- “Frederick,” arrested at age 16 and now serving a 30 year sentence in a Maryland prison

Empirical data from a recently released Maryland study backs this up.  Both in terms of community safety and dollars, in the clear majority of cases, charging children as adults in the criminal system makes no sense. Throwing juveniles together with hardened adult criminals does nothing to reduce crime or lower all kinds of other societal costs.

The study was funded by the Just Kids Partnership to End the Automatic Prosecution of Youth as Adults — a group made up of the Public Justice Center, Community Law in Action and United Parents of Incarcerated Children and Youth.  It examined 135 individual cases of Baltimore youth in the Maryland justice system, and the results were dramatic. The group chose to undertake this study because as the authors state, “Maryland state and local agencies were not keeping track of crucial information about the effectiveness of its policy of charging youth as adults.”

One of the key problems with charging children as adults is that, until their cases are heard, the children must be kept in adult pretrial facilities in which they must be separated from the adult inmates. This can mean tortuous 23 hour isolation if the facility has no separate juvenile area.

Maryland county pretrial detention facilities, referred to more commonly as “jails,” vary in how they house children charged as adults.  Baltimore City happens to have a separate area of the jail where youth are housed. However, when a child waiting for his trial turns 18 in the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC), he is immediately placed in the adult population where he can languish for extended periods. Children spend months or even years in adult jails while they wait for the criminal court judges to decide their cases.

The irony is that, 68% of the time, the child who is charged as an adult in Maryland will have his case dismissed or returned to the juvenile system. When judges and attorneys look at the cases of individual youth, they usually decide to send the child to the juvenile system or not to prosecute at all.  Sadly, though, the youth by then has already faced irreparable harm from the pre-trial incarceration in an adult jail

Treating a youth like an adult is contrary to scientific evidence. The part of the brain that deals with decision-making and risks and consequences is not fully developed in a youth. Once a child matures, he will likely age out of crime. As the children typically receive seriously inadequate representation, the study showed that they are more likely to make false confessions, waive legal rights, and accept bad plea bargains. They also cannot assist in their own defense.  As a result, adult court judges who are not specially trained in child development or familiar with services available in the juvenile justice system, frequently make life-altering decisions in a young person’s case based on unreliable and inadequate information.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recognized in Graham vs. Florida (2010), there is often sheer folly in charging children as adults, “Juveniles are more capable of change than are adults, and their actions are less likely to be evidence of irretrievably depraved character than are the actions of adults… It would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”

This is not to say that a child who has committed an extremely heinous crime should immediately be released upon reaching adulthood.  There are definitely cases of extreme violence where it is society’s interest to transfer a convicted juvenile to an adult prison upon reaching 18 to continue a longer sentence.  However, these cases are a very small minority of crimes committed by youth.

The authors of the Maryland study also explain that charging youth as adults has not been shown to reduce crime. Those convicted and later released from the adult criminal system are 51% more likely to commit future crimes — and more violent crimes — than children released from the juvenile system.  This makes sense as a youth in adult prison will become hardened by the experience and tutored in criminal behavior by his older, more experienced inmates. He is also more likely to be raped and beaten there than in a juvenile facility.  (Sadly, he is also more likely to commit suicide.)

Another contributing factor can be the lack of rehabilitative services in adult prisons such as in Maryland. The authors explain that providing such rehabilitative services, as model juvenile detention systems do, reduces crime and costs less in the long run than charging youth as adults. The estimate is that every $1 spent on older teens in the rehabilitative juvenile justice system results in $3 of savings in the criminal justice system.

One final disturbing fact the study showed was that African-American youth are disproportionately impacted by laws charging youth as adults.  All other things being equal, an African-American youth is more likely to be charged and convicted as an adult than his white peer. In Baltimore City, African-American youth charged as adults are overrepresented in the pretrial detention facility. While they comprise 63% of the City’s population, 99% of youth in the jail are African-American.

It’s time to start listening to the empirical data and not the sound of politicians’ voices trying to appear “tough on crime” in order to curry favor with and frighten their least educated voters.  Common sense should dictate the end of this inhumane and costly practice of sentencing youth to adult prisons.

While much has already been done in the early stages of the Obama administration to focus on early childhood development and children’s health, almost no attention has been paid to youth in this nation’s juvenile justice system.  This system too often fails the children in its care, creating lifelong consequences for them as well for the public. With recidivism rates as high as 80% in some major urban areas and expensive “warehousing” of children in many juvenile justice systems which offer little rehabilitation, such programs are significantly contributing to state budget problems and making communities less safe.

Some programs cost over $200,000 per youth per year – 4 times Harvard’s annual tuition – but with disastrous results.  More importantly from a cost perspective, evidence shows that for two same-aged children committing the same crime, the one having contact with the juvenile detention system versus the other who is put in a diversion program has a far greater likelihood of incarceration upon reaching adulthood, and escalating adult prison costs are a major source of state fiscal problems across the nation. Additionally, young people who are detained in justice systems offering little rehabilitation, compared to youth detained in more therapeutic and restorative programs, are more likely to drop out of school, have diminished job prospects and become more reliant on public assistance, thereby creating an even larger drain on government coffers.

