Colorado Tries a Kick in the Pants to Fight Teen Crime

Here in this once-fabled mining town, an experiment is underway in a former Army barracks to turn wayward boys into law-abiding young men.

Camp Falcon, unlike the sprawling prison just next door, has no guard towers, no barbed wire, no cold showers or cold food or cold cells. What there is at this military-style boot camp is discipline. For the young miscreants on the receiving end, the choice is either to embrace it or to listen to the prison door slam shut behind them.

“This recruit was so scared to be here, sir,” said Paul, 17, who was sent here after breaking probation and repeatedly refusing to go to school. Like the other young men, he speaks of himself in the military lingo instilled on the day of his arrival.

Troy, 17, was sent to Camp Falcon after he tested positive for illegal drugs. “This recruit wants to go home, sir,” he said. “This recruit wants to see his mother.”

Colorado’s boot camp responds to a relentless surge in crimes committed by violent, remorseless teenagers. While the overall crime rate is declining nationally, the rate for teens is climbing steadily.

Variations on Colorado’s kick-in-the-pants approach for young offenders can be found throughout the country. And other localities are experimenting with kinder and gentler approaches: teaching young toughs the skills they will need to find and hold a job, for example, or putting them on cleanup duty in streets and parks.

How to reform today’s young delinquents before they become tomorrow’s murderers is a question that has taken on new urgency at a time when, according to the Justice Department, the annual number of murders committed by those under age 18 has tripled in the last decade.

Making this fact all the more ominous is demography: The number of youths in the prime crime years of 15 to 19 will grow by nearly 30% over the next decade.

“If the trends continue as they have over the past 10 years, juvenile arrests for violent crime will more than double by the year 2010,” the federal Office of Juvenile Justice said in a March report.

Kids Who Kill

Consider some recent cases of kids who have killed:

In a St. Louis suburb, Michael Est, 14, was playing music in his room when his father complained that it was too loud. Michael shot him four times, once in the back of his head, according to police. Then he lifted his wallet and his car keys and drove off with his girlfriend. They were caught in Oklahoma and charged with first-degree murder.

Likewise, Lamont Wright faces first-degree murder charges in Indianapolis for shooting and killing a man after selling him drugs. “The murder charge was the 12th criminal complaint on his record,” said Marion County prosecutor Gary Chavers. He is 13 years old.

In Tulsa, Okla., 15-year-old Marcus Currie and a 17-year-old friend are charged with murder in the death of a young mother carrying her 5-month-old baby in a hospital parking lot in midafternoon. The teenagers planned to steal her purse. When she resisted, they shot her.

“This generation of youth--the young and ruthless--is more violent than any before it,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. Far more of today’s young people have weapons, he said, and “they are willing to pull the trigger over trivial matters.”

“What I see frightens me,” said Carol Kelly, a juvenile court judge in Chicago. “On any given day, I see 50 to 100 cases, 90% of which involve guns, drugs and stolen cars.”

Kelly presided two years ago over the case of two boys, 10 and 11, who lured a 5-year-old to the top floor of a housing project apartment and pushed him out the window to his death. “Neither boy ever expressed any remorse for their victim,” Kelly said.

Escalating Violence

Three or four decades ago, police worried about juvenile delinquents who stole cars or robbed local stores. Today’s young thugs, armed with guns and a casual attitude toward death, are as likely as not to kill the car owner or shoot the store clerk.

“We used to get juveniles for stealing cigarettes and bikes,” said Judge Charles McClure of Tallahassee, Fla. “Now it’s armed robberies, burglaries, rapes and murders.”

Why is this happening? Experts point first to the breakup of the American family and the absence of fathers in many homes, which deprives children of a key caretaker, role model and disciplinarian.

“The single most reliable predictor of violent crime in a neighborhood is the proportion of single-parent families,” said Paul J. McNulty, counsel for the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime. As the number of boys growing up without fathers has steadily risen in recent decades, so has the juvenile crime rate, he said.

