Juvenile Justice System--a Success Story Under Fire

With children and violent crime now inextricably linked in the national consciousness, one of America’s most widely imitated judicial innovations of this century, the Juvenile Court system, is under fire.

Indeed, even as serious crime by youth has been in decline in recent years, shocking spasms of violence--in country classrooms or on big city streets--threaten a juvenile justice system that transformed the perception of children here and around the world.

“I’m very concerned. I think all of the trends in juvenile justice are toward the demise of the Juvenile Court,” said Northwestern University law professor Steven Dinzer. “And the saddest part is that the principle that children are different, that they are less culpable, that they are more amenable to intervention, is as true today as it was 100 years ago.”

Yet as Dinzer and others lament attacks on the Juvenile Court system, one that paved the way for remarkable reforms in public education, child labor laws and even the development of urban recreation programs, many who have studied the system note optimistically that it already has weathered more criticism than almost any institution around.

“It is in amazingly good health for being the most attacked system on Earth,” said Frank Zimring, professor of law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. Indeed, Zimring said, for all its critics, the nation’s juvenile justice system is “the most widely admired and uniformly popular legal innovation in American history.”

Juvenile Crime Declines in Decade

All 50 states have juvenile courts that guard children’s identities, offer a variety of sentences for offenses and emphasize rehabilitation, not incarceration. The same is true in many nations. And notwithstanding claims that the juvenile courts often coddle natural-born criminals, many experts say the evidence--both statistical and anecdotal--proves otherwise. Indeed, they note, juvenile crime has been in decline for much of the decade even when the system has been under almost constant attack.

“If you think the idea of the justice system is just punishment and that you are almost assured people are going to be back in trouble with the law, then you have to like the adult prison system as your model,” said Peter Greenwood, who directs Rand’s Criminal Justice Program.

“If on the other hand you want to prevent recidivism and think you should look at other things that led someone to commit a crime, like whether a kid was sexually abused as a little child or beaten up by a drunken parent . . . then you have to like the Juvenile Court system because it can turn kids around.”

One widely cited study of Orange County’s juvenile justice system found that only 8% of youthful offenders were responsible for more than half of all juvenile crime. And in the vast majority of cases, the study found, youths who came through the Juvenile Court system once never returned on another offense.

“I think Los Angeles mirrors those statistics and I think the statistics alone show we are doing something right,” said Michael Nash, presiding judge of Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court system and a former deputy attorney general whose prosecutions included the Hillside Strangler case.

Still, some high-publicity crimes involving teenagers, and even preteens, have proved so shocking that most states have made it easier in the 1990s to prosecute children as adults. Every state but Hawaii now allows youths as young as 14 to be tried as adults. Five states allow them at age 13, two at age 12 and three at age 10. The rest have no minimum at all.

The result: Each year, an estimated 200,000 children are tried in adult courts and, if convicted, often face the same punishments as adults, according to a 1998 report by Amnesty International.

Although he was in trouble with the law as a teenager, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) believes today’s system must be toughened to discourage crimes that are unconscionable.

“Obviously I don’t think they should get rid of the Juvenile Court system,” said Simpson, who at 17 pleaded guilty to destroying federal property. “I just feel there are certain heinous crimes that deserve adult treatment.”

Said Simpson: “What I did was shooting mailboxes . . . we never ever intended to hurt anybody, we were never into physical abuse. But nowadays, the things you read about [juvenile crime] just make your stomach turn.”

In California, voters next March will decide on an initiative--sponsored by former Gov. Pete Wilson--to significantly toughen the prosecution of youths by, among other things, authorizing prosecutors to directly file adult charges on some crimes against teenagers as young as 14.

The Case for Juvenile Court

Nationally, U.S. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) has been among those arguing that the juvenile justice system must be overhauled.

“There are few issues that will come before the Senate this Congress that touch the lives of more of our fellow Americans than our national response to juvenile crime,” the Senate judiciary chairman said before the full Senate recently passed the legislation.

Hatch’s sweeping bill would allow prosecutors and the attorney general to decide whether youths should be tried as adults for federal crimes.

But others, including some who had run-ins with the law as teenagers, worry that the Juvenile Court system is becoming a scapegoat for aberrant incidents.

“I think a lot of the disdain for the system is based on misinformation--that juvenile offenders are coddled . . . that juvenile offenders are all released when they reach [adulthood],” said James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

“Trying juveniles as adults may satisfy our thirst for vengeance and our desire for justice. But it does very little to rehabilitate juvenile offenders and turn their lives around. In fact, it may do more harm than good.”