Unfortunately, to date, the Obama administration has yet to appoint a leader for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and without such a leader, there is no one to advocate for the proper reauthorization levels of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act which helps to promulgate best practices for states and localities.  There are some highly successful, extremely cost-effective diversion programs that keep kids out of the system and others that very effectively rehabilitate those who do enter it.  But sadly, they have not been implemented in many cities and states that could greatly benefit from their presence.

Additionally, the Administration needs to lead the charge in advocating for the passage of the Federal Youth PROMISE Act (H.R. 1064/S. 435), authored by Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia.  This bill would establish Federal funds for distribution to local governments for the purpose of keeping kids from entering the justice system.  Sheriff Lee Baca, who heads law enforcement for Los Angeles County, the “gang capital of the world”, testified in front of Congress that this Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation our nation could ever enact.

It’s time to see some true White House leadership for these children at risk who, without proper programming, are putting everyone else at risk along the way

This problem has been festering for decades. Elected officials who have ignored it will need to clean house as swiftly as possible, closing down the worst institutions and ensuring that children in custody are protected from abuse in compliance with federal law.

Unfortunately, the problem is not isolated to New York.  This is a nationwide issue and the sooner elected officials understand that neglecting the residents of these institutions hurts us all, the better. Warehousing troubled children with each other under deplorable conditions with no evidence-based therapeutic services can no longer be acceptable, and we need to demand change from our elected officials.  Not only do the individual children suffer under such circumstances, but upon release, they bring their pent-up anger, mental illnesses and lack of development and proper education back into society. It is time that everyone demand the delivery of superior care and services and improved living conditions for incarcerated youth in every state across America.  The cost of not doing so is simply too great on every level.

What has been strange is that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has not only endorsed this bill, but that he has also failed to endorse S. 435, The Youth PROMISE Act, which has garnered overwhelming support from children’s advocates across the nation. The Youth PROMISE Act would invest $1 billion in evidence-based prevention and intervention efforts supported by local communities to put gang-impacted youth on a positive path to success.

While the Mayor may prefer the Feinstein bill because it also provides gang suppression dollars that are popular with police departments anxious to receive funding, even major law enforcement leaders such as Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, have publicly endorsed the Youth PROMISE Act.  In fact, Sheriff Baca,  Executive Board Member of the nationally prominent organization, Fight Crime, Invest in Kids stated when testifying at a House hearing, “The Youth PROMISE Act, is perhaps … from a criminal justice reform perspective … the most significant legislative Act that this Congress will ever have considered in the history of the Congress.”

For a mayor who has continually called out for more resources to be put into youth programs in order to keep kids out of trouble and off the street, his failure to endorse S. 435 is very puzzling.  That is unless one realizes that the Mayor might have his sights set on Feinstein’s Senate seat when she retires.  Given that the Senator is now well into her late 70s, this could happen sooner than later.   If the Mayor is trying to curry favor with Senator Feinstein by withholding his support for a the Youth PROMISE Act, a bill that better accomplishes his own goals for curtailing gang crime, this would be a true tragedy.

The Feinstein bill creates a variety of new crimes and penalty enhancements, which are problematic for several reasons.  First, current state and federal laws – particularly in California – are sufficient to combat gang activity through prosecution.  Prosecutors and law enforcement officers repeatedly emphasize the need for more community resources, rather than additional, duplicative federal sanctions, to address gang violence. While there is absolutely no doubt that there are many instances where incarceration is necessitated, it should not become the automatic default solution for addressing most youth crimes.  Studies show, for example, that children who encounter the juvenile justice system for the first time have lower recidivism rates when they are placed in diversion programs instead of incarcerated.  Second, incarceration is not only expensive – incarcerating one youth can cost $100,000-$200,000 per year – but can be counterproductive; research shows incarceration can actually strengthen gang affiliations.  Third, policies that increase incarceration also disproportionately affect youth of color.  For this reason, eight Members of Congress, six from the Congressional Black Caucus, formally withdrew their support for the House version of the bill in the last Congress.

Alternatively, research shows that every dollar spent on evidence-based programs can yield up to $13 in cost savings and intervening early can save the public nearly $5.7 million in costs over a lifetime.  Programs such as Functional Family Therapy or Multisystemic Therapy cost less than $7,000 per youth and significantly decrease recidivism.  Implementation of these research-based alternatives which are family-centered and community-based have been met with success across the country, particularly in Missouri, which has maintained a 7% recidivism rate (as a comparison, L.A. County’s recidivism rate is nearly 70% including probation violations).  And other jurisdictions, including Washington D.C., New Orleans, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Jose and soon, San Francisco, are following Missouri’s lead.

Given the current economic climate in California, it is even more  disheartening to hear that Mayor Villaraigosa is not endorsing the legislation that makes the most fiscal sense in addition to common sense.