In both 1961 and 1991, McNulty noted, 4 million babies were born in the United States. “But in 1991, five times as many of them were born out of wedlock,” he said.

Other experts pointed to the drug trade, which has resulted in the arming of a generation of inner-city youth. Crack cocaine arrived in most cities in the mid-1980s and it soon led to an increase in the murder rate.

Because crack was cheap, “many low-income people could buy it one hit at a time,” said Carnegie Mellon professor Alfred Blumstein. This resulted in both more buyers and more daily drug sales. As arrests and murders took their toll on the supply of drug sellers, “drug dealers had to recruit a large number of new sellers. Juveniles were the natural source of supply.”

If the causes of teenage violence are clear, means to prevent it are not. “We’re still at a very primitive stage of knowledge regarding [youth] violence,” Blumstein told a Senate subcommittee.

Both President Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole have promoted curfews for teenagers as one remedy. In New Orleans, the president noted that violent youth crime fell 27% after city officials put a dusk-to-dawn curfew into effect for those under 18.

But curfews have been tried elsewhere with only a modest impact on crime. Police have said that the curfew laws give them reasons for questioning potential troublemakers after nightfall. However, other law enforcement officials dispute the value of using police to pick up and bring in otherwise law-abiding teenagers.

As recently as Monday, Clinton said the Treasury Department was establishing a computer database that would help it track down those who sell guns to teenagers in 17 cities, including Inglewood and Salinas in California.

There are many other initiatives intended to prevent youths from becoming violent criminals. And, while many officials claim that their programs have had some success, they also caution that it is too early for a final judgment. Not until today’s teenagers reach full adulthood--as much as another five or 10 years--will it be known whether today’s efforts have had lasting value.

Approaches Vary

A survey of what’s going on nationally reveals the diversity of approaches.

Kansas City, Mo., decided to get guns out of the hands of kids. Concentrating on the inner city, police arrested hundreds of persons for illegal possession of firearms--and they confiscated the guns. Most of those arrested were young men under 20.

Alvin Brooks, a longtime civic activist and president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, applauded the police gun suppression operation but said that it has not gone far enough.

So Brooks has helped set up preschool programs where multiracial puppets teach the youngest of students that, in his words, they should “respect themselves and be proud of themselves and their families.”

Ex-offenders give presentations in Kansas City’s middle schools and, for high schoolers, a 24-hour hotline has been set up for teenagers to turn in anyone suspected of gang-banging or selling drugs. The number is 531-COOL.

Brooks also has set up a mock cemetery in the heart of the inner city, where a cross is planted every time someone is murdered in Kansas City. “We take the kids up there,” he said. “We have prayer vigils.”

In Des Moines, Iowa, prosecutors and jail officials set up a youthful offender program that forces young thugs to face their victims.

Fred Gay, bureau chief of intake and screening for the Polk County attorney’s office, recalled how dozens of youths have squirmed in upright chairs in front of those they had robbed or assaulted.

“It gets very emotional,” he said. “Pretty soon the kids are responding . . . about using drugs at 8 or 9 years of age. And then getting hooked. And then getting busted and jailed and strip-searched.”

Ocala, Fla., set up a “Mad Dads” chapter to work with kids who are first-time felony offenders. Fathers run a 10-week program of academics, counseling and goals training.

Kelvin Richardson, a former state juvenile probation officer who runs the program, said that Mad Dads is the last chance for many of these youths.

“Anything below murder, we deal with it,” he said. “And they’ve done everything. They’ve been caught with drugs. They’ve had assaults and batteries. They’ve had just plain batteries. They’ve burglarized businesses. Anything that is a felony, they’ve done it. Everything including beating up an old lady so bad that she can’t walk.”

Key roles are played in Ocala by local lawyers, doctors and business executives, who act as mentors and role models to troubled teens.

“You have to be out there at night with the kids,” Richardson said. “When the devil’s got his legions out there, you’ve got to be out there, too, to battle against him. We’re losing too many kids as it is to drugs and gangs and eventually the graveyard.”

