A Legislative Con Job on Juvenile Crime

It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d been had. A bunch of faded faces peeking out of drab suits had fooled me with the oldest trick in the book, the bait and switch.

I had been invited to speak before a state legislative committee on the subject of juvenile justice. Now politicians don’t normally seek advice from reporters, but because I’d produced an extensive series on the subject, talking to hundreds of people around the country and reviewing thousands of pages of documents on the issue, they said they figured I might have something to say.

They invited a bunch of other people too--among them, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, Barry Krisberg of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the heads of the juvenile probation departments for Los Angeles and Orange counties and the head of the California Youth Authority.

The hearing organizers said they wanted to hear from us about effective strategies for dealing with juvenile crime. That was the bait. But after we got up to talk, we got the switch.

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What became quickly apparent to me and most of the other speakers was that we weren’t there to help our legislators make California safer for citizens, just safer for politicians.

Assemblyman Charles R. Quackenbush was leading the charge. Quackenbush is pushing a bill to try juveniles as young as 14 as adults. In a virtual feeding frenzy, the idea has caught on. Right now, there are 13 bills circulating to try more kids as adults or otherwise get tougher. None of them will reduce juvenile crime. None of them will make you or me any safer, and the legislators all know it.

“In terms of preventing juvenile crime, I don’t think (our bill) does that,” admitted Rex Frazier, legislative analyst for Quackenbush. Ask the others and they should tell you the same thing.

They know it won’t work because it has never worked. In New York state, a study found that lowering the age at which kids can be tried as adults had no impact on juvenile crime. Instead, it went up. Florida, which tries more juveniles as adults than any state in the nation, has one of the highest rates of violent juvenile crime in the country--and it has increased since the state began trying more juveniles as adults.

“It’s an illusion,” Krisberg said to me after the hearing. “What you’ve got in there are a bunch of ambitious politicians defrauding the public into thinking that trying more juveniles as adults is really going to make any meaningful change.”

Actually, all of this stuff is old hat. For the past 17 years, the state Legislature has been passing laws to try children as adults under the guise that they were doing something to decrease crime. They started in 1977, with something called 707B, a state statute that placed the burden on kids accused of six crimes--murder, rape and armed robbery, among them--to prove that they should be tried in juvenile court--otherwise, they’d be tried as adults.

But violent juvenile crime continued upward.

So they came back a few years later and added some more crimes to the list: sodomy, child molestation, oral rape and the like.

But violent juvenile crime kept climbing. So they came back and added some more crimes: attempted murder, assault with a firearm, drug manufacturing, torture, escape by force. This has continued until the number has now reached 24 crimes.

And juvenile crime continues climbing.

Meanwhile, the Legislature increased the penalties and took away judicial discretion until California had the toughest juvenile system in the country. One of every four kids in custody in America is in California, where the average juvenile does more time behind bars for crimes than do adults convicted of the same offenses.

And juvenile crime . . .

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Why would our state legislators pass bills that they know won’t do any good? Because, according to the people who work in their offices, they are more afraid of the public than they are of the criminals.

They’ve seen the reports and studies showing that early intervention is the most effective way to keep you and me from getting robbed, stabbed, carjacked or murdered by some kid.

“They fear if they propose programs that talk about intervention, they will be accused of throwing money at the problem or social engineering,” said a legislative aide who works for an assemblyman proposing one of those tougher juvenile laws.

(I guess they don’t call $35,000 a year to put a kid behind bars throwing money at a problem, or placing a kid on the path to become a career criminal social engineering. )

The word is that just about all of these get-tough-on-juveniles bills will pass. So Los Angeles and California won’t be any safer for you and me, but it will be for politicians.