Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994 TAG: 9404190159
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
Taylor, 43, a decorated Vietnam veteran, died in the emergency room. Johnson was tried as an adult and convicted of murder. But rather than sentence him to life in prison, the judge sent Johnson to a juvenile facility. Less than two years later, he was back on the street.
This month, Johnson, now 19, is back in court, accused with two others of holding a 13-year-old girl hostage and raping her repeatedly during two days last summer.
The grim outcome of Johnson's encounter with the law offers a cautionary tale for those hoping to stem the rising tide of juvenile violence with laws promising adult trials and adult prison for bad kids.
Such laws frequently backfire, producing tougher young thugs with even less to fear, criminal justice experts warn. One important reason: Only a fraction of the 10,000 children tried as adults each year in America actually go to prison.
Some teen-agers do get long terms, but many more are sent back to the juvenile system, where they are often released after just a few months. Many other youthful offenders are given quick parole from prison or are released on adult probation directly from court, with no exposure to the rehabilitation programs the juvenile court system was created to provide.
``For every complex problem, there's a simple and obvious solution that's wrong,'' Howard Snyder, research director for the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, said of the rush to try kids as adults. ``Nobody in the world will tell you that the adult system is better than the juvenile system. The only thing is, hopefully it'll keep them off the street longer.''
There's no guarantee of that, though.
A recent study of juveniles sentenced by Pennsylvania adult courts in 1986 found that the typical sentence was two years in jail, with parole likely after one year. In the juvenile system, punishment likely would have been tougher. Such serious offenders routinely would have spent 18 to 24 months locked up in a secure facility, followed by a few months of intensive supervision, said Henry Sontheimer, senior evaluation analyst for the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
``If the goal of waiving kids to adult court was to incapacitate them for longer than the juvenile system could have done, in most cases that wasn't accomplished,'' Sontheimer said.
Despite such reservations, the impulse to do something about juvenile crime rarely has been stronger.
Surveys indicate that Americans are fed up with vicious young criminals who seem to terrorize their communities without fear of punishment. They're outraged by a juvenile justice system that can hold even the most brutal kids only until they're 19 or 21 and that releases killers without criminal records.
Lawmakers are responding to voters' anger with some energy.
In statehouses across the nation, a wave of proposals to sharply increase punishments for youthful offenders is being floated this spring. It's ``the biggest raft of get-tough proposals in recent memory,'' said a juvenile-justice expert.
The House is expected to vote soon on a crime bill that would allow children 13 and older to be tried as adults in federal court. That provision is largely symbolic: Federal prosecutors rarely try juvenile cases, and only 123 juveniles are in federal custody.
A version of the crime bill the Senate passed last fall would actually require kids as young as 13 to be tried as adults for certain violent crimes, including murder.
``We have to make youngsters know they have to be accountable when they kill someone,'' said Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, D-Ill., who sponsored an amendment to require the adult trials.
Driving the thirst for punishment: From 1987 to 1991, juveniles were arrested in connection with violent crimes at a rapidly increasing rate. The arrest rate of juveniles in murders and non-negligent manslaughters especially skyrocketed, jumping 85 percent, or nearly eight times the rate of adult arrests.
Scowling teen killers and giggling young gangsters have become stock characters on the nightly TV news. The crimes are startling because of the youth of the criminals, but they are often shockingly brutal, as well.
In what may have been one of the nation's first carjackings, a businessman in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was shot to death in 1990 after he was forced to stop for a tree thrown into a road on Detroit's east side. The trap was laid by the 16-year-old gunman and five other teens, who left the man to die while they drove away in his Cadillac.
In that case, all of the boys were tried as adults, but none got prison time. Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court decided that Detroit Recorder's Court Judge Dalton Roberson had been too lenient when he sentenced gunman Kermit Haynes to juvenile probation for the murder.
Roberson's only other option had been a mandatory adult term of life without parole, which he considered too harsh for a boy of 16.
``I agonized over that case for months,'' Roberson said. Michigan law ``puts us in a position where the only choices you have are mandatory imprisonment for life or the juvenile system for five years ... I recognized that the lower choice was not severe enough, but I didn't have any good alternative.''
According to Snyder of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, the best source of information about the prosecution of children, Roberson's dilemma is common among adult judges across the nation.
Statistics compiled in Florida, which tries more kids as adults than any other state, indicate that fewer than a quarter go to prison. In New York, where kids as young as 13 are tried in adult court under a special juvenile offender law passed in 1978, fewer than a third go to prison.
In both states, many of the rest are sent back to the juvenile system for punishment, authorities say.
That problem could be fixed if laws were changed to give adult judges broader discretion in sentencing juveniles, Snyder said.
by CNB