Christian, who is 13, was ordered into the Ocala program by a juvenile court judge who put him on probation for stealing a shirt at a local mall. He is in the eighth grade. His father has moved away. His mother works at a gas station.

Now he is learning “things I never heard before, like pre-algebra and things like that,” he said. Some day he wants to be a doctor.

“The judge said if he sees me again, it’s not going to be very nice,” Christian said. “That made me scared.”

Officials in Bridgeport, Conn., started the Powerline Intensive Youth Center to give kids an alternative to prison. Teenagers attend classes for up to nine months, learn basic skills such as math and reading and computers and study the fundamentals of how to find a job.

The program saved taxpayers an estimated $80 million last year, according to a University of Connecticut study. It costs $5,000 to put a youth through the program, compared to $25,000 a year to keep him in prison.

In DuPage County, Ill., outside Chicago, officials want to extend their sheriff’s work alternative program (SWAP) to juveniles and send them out on community service tasks, such as painting and cleaning streets and parks.

But in other communities, some traditional youth programs are on the endangered list as municipal budgets are squeezed. In St. Petersburg, Fla., for example, the Boys and Girls Club, which just opened a few years ago in a city-owned building, is suffering from a dearth of public funds and private donations.

Fort Myers, Fla., was too slow off the dime. Local officials worked for a year with the Justice Department in Washington to come up with new plans to deal with teenage lawbreakers, particularly first-time offenders.

But just as those plans were being completed, a high school band director was killed when he answered his front door in April and was shot once in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Police arrested two 18-year-old students who they said were part of a teen militia called the “Lords of Chaos,” which had been responsible for a rampage that included arson, carjacking, armed robbery and even planning to burn down the school auditorium in the weeks before the murders.

What truly alarmed Fort Myers officials was that the youths charged in the murder did not have criminal records. In fact, one of them was a straight-A student who had just won a four-year college scholarship.

‘Summer of Blood’

In Colorado, teenage crime hit a high during the summer of 1993. Denver residents, alarmed by a rash of gang murders and drive-by shootings and other juvenile crimes, called it the “summer of violence” or the “summer of blood.”

“It was a slow-growing snowball that became overbearing,” said First Sgt. Chuck Isner, a 16-year Air Force veteran who now serves as program manager at Camp Falcon in Golden. “In fact, our camp was born out of the reaction to that summer.”

The camp processes 80 boys every 60 days, with a waiting list of more than 150. The youths are sent here from around the state by judges who demand completion of the program as part of the boys’ probation. Completion means passing grades in academics, physical training and other endeavors.

The youths learn to make their beds with no creases, to stand erect in a chow line, to speak only when spoken to. Their hair is shaved. Their boots sparkle. Early to bed and early to rise.

“The first minute we get them, we explain who we are,” Isner said. “We care about them very much. We are a group of adults who are going to be there for them. We promise we are not going to go away. We tell them they will succeed.”

Isner and Lt. Col Jack D. Shiker, his assistant and also an Air Force veteran, said that they graduate about 92% of their recruits, with the other 8% washing out because of physical stress or poor grades. But, they said, they will not know for sure until the end of this year, when a report is due to the state Legislature, whether most of their boys have stayed out of trouble after leaving boot camp.

Not particularly encouraging is a National Institute of Justice finding that adult boot-camp graduates are just as likely to commit crimes in the future as those sentenced to regular probation or dispatched to prison.

But Isner and Shiker have reason to believe that Camp Falcon will be different. The boys here have not had years of experience already on the wrong side of the law. The juvenile prison next door is a constant reminder of the fate that is in store for them if they do not pass muster in boot camp.

“This recruit was starting to be a wild kid,” said Troy, who has been involved in drugs since the sixth grade. “He was not under control or discipline. And that’s what this recruit is mainly here for. If this recruit messes up again, then this recruit will get tried as an adult.”