Price for Teens’ Bad Choices Is Too Great

Like many readers, the chaplain was unhappy with the column -- but for different reasons. When I wrote recently that three teenage boys didn’t deserve decades in prison for the alleged sexual assault on an acquaintance last summer, readers bristled at what they considered my callousness.

Father Clif Marquis agreed that potentially consigning the teens to decades in prison would be wrong but chastised me for raising the issue belatedly and only when it involved three white kids.

“My overwhelming and painful concern with your article is: Where have you been?” he wrote. “I daily witness teenage boys and some girls getting the oppressive and [I believe] revenge-laden virtual life sentences you spoke of.”

Marquis, 60, agreed to a follow-up interview, and it became obvious he’s not a quick-fix advocate. He’ll leave that to legislators and politicians, he says pointedly.

A Chicago native, Marquis is on his second stint as a chaplain for the county’s juvenile jails. He first worked in Orange County from 1976-84 and returned 2 1/2 years later. He also makes the rounds of its five adult jails.

“I don’t buy the Father Flanagan statement that there’s no such thing as a bad boy,” Marquis says. “There are bad boys. But what I’m saying is what we have in place right now is the presupposition that any kid who does anything violent should be put away for the rest of his life.”

Passed in 2000, Proposition 21 gives prosecutors more authority to charge young teens as adults. Intended to stem violent gang culture, Marquis says, it has become too sweeping.

“The vast majority of these people are not incorrigible,” he says. Rather, they’re the products of violent surroundings and personal despair. “Many of these kids who pull the trigger don’t even realize what they’re doing until it’s too late.”

Knowing that comes across as soft on crime, which no politician who wants to get elected would embrace, he adds: “I’m not talking about incorrigibility or ingenerate viciousness. You have to face the consequences of your bad choices. Almost to a boy, every one of them says they did wrong and they need to pay for it. I’m not talking about people trying to cop a plea. I’m talking about people who too late come to an awareness of what they’ve done.”

Marquis’ central lament is well-worn: that society spends far more on incarcerating young people than educating them or improving the neighborhoods in which they live. It’s a debate that, in recent years, liberals seem to have lost.

“There isn’t an easy answer, and I’m not pretending there is,” Marquis says. “But the first thing we have to admit is what we’re doing isn’t working. The money spent on juvenile hall and incarceration isn’t deterring anybody, and it’s not slowing anybody down.”

I ask him what his young confessors in jail say when they realize they face many years behind bars. “It’s amazing how quickly a kid, especially a street kid, is going to [accept prison life], because he’s a kid and he’s going to adapt. In the same way they didn’t understand the gravity of what they did, they don’t really grasp what 45 years in prison would mean.”

Marquis is hard to pin down on what he’d do. To me, that’s being honest -- what to do with young offenders is a tough nut. In general, he says, “hard time should be the last thing, not the first thing” considered for youthful offenders. Beyond that, he says only that “far more” young teens are sent to the California Youth Authority than should be.

But that leads down yet another road too winding for the space here. “Nobody wants to question the system at all,” he says, “because when you question one part of it, you open a Pandora’s box of questioning the whole thing.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.