When you’re talking to Bill Ayers, it is hard to believe the soft-spoken, bespectacled education professor is the same guy the FBI was chasing for 11 years as a dangerous radical.
Nor is it easy to believe his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, also was a member of the Weather Underground back in the ’60s. They married while underground and resurfaced during the 1980s. Now he is an adviser to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nationally acclaimed education reform effort and she heads a family and children’s justice program at Northwestern University Law School
Judging by the headlines they were making years ago, I would have thought them to be too dangerous for such respected positions.
But, take it from an aging journalist: Headlines are deceptive and people change.
Perhaps it is their first-hand knowledge of how much young people can be misjudged and how much their perspectives can change with age that has led Ayers and Dohrn, who have three law-abiding teenage sons of their own, to their latest crusade: Helping some of today’s most demonized youth, the ones some Washington politicians call “predators” and worse.
Ayers, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has written a new book “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court,” based on his observations as a teacher in Chicago’s Juvenile Court system, the nation’s largest institution of juvenile justice. The book offers a view of delinquent youths you won’t see much of on the evening news. It is not scary enough. It is only tragic.
Yet, the news defines public attitudes and the public is frightened. A particularly grotesque crime by a kid “completely fills our collective consciousness, becomes emblematic of all juvenile crime and leaves virtually no space to understand and combat the reality of juvenile delinquency,” Ayers writes. “It distorts the public discussion, confuses and enervates people, leaves us shaken but resigned.”
More tragic is how the frenzy to lock up delinquent kids conceals a more fundamental and widespread problem: How callously most of these kids were thrown away in the first place.
As juvenile crime increases, the brutal conditions that produce delinquents have risen even faster. Since 1960 the number of child abuse or neglect cases handled by juvenile courts has risen five times faster than the delinquency cases, which have nearly quadrupled.
With that in mind, one might ask why so many children become delinquents and how do so many avoid becoming delinquents?
It was that pioneer social worker Jane Addams, who pushed for the creation of the world’s first juvenile court in 1899 in Chicago. She saw the juvenile court as “a kind and just parent” and the judge a sympathetic doctor who examined the child’s social conditions the way a doctor examines an ailing patient.
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Today’s Washington is threatening to deal juvenile courts their biggest setback in 100 years. Among the provisions in a proposed get-tough crime bill by Rep.Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) is a $500 million incentive package that, among other provisions, would encourage prosecutors to try violent youthful offenders as young as 15 as adults.
Such thinking unfortunately discards an important notion that undergirds juveniles courts, the notion that juveniles have an underdeveloped moral sense that cries out for help, not just punishment.
In a telephone interview, McCollum acknowledged that the vast majority of delinquents are not violent and only a tiny percentage of those who are violent are the repeat offenders who have generated the “predator” label.
Much of McCollum bill strikes the right note. He quite properly believes sanctions of some sort for minor offenses will help prevent youngsters from committing more serious ones.
Still, at the other extreme, he would not back down an inch from characterizing young repeat offenders as “predators. Unfortunately, demonizing young offenders can poison the atmosphere against programs that have proved to be effective, if less sensational, crime prevention efforts.
Some cities, like Boston, which recently had more than a year free of any youth homicides, have made tremendous advances with more aggressive community-based policing and other local reforms to get guns out of the hands of kids.
“Take away the guns,” said Dohrn, “and the crimes are not significantly worse than they were for the mostly European immigrant kids in Jane Addams day, when that generation was being demonized as predators.”
She has a point. Some of our kids commit some truly horrible crimes. But, before we rush to crack down on the kids who have turned against the world, we also should face up to how much our world has turned against them.