Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s announcement that violent juvenile crime has taken its first dip in a decade probably won’t bring much comfort to the family of Viola McClain.
The 82-year-old Los Angeles grandmother was killed recently on the porch of her Watts neighborhood home by a stray bullet. It was fired by a gang of boys who had just kidnapped, tortured and raped a 13-year-old girl in an abandoned building next door.
When the suspect, described by police as “dangerous and violent,” turned himself in (accompanied by his mother), he turned out to be a kid who had just turned 12, two days after the crime.
After that, it comes as bittersweet news that violent juvenile crime fell slightly last year and the juvenile homicide rate decined 22.8 percent since reaching an all-time peak two years ago. . It is too early to tell if that’s a trend or just an inevitable blip. After all, juvenile crime almost tripled over the past decade to reach an all-time high two years ago.
If horror stories like that of Viola McClain do not make the rest of us numb with horror, they make us so angry that we want to take public action. Usually we want to lock “all of ’em up” and throw away the key. Politicians sniff at such anger–like dogs to red meat–and they address it passionately, often with promises of more jails and stiffer sentences for younger and younger children.
In Illinois, for example, the legislature was moved to toughen laws against criminal youths after the case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer became infamous enough to be cited by President Clinton.
Sandifer was only 11 years old when he allegedly shot a 14-year-old girl to death on Chicago’s South Side in August, 1994. Three days later he was gunned down, allegedly by members of his own gang who didn’t appreciate the national heat he had caused.
Before the year was out, the legislature passed a law that allowed the state to start locking up delinquents in so-called “kiddie prisons” at age 10 rather than 13, for longer than the previous maximum of 30 days.
That’s how we usually react to such horror stories. We demand that something be done about the young criminals.
But the “lock-’em-up” trend may be precisely the wrong thing to do. An overview of national trends released the same day as the Reno press conference confirms increasing youth violence at younger ages, but challenges the effectiveness of treating juveniles as adults.
The Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy, a Washington-based research group, looked at the effectiveness of crime prevention programs across the country. Among its findings:
Jail does reduce crime, but prevention reduces crime more–and for less money. A RAND Corp. projection estimates that a $1 million investment in new prisons could prevent 60 serious crimes a year, while the same amount of spending on parent training could prevent 160 serious crimes a year and the same amount spent on graduation incentives for disadvantaged students could prevent 258 serious crimes a year.
A close look at studies from various states shows sentencing juveniles to adult courts or prisons may actually lead to their becoming worse criminals after they eventually are released.
For example, a California study found during a 10-year period when the state’s juvenile incarceration rate of 498 per 100,000 was more than twice the national average of 208, the recidivism rate increased by 14 percent, from 44.5 to 58.4 percent among juveniles.
In Florida, another study found that juveniles who went to adult prison had a 30 percent rate of re-arrest, compared to only 19 percent for youths with similar records who remained in the juvenile system for similar crimes. Juveniles transferred to adult facilities also were more likely to re-offend and for more serious crimes.
In other words, prosecuting teens as adults actually may increase crime.
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By contrast, cities like Boston, whose police department has been working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on creative crime reduction, have had better results with a variety of coordinated community-based efforts to trace guns, report crimes and lure youths away from gang activity.
Viola McClain’s last words, according to her grandson, were, “You can’t change these people.” Can we? We often can, if we intervene early enough.
The horror stories have something eerily in common. None of these kids turn rotten overnight. Long before they make headlines they tend to show plenty of signs of disaster in the making.
A kid headed for trouble is like a train headed down a track toward a washout bridge. We can see the trouble coming. Why don’t we stop it?