

“I just shot the gun ‘til the gun wouldn’t shoot no more,” Fudge said of the July, 1986, shooting, which also left four others wounded. “I was just a kid. I never thought about the consequences.” Because Fudge was under 16 at the time of the murder, he was tried in Juvenile Court and sentenced to the Youth Authority system. State law requires that all juvenile offenders be released from the Youth Authority at 25, regardless of the crime. Had he been 16, he could have been tried as an adult and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Fudge’s case and many others like it lie at the heart of a nationwide debate about youths and violence. With increasing numbers of teen-agers being arrested for violent crimes, a growing chorus of get-tough advocates is calling for stiffer penalties for kids who kill, rape and rob.

In California, more than a dozen bills in the Legislature have been proposed to toughen the penalties facing juveniles, ranging from sentencing youths as young as 14 as adults in murder cases to allowing gang members as young as 12 to be tried as adults regardless of their crimes. On the national level, a Senate anti-crime bill would allow people as young as 13 accused of violent federal offenses to be tried as adults.

The issue has particular significance for Central Los Angeles, where youths carrying guns has become increasingly commonplace. “Without a doubt, more kids are involved in this cycle of violence,” said Lt. Sergio Robleto, commander of the Police Department’s South Bureau homicide detail.

But is treating youths as adults the answer to reforming a juvenile criminal justice system that many agree has failed to keep up with escalating levels of violence during the past decade?

Stiffer sentences, proponents argue, would protect society by locking up young offenders longer and deter violence by causing youths to think twice before committing crimes.

“Many kids in their early teens are already hardened criminals. And if they do the crime, they should do the time,” said Assemblyman Bill Hoge (R-Pasadena), who introduced the bill that would make it legal to try 12-year-old gang members as adults.

Others, however, contend that locking up youths for longer periods will only create hardened criminals, many of whom will ultimately be released back on the streets meaner than before. What is needed, they say, are more social programs that address the causes of crime.

“You can incarcerate people longer and build more prisons, but you will just create people who come out more brutalized,” said Constance L. Rice, western regional council for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “You can’t lock up everyone forever--that’s not the answer.”

The state law that sets the minimum age limit for adult trials at 16 was established in 1975. It applies to felonies ranging from murder and arson to sodomy and kidnaping for ransom.

Prosecutors, police and judges say many gang leaders order young associates to carry out shootings, knowing that they will be released at 25 no matter how heinous the crime.

“When that law was written, we didn’t have the sophistication and violence that we have today,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Scott Carbough, who heads the unit that prosecutes hard-core gang members in South-Central Los Angeles County.

Indeed, across the country, violent youth crime is on the rise. The national murder arrest rate for people between 10 and 17 more than doubled from 1983 to 1991, from 5.4 arrests per 100,000 youths to 12.7 arrests, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice, a Pittsburgh research organization.

In California, the number of youths incarcerated for homicide, rape, robbery and assault increased from 44% of the prison population in 1987 to 61% in 1992, Youth Authority data shows.

Locally, 31 youths ages 10 to 17 were arrested for murder in 1993 in the Police Department’s South Bureau, up from 21 the year before.

Experts point out that in New York and Florida, which for years have had tougher juvenile laws, crime levels are among the nation’s highest. New York permits adult murder trials for youths as young as 13, and Florida tries more youths as adults for violent crimes than any other state.

“There has been no evidence that get-tough policies have had much impact on violent crime,” said Marc Mouer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based think tank.

Said Mark Soler, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco: “The thing to remember is that most them are going to be released one day and will come out more hardened.”

Such as 20-year-old Jose Rodriguez.

By age 11, Rodriguez was running with a gang in his Watts neighborhood, smoking PCP and vandalizing local schools. Two years later, in 1987, he was convicted of attempted murder for the drive-by shooting of a rival gang member.

Thus began a seven-year cycle in and out of detention centers for Rodriguez--an experience that only hardened him. Surrounded by other criminals and frustrated by a system that he says offered little support, he became filled with rage.

“I just held a lot anger inside,” said Rodriguez, who has his gang logo tattooed on his neck. “I just told myself, ‘When I get out, anyone who talks ---- to me, I’ll take their head off.’ ”

In June, 1988, nine months after his attempted-murder conviction, Rodriguez was paroled. He was arrested one month later, this time for armed robbery and brutally beating two men.

