Adult Jails Are No Place for Kids

WASHINGTON -- The recent trial of Derek and Alex King, the 12- and 13-year-old Florida brothers who killed their father after being sexually molested by a neighbor, has refocused national attention on the practice of trying juveniles as adults. Florida, where the boys face life sentences and where one out of every eight juveniles in America’s adult prisons is locked up, is once again the battleground for this debate.

But like the nationally publicized case of Lionel Tate, a Florida 12-year-old who received a sentence of life without possibility of parole, the King brothers’ case does more to distract from the real issues of trying children as adults than it does to inform them.

That’s because in Florida, the majority of youths prosecuted in adult courts are tried for nonviolent offenses. Only 2% were tried for murder, the crime we most often hear about when this issue is brought up. Nearly half had one or no prior felony convictions. In most of the cases, youths were sent to adult court without having had a chance to be rehabilitated by the state’s most intensive level of juvenile justice programs.

Instead of focusing on anomalies, we need to look at more typical cases like that of Adam Bollenback, a 17-year-old mentally disabled boy with a history of substance abuse. At age 16, Adam stole a six-pack of beer from a neighbor’s garage and then managed to slip away from a patrol car after being caught. Not only was he prosecuted as an adult; he was given a 10-year prison sentence. During the sentencing, Judge Ric Howard noted approvingly, “This sentence is going to break your spirit right now.”

Following the sentencing, Adam’s lawyer asked that the boy be segregated from adult inmates, but Howard rejected the request, stating, “He’s an adult, and he’s going to be treated as an adult.”

In an interview following the sentencing, the garage owner, Charlotte Coadic, said, “If I had known [his age], I wouldn’t have called the cops, I would have given him a good tongue-lashing and sent him home.”

But while the King brothers’ case was widely covered by the news media, Adam’s received limited local coverage. Unless you read the St. Petersburg Times, it is unlikely you have heard of him.

Nor is it likely you heard about Anthony Laster, a 15-year-old near-deaf, mentally retarded boy, also from Florida. Anthony was prosecuted as an adult in Palm Beach County after his first arrest. His crime? He stole $2 from another boy in middle school. No weapon. No physical harm to the victim. A classic lunch-money theft resulting in young Anthony spending the first Christmas after his mother died in an adult jail.

What’s going on here? Has the behavior of America’s young people really deteriorated so badly that we need to hand out adult time for petty crime? What happens when we dispatch these hapless youngsters into adult prisons? And, perhaps most important, is our punitive approach to youth crime an effective way to address public safety, or are we just sending young people to graduate schools for crime?

The most recent national crime statistics show that youth crime is at its lowest level in decades. According to the FBI, between 1993 and 2000 there was a 74% decline in homicides by youths, eclipsing the decline in homicides by adults during the same period. This put killings by kids at the lowest level in decades.

The same is true with overall youth crime. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, in 1998 youth crime was at its lowest level in the 25-year history of the survey.

Still, record numbers of young people are incarcerated in America’s adult prisons and jails, where evidence shows that they are at great risk for their personal safety. During the 1990s, 47 states made it easier to try juveniles as adults, and there are approximately 17,000 minors in America’s adult prisons and jails on any given day.

This, despite the fact that research shows that when young people are locked up with adults, they are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and eight times more likely to commit suicide as when they are confined in juvenile facilities.

In Florida, a Miami Herald report found that youths in the state’s adult prisons were 21 times more likely to report being assaulted or injured as children in juvenile facilities. Michael Myers, a 16-year-old from Broward County, was sent into Florida’s adult prisons and, by age 17, was dead. On May 8, 1997, Michael’s future roommate, an adult inmate with an extensive and violent prison record, wrote to the Department of Corrections, “I will do my best to injure any roommate I may receive in the future.” A year later, Michael was placed in this inmate’s cell and was strangled to death by him.

Adult imprisonment for youth crime is by no means meted out equally across racial and ethnic lines. Research by the Building Blocks for Youth initiative found that nationally, even when they had been convicted of similar crimes and had similar prior records of institutionalization, African American and Latino youths were more likely to be sentenced to adult prisons than white youths. In Florida, black youths are three times as likely to be sentenced to adult prisons as white youths.

Moreover, about one in 13 of Florida’s 70,000 state prisoners entered the adult system for crimes they committed when they were 17 or younger. Since Florida law denies voting rights for life to anyone convicted of a felony, this means that there are substantial numbers of youths who lost their right to vote before they were even old enough to have exercised it.

If locking kids up in adult prisons were the answer to crime some claim it to be, Florida should be a juvenile-crime-free paradise by now. But despite the harshness of Florida’s youth crime policies, which even include the death penalty for juveniles, there is no evidence that they have had a positive impact on public safety.

Since 1993, the year before Florida’s Legislature made it much easier for prosecutors to try juveniles as adults, Florida’s serious juvenile arrest rate fell by 13%, while the serious juvenile arrest rate for the United States as a whole declined by a much more impressive 53%. In 1993, Florida’s serious juvenile arrest rate was twice the national average. Now, Florida’s serious juvenile arrest rate is nearly four times the national average.

This year, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice released a comprehensive study concluding that, when you lock up a teenager with an adult prisoner, he gets more then a cellmate: He gets a role model. Youths transferred to adult courts in Florida were twice as likely to re-offend as youths sent to the juvenile justice system for similar crimes and with similar records.

Six out of 10 youths interviewed in adult prisons said being locked up with adults had either no effect on their behavior or made it worse. One youth in an adult prison noted, “In prison, you learn too much wrong. People are crammed together and have all day long to talk. They talk about crimes they got away with. And the ones that got caught ask the ones who got away with it how to do it. You learn too much.” By comparison, a youngster interviewed in a juvenile facility said, “They helped me know how to act. I never knew any of this stuff. That really helped me, cause I ain’t had too good a life.”

There is no question that violent and dangerous youths need to be securely confined for our safety and theirs. But incarcerating youths with more sophisticated adult prisoners renders them vulnerable to attack and more damaged when they return to society. This is tantamount to giving up on them -- something we should never do. Our challenge as responsible adults is to create a fairer and more effective youth justice system, where there is a balance among prevention, treatment and punishment that gives kids a chance to make a better choice.