ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260087
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: LORI MONTGOMERY KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Robert's criminal career began on a summer afternoon in 1994 when he set fire to a neighbor's garage. As the flames leaped to nearby buildings, witnesses saw him racing away, a cigarette lighter in his hand.
Since then, Robert has tangled twice with police, once for burglarizing a neighbor's home and most recently for stealing a $150 CD player from a store shelf.
It's an awfully long record, given that Robert is only 7.
``Kinda scary, isn't it?'' said Minneapolis prosecutor Janet Wiig, who discovered Robert (not his real name) while conducting a ground-breaking study of more than 100 children as young as 4 who have been referred to her office by police.
Robert was among an estimated 110,000 children under 13 arrested in 1994 for acts considered felonies, federal statistics show. Of those, an estimated 11,700 were picked up for crimes against people - including 39 murders - a pace of violence that's been rising for more than two decades.
These young lawbreakers are at high risk of turning into what conservatives like to call the ``superpredators'' of tomorrow, a growing body of research indicates. By getting arrested at 6 or 7, some say, these kids are sounding an alarm on the teen thugs they may become.
New research shows that children arrested before the age of 12 are likely to have had histories of abuse and neglect and are more likely to go on to commit more numerous and more serious crimes than children first arrested as teen-agers.
Now, child advocates and law enforcement officials are teaming up to target these children for special intervention while they're still small - and while a frightened public might be persuaded to find them worth saving.
``It's no mystery to identify kids before they become serious offenders,'' said Michael Petit, deputy director of the Child Welfare League of America in Washington, D.C.
``If you see a kid that's 7 or 8 years old who is actually burglarizing buildings or being physically aggressive or has been involved with starting fires, you can't say he'll grow out of it. What we see is he grows into it more.''
At a recent Child Welfare League convention in Washington, Petit unveiled two studies of very young delinquents. One was from Sacramento County, Calif., where a task force studied children arrested at ages 9 through 12. The other was Wiig's study of delinquents under 10 in Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis.
The studies show the teen criminals of tomorrow are ``literally being manufactured, programmed, hardwired to behave in a certain way,'' Petit said. ``We know right now who they are.''
The results of the Hennepin County study are particularly compelling.
Wiig, a former child-services director hired by county prosecutor Mike Freeman to design crime-prevention programs, was astonished by the number of cases. In a county with just over 1 million people and a fairly placid central city, more than 300 children under 10 were named suspects in police reports between July 1993 and January 1995. Of those, police considered 135 cases serious enough for prosecution.
More surprising was the nature of the offenses. Nearly half the children were accused of stealing - burglary, shoplifting, crimes not uncommon among kids. But more than a quarter were accused of crimes against people, including 19 assaults, four incidents of dangerous weapons at school, seven rapes and one armed robbery.
The littlest potential defendants, the 4- and 5-year-olds, were most often reported for arson - a disturbing finding given that fire-setting is common among sexual abuse victims.
``We've got 9-year-olds who hold knives to the throat of the little ones while they sexually assault them,'' said Nan Beaman, a Hennepin County social worker.
In Sacramento County, researchers were finding much the same thing.
``I was quite surprised when we looked at our records,'' said Deputy Chief John Benbow of the Sacramento County sheriff's office. ``I, like most people, had the belief that these young little kids don't really do wrong things like adults do wrong things.
``But we had a 9-year-old homicide suspect,'' Benbow said. ``And it wasn't an accident.''
More significantly, both studies found that the families producing these children had often been investigated by child-welfare workers at least once.
In Sacramento County, half of 132 arrested kids ages 9 through 12 had been the subject of reports of abuse or neglect. In Minneapolis, where the children studied were younger, child welfare workers had investigated the families of 81 percent of children arrested.
In her 1992 work, ``The Cycle of Violence,'' Cathy Spatz Widom compared children born in the same hospitals and living in the same communities and found that those who were abused or neglected were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than their better-raised peers.
``The new data is so hard to ignore,'' said Widom, a professor of criminal justice and psychology at the University of Albany in New York. ``We now know that abused and neglected kids are at demonstrably increased risk for these problems. And we need to intervene.'' The Minneapolis and Sacramento County studies go further. Both found many arrested children shared other characteristics considered to be indicators of future delinquency.
In Minneapolis, for example, 70 percent of the children had a parent or sibling with a criminal record. More than half had serious problems at school. And 91 percent came from families that were either receiving welfare or had received assistance in the past.
Across the country, the crimes of very young children often fall through the cracks, child welfare officials say: They're often too minor to draw the full attention of the juvenile justice system, which is focused on older, more menacing kids. And they draw little response from child-welfare workers preoccupied with younger kids in more immediate danger.
Currently, a smattering of programs target these young offenders. More often, however, authorities say they have no good response.
Experts say it makes good sense to focus scarce resources on children who start committing crimes early. But researchers in Minneapolis and Sacramento County are struggling to find cash for their prevention strategies.
Congress is reviewing the only federal funding source for delinquency- prevention programs, which provides about $144 million a year. Republicans say they're keeping an open mind, but child advocates fear the money will be earmarked for punishment not prevention.
That, Wiig said, that would be a mistake.
Roanoke appears to be bucking a national trend. Arrest figures show that serious crime committed by juveniles has remained stable or dipped slightly over the past five years.
But more importantly, police say, the arrests of youngsters under 10 - who are most likely to be rearrested on more serious charges when they've entered their teens - has been steadily declining, from 259 in 1983 to 103 in 1994.
Technically, Roanoke leads the state in juvenile arrests on a per capita basis. But that's because nearly a third of all arrests reported in 1994 were for runaway and curfew violations - an indication that police may be preventing more serious crime by intervening early with young troublemakers.
Statewide, a 60 percent increase in violent juvenile crime over the past 15 years prompted the General Assembly to pass laws this year that will subject more juveniles to adult trials, and keep them locked up longer. - Staff writer Laurence Hammack contributed to this story.
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