Rodriguez, now at the Chino youth prison for possessing a gun, says he regrets the robbery and longs for his girlfriend and their 14-month-old son. He will be released at 25.

“I shouldn’t have done it. I can picture myself being in their position. I wouldn’t like it.”

Reflecting on his troubled past, he says he wanted to go to prison as a teen-ager--to earn respect in a gang subculture that honors those who have done time.

“I looked forward to going inside,” he said, as sunlight filtered through the barred windows of the prison visiting area. “I wanted to come here to see what everything was like.”

Such attitudes are not uncommon among troubled teens, said Fred Williams, 35, executive director of the Common Ground Foundation, a Watts nonprofit organization that works to keep youths in school and out of gangs.

“Prison doesn’t scare them. It’s a home away from home,” said Williams, who was convicted of manslaughter at 14 for fatally shooting a rival gang member in South-Central. He served a year in detention camp and reformed after embracing Christianity.

Even those who favor lowering the age for adult trials disagree over how it should be accomplished.

At issue, experts say, are responsibility and redemption: At what age is a young person capable of understanding the consequences of a crime? And since the goal of the adult penal system is incarceration--as opposed to education and job-training in the juvenile system--should youths be committed to an environment where there is little chance for rehabilitation?

“By the time you are 14 or 15, you know the difference between right and wrong. And if you commit something as cold and calloused as murder, then society has to be protected from you for as long as possible,” said Rex Frazier, an aide to Assemblyman Charles W. Quackenbush (R-San Jose), author of the bill that would lower the adult age in murder trials to 14. He introduced the measure after a 15-year-old hacked an 8-year-old boy to death with a machete in San Jose.

Others, such as Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, oppose across-the-board age limits and favor allowing prosecutors to determine when a youth should be tried as adult. Each case is different, Garcetti said, and some younger than 14 could be mature enough to be tried as adults, while some 16-year-olds should be treated as juveniles.

“You have to take violent youngsters off the street for as long as possible,” Garcetti said. “On the other hand, we as society have to be prepared to deal with that youngster who is capable of being rehabilitated.”

Politicians are not the only ones calling for tougher laws. Many families of murder victims believe that life imprisonment is just retribution for the loss of loved ones.

“Anyone who kills should be locked up forever,” said Heladio Lopez, whose 17-year-old daughter was slain in a Watts housing project in July, allegedly by a 16-year-old boy. “I’ll never get my daughter back.”

Proponents of stiffer sentences maintain that if teen-agers know they are likely to be tried as adults, they will think twice before committing crimes. But several violent offenders argued otherwise in prison interviews.

“When you’re out there getting ready to do a drive-by, you’re not thinking what’s going to happen to you if you get caught,” said Robert Fuiava, 21, who was convicted of seven counts of attempted murder at age 14. “You’re thinking about pulling that trigger.”

Fuiava, who grew up in Compton, said he followed his older brothers and cousins into gang life. He says he was carrying a gun at 9 and had committed “dozens of shootings” before he was arrested on the attempted murder charges in 1987. In that incident, he fired on rival gang members.

Asked if he had ever killed anyone, Fuiava said: “When you do a shooting, everybody falls down, regardless if they get hit. So you don’t really know.”

Fuiava, a soft-spoken man with long hair and a goatee, hopes to put the associate of arts degree in sociology he earned in the Youth Authority to good use when he is released from Chino in four years. He would like to become a counselor or social worker.

“This is my last stop,” he said, his body covered with tattoos with the name of his gang and his family that he received behind bars. “I don’t want my (1-year-old) daughter calling someone else daddy.”

Like Fuiava, Michael Clark does not believe that the threat of an adult sentence will stop would-be criminals. He ought to know--he was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison at 17.

“It’s not going to stop crime,” said Clark, who killed a rival gang member in South-Central to avenge a friend’s slaying. Now 24, Clark will soon be transferred from the Youth Authority facility in Chino to the adult prison system. Many youths tried as adults and convicted of violent crimes first do time at the Youth Authority before being transferred to the state Department of Corrections.

“I ------ my life up. But because of my faith, I have hope,” said Clark, who embraced Islam three years ago and leads prison prayer sessions.

Barry Nidorf, chief probation officer for Los Angeles County, has seen hundreds of youths like Clark and Fuiava in his 28-year career. He, too, believes that lowering the adult trial age for youths will not deter violent crime.