In August 1970, Luis Rodriguez was barely old enough to drive when, as one of a crowd of Chicanos protesting the Vietnam War, he was Maced, arrested and held at the Men’s Central Jail because there was no room left at Juvenile Hall.

Housed in an adult wing dubbed “murderers’ row,” the 16-year-old Rodriguez and a frightened 13-year-old were kept in a cell next to Charles Manson’s.

One cellmate, Rodriguez said, sneaked a razor into jail and quickly threatened to kill the teenager. “I thought if I stood up to him it was the best thing. So I told him, ‘You better make sure I’m good and dead, otherwise I am gonna kill you,’ ” Rodriguez remembered. “The guy looked at me real hard, pulled the blade away and started laughing.”

Because the gambit worked, Rodriguez and the other youth were spared. But the memory still sears Rodriguez, who is now a successful author and poet living in Chicago.

“What it taught me,” he said, “was that young people being put in adult facilities is wrong.”

One hundred years ago, that same conclusion prompted Chicago reformers led by Jane Addams to push Illinois to open the nation’s first Juvenile Court in July 1899. Their campaign followed disclosures that hundreds of children as young as 8 were being terrorized in adult jails. The resulting Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 spawned other groundbreaking reforms, based on a simple premise:

Children are children, not mini-adults.

“If you think how far the idea has spread, it is remarkable,” said Northwestern’s Dinzer. “At the turn of the century, children were considered property. They were put in the work force at an early age. They were not entitled to public education. And they were housed in orphanages, poorhouses and adult jails if they had trouble with the law or came from broken families.

“The movement . . . reshaped and redefined what childhood meant throughout the world,” Dinzer added. “There were a whole series of reforms that said basically children are not adults. They require supervision and an investment [in] human and financial capital to get them to adulthood.”

That sea change in how America viewed its children soon led other nations to follow suit. “When you think that this was a time when boat travel predominated over air travel, when there were few highways, let alone superhighways, and when more people had bicycles than cars, to have places like Madagascar have a Juvenile Court was pretty staggering,” said Dinzer.

But the Juvenile Court’s evolution has not been without growing pains. Long before this decade’s attacks, the court had been blasted from all sides for either glossing over the due process rights of children or for being too soft on teens who have proven, by repeat appearances, that they cannot be rehabilitated.

“I think the history of the juvenile justice system has been really quite mixed,” said David Tanenhaus, an assistant professor of constitutional history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Although it was created with the best of intentions, by the 1920s it started to fade from the public eye, and by the mid-1950s, many of the judges in charge did not have legal training; some of them did not even have a college education.

“So we found that by the 1960s, juveniles had the worst of both worlds--they had neither due process protections that adults had, nor did they receive the social services or therapy that the juvenile justice system had promised.

“The real challenge for the 21st century,” he said, “is to create a system that can deal with all the new learning we have about child development and how humans evolve over time.”

In the meantime, Tanenhaus said, the constant assaults on the system make it more likely than ever that some state will move to abolish its juvenile justice program--a move that he and others describe as dangerous.

Were it not for America’s Juvenile Court, he and others note, countless adults might never have been given the help needed to turn their lives around.

Many of them are well-known, like Olympic long jumper Bob Beamon, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Terry Hallinan and Washington, D.C., Superior Court Judge Reggie Walton, who served as deputy drug czar in the Bush administration.

Others, while not as familiar, hold significant positions in government. After being spared adult incarceration, Ron Laney became a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War before joining the U.S. Justice Department, where he now directs the Missing and Exploited Children’s Program from Washington.

And others, still young adults, credit the juvenile courts with not giving up on them.

“I got a last chance and I was able to take that opportunity and run with it,” said Jeremy Estrada, a violence-prone teenager from Boyle Heights who, at 23, is now a husband, a father and a premed senior at Pepperdine University.

After returning last week from a retreat counseling troubled teenagers, Estrada said it was precisely such programs that helped him turn his life around. “These kids are not all horrible animals. They are not born this way. They are made this way,” Estrada said. “And if they are made this way, they can be made a different way.”

Added Los Angeles Judge Nash: “I am not going to sit back and say I am totally satisfied with the performance of the Juvenile Court or that we are totally meeting the needs of society. But having spent many years in criminal court, I can say there is very little satisfaction in that system, unless your primary satisfaction is derived from putting people in jail.

“Just sitting in dependency court, I find I can . . . benefit more people in one year than in an entire career in criminal court. And in delinquency court, as frustrating as it can be with kids coming through who have committed crimes, there is still a lot we can do.

“We can’t save them all, but we can save a lot of them,” he said. “And I think that justifies the court’s existence.”