ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
LAST WEEK, Roanoke's Juvenile Detention Home at Coyner Springs housed 36 youngsters in the facility designed for 21 - and 36 was down from the usual number of kids held there.
The story is much the same at virtually every local, regional and state juvenile-detention center in Virginia - facilities filled to 300 percent capacity have not been uncommon in recent years. In 1992, hired consultants warned state officials that, by allowing untenable overcrowding to go uncorrected, Virginia was inviting trouble.
Trouble may have arrived with the U.S. Justice Department's recent announcement that it is investigating conditions at the state's Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center near Richmond. This facility, built for 200, holds more than 400 of the commonwealth's most dangerous youths. Understaffed, fenced in by razor wire, it's been the scene of riots and dozens of assaults by inmates.
If anything, the overcrowding there and elsewhere has gotten worse since 1992, and state actions have mostly aggravated it. The 1994 General Assembly, for instance, passed a law allowing judges to sentence juveniles for up to seven years, adding to the population in youth facilities. The 1996 assembly's changes in juvenile-sentencing laws, made at the behest of Gov. George Allen, are likely to further increase the system's population.
Political culpability for the overcrowding that has triggered Justice's attention is bipartisan. Democrats as well as Republicans have responded to public demands for tougher penalties without giving enough thought to the system's capacity.
As a result, Virginia is expected to be short 464 beds in its juvenile corrections system next month. In a year, the projected shortfall will be 739 beds. Lawmakers heard recently that even with planned construction, alternatives to incarceration and private-sector initiatives approved by the '96 assembly, the juvenile system will still be 500 beds short in five years.
A big part of the problem is that, even with the changes enacted in this year's assembly, Virginia is failing badly to invest in more intense intervention at younger ages for youths at risk of becoming criminals.
Kids need to experience success at an early age. If we wait to lock up incorrigibles for serious offenses, in places practically designed to teach violence and criminality, we are as a society inviting defeat and disorder.
The outcome of the Justice Department's probe is, of course, unpredictable. Conceivably, though, it could result in a federal order for Virginia either to embark on a crash construction program or to turn loose hundreds of violent juvenile criminals now behind bars.
In any event, the Justice Department's involvement ought to serve as another reminder that longer sentences for increasing numbers of youths is not the simple answer to juvenile crime that many Virginia residents, and their elected leaders, might wish it to be. Not simple - and, as federal intervention may again underscore, certainly not cheap.
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