What is needed, Nidorf and others say, is more funding for social programs that address the underlying causes of violence: poverty, gangs, broken homes and unemployment. Society will benefit in the long run, they say, noting that gang-intervention programs run about $2,000 a year per youth, as opposed to about $25,000 for housing a prisoner for a year in the Youth Authority.

“Prisons are important. On the other hand, we have to stop violence in the first place,” said Ron Flick, a judge at Compton Juvenile Court. “Obviously, the only answer is to address the root causes.”

In four years of trying cases from South-Central to Carson, Flick said, dysfunctional family life has been the biggest common denominator among violent criminals. “Most of them come from broken homes.”

Including Shawn Fudge.

Fudge grew up without a father in the tough Jordan Downs housing project in Watts. “I don’t know what happened to him,” Fudge says.

His mother, Patricia Williams, said her husband was a drug addict who was in and out of jail. He took off years ago, Williams said, leaving her to raise three boys and five daughters.

Williams said her oldest daughter is also in prison, for drug-related offenses. She has assumed legal custody of her three grandchildren.

“I don’t approve of the bad things people do, but they do it to survive,” said Williams, 45, who was laid off from her job as a cook several years ago and survives on state welfare and child-care payments. “There’s no hope, no jobs here.”

Her neighborhood is typical of many inner-city areas, where criminal justice policies such as the war on drugs have resulted in astronomical incarceration rates and left many young men unable to find work because of their prison records, said Rice of the NAACP. (In 1992, African Americans and Latinos made up 75% of the 8,367 inmates in the state’s Youth Authority system.)

Without a father, Fudge’s role models were the older gangbangers who gambled, sold drugs and boasted of drive-by shootings. By the time he was 14, Fudge was dealing crack cocaine and carrying a gun. He was respected and feared by his peers.

Shortly after his 15th birthday, Fudge committed his first shooting, a warning shot at a neighbor who he says cheated a friend in a dice game. “I didn’t really want to hit him,” Fudge said. “I just had to live up to my reputation.”

His reputation finally caught up to him on the evening of July 4, 1986.

After a neighbor was wounded by gunfire earlier that day, Fudge and six friends went looking for the attackers, who were from another gang. They found them near a riverbed in Watts.

As Fudge pointed the gun, one his friends asked for the weapon so he could do the shooting.

“I remember saying, ‘I got it,’ ” Fudge said.

He was sentenced to the maximum term in the Youth Authority, which must release him when he turns 25 in two years. His friends testified against him and were not convicted.

Fudge has no education and few skills other than barber training, but he still hopes to rebuild his life and avoid the gangs and drugs that led to his downfall.

“I always think about what I did. It always hits you. You can never forget about it,” Fudge says. “I don’t believe I had the right to take that young boy’s life, and I’m sorry for what I did.”

Inmates

Although the number of inmates in the California Youth Authority dropped about 3% to 8,367 between 1987 and 1992, the ethnic breakdown has significantly changed. The percentage of Native Americans, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders and others has remained about 2%.

Doing Time

The length of incarceration for inmates under the California Youth Authority (CYA) is much less for first-degree murder than inmates in the California Department of Corrections (CDC), but longer for assault and rape, according to first-time parole releases.

In months

First Degree Murder CDC: 189.3 CYA: 74.5

Assault CDC: 22.2 CYA: 28.3

Rape CDC: 43.5 CYA: 50.8

Source: California Department of Justice

Youth Crimes

The percentage of inmates of the California Youth Authority who were convicted of violent crimes--homicide, assault and rape--has grown from about 25% in 1987 to about 40% in 1992.

1987 1992 Homicide, Assault, Rape 25.2% 39.5% Burglary 24.3 21.0 Robbery 19.8 11.7 Narcotics & Drugs 11.2 8.9 Arson, Kidnap/Extort, Other 7.9 7.5 Theft 6.3 3.9 Auto Theft 5.3 7.7

Homicides

The number juveniles arrested in homicide cases has soared between 1987 and 1992. A total of 352 were arrested in 1987; the figure peaked at 680 in 1991.

Source: California Youth Authority and California Department of Justice

Kids Who Kill

A total of 464 children younger than 16 were incarcerated in the California Youth Authority on Oct. 12, 1993, including 10 boys and one girl who were 12.

Totals in ages

12 yrs.: 11 13 yrs.: 33 14 yrs.: 132 15 yrs.: 288

Source: California Youth Authority