| Chapter
2
Juvenile
Justice
By Jack
Kresnak
Creating a Secret System
In 1910, child advocates started calling for secret juvenile court
hearings in order to protect children from embarrassment and
to allow a juvenile delinquent to enter adulthood with a clean
slate. Few people objected to confidential proceedings, even
though more than 20 state constitutions clearly stated that all
court hearings would be open to the public. By 1925, when 46
of the 48 states had created some sort of juvenile court system,
confidentiality was standard. It was not codified into law in
most states until the early 1960s.
News reporters and the general public were effectively banned
from witnessing the inner workings of juvenile justice. And to
protect an adult with a childhood history or abuse, neglect or
delinquency, juvenile court records generally were destroyed a
certain number of years after a child reached the age of majority.
While the informality of the juvenile justice system may have
been appropriate for cases of petty theft or school truancy, the
lack of due process for children accused of wrongdoing inevitably
caused situations in which kids were locked into detention facilities
with no access to a lawyer or other advocate.
On June 8, 1964, a 15-year-old boy named Gerald Gault and a friend
made a series of crank phone calls to a neighbor woman in Gila
County, Arizona, asking "Are your cherries ripe today?'' and "Do
you have big bombers?'' Perhaps lacking more serious crimes to
investigate, the county sheriff hauled young Gerald to jail and
charged him as a juvenile delinquent without allowing the boy to
make a phone call or even informing the boy's parents.
A week later, Gerald went before the judge, who heard no evidence
beyond the boy's forced confession. When Gerald, already on probation
for a minor property offense, failed to give enough incriminating
information, the judge berated him as "habitually immoral." The
judge found him guilty and proclaimed him a juvenile delinquent.
Under Arizona law at the time, an adult charged with making an
obscene phone call faced a fine of perhaps $50 or a brief jail
sentence. But because Gerald was a juvenile, the judge could and
did sentence him to a reform school until his 21st birthday – nearly
six years of confinement.
As was true in most juvenile courts, no transcript was made of
this hearing. That's because juveniles had no right to appeal a
judge's decision. But Gerald's family took his case to federal
court, challenging the entire case as a violation of the juvenile's
constitutional rights to due process.
Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gerald's favor
in the landmark In Re Gault case. "Under our Constitution
the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court," read
the decision issued on May 15, 1967 that forced juvenile courts
across the country to give juvenile offenders the full panoply
of due process protections, including the right to notice of
charges, the right to counsel, the right to confront witnesses,
the right of appeal and the privilege against self-incrimination.
The ruling required juvenile courts across the nation to bring
in court reporters for creation of created official records,
to appoint lawyers for children and to adopt new operating rules.
The Violent Few
During the 1950s, criminologists such as Marvin Wolfgang of the University
of Pennsylvania began to research the roots and causes of juvenile crime.
Wolfgang's famous study of all boys born in Philadelphia in 1958 found that "chronic
offenders'' (five or more police contacts) comprised only 6 percent of the
total child population and 18 percent of all delinquents. Such chronic offenders
were responsible for about half of all juvenile crimes, researchers found,
and they had a greater chance of becoming adult criminals.
Post-war baby-boomers became teenagers in the 1960s and abuse
of illegal drugs like marijuana became common. Illegal drug use
among the young expanded greatly in the 1970s as kids experimented
with more psycho-active drugs like LSD and mescaline.
In the 1980s, even as the criminal justice system began to question
how better to target the serious repeat juvenile offender, a new
drug menace swept the country's urban areas: crack cocaine. Crack
was relatively easy to package and the illicit drug trade was lucrative;
a kid from a poor neighborhood didn't have to stay in school to
make good money. Drug dealers began using juveniles to conduct
drug transactions because when a kid was arrested he ended up in "Juvie'' – not
in prison – and could expect to be released in less than
a year. One drug gang in Detroit, for example, called itself Young
Boys, Incorporated, and recruited a small army of juveniles to
sell crack.
Along with the drug trade, of course, came a wave of violent
juvenile crime. Between 1983 and 1992, according to the FBI,
juvenile arrest rates for violent crime jumped 128 percent for
murder and non-negligent manslaughter (versus 9 percent for adults);
95 percent for aggravated assault (versus 69 percent for adults),
and 25 percent for rape (versus 14 percent for adults).
Fed by innumerable examples of kids committing some truly atrocious
crimes, the news media reported the skyrocketing numbers and declared
a "juvenile crime epidemic." By the early 1990s, something
akin to a public hysteria about juvenile crime existed and federal,
state and local governments began taking action against delinquents,
most of whom were black or Hispanic, urban and poor. News reports
of kids who seemed to act without remorse or conscience fed the
public perception that juvenile courts were unable to deal with
this new danger.
On Feb. 22, 1978, Roger Needham, a 15-year-old student at Everett
High School in Lansing, Michigan, who was fascinated by Hitler
and the Nazis, pulled a gun in a school hallway and shot two students.
One of them, 15-year-old Bill Draher, died. As Susan Taylor Martin
of the St. Petersburg Times wrote in a fascinating February 2001
series, the shooting was front page news at the Lansing State
Journal but warranted only a brief article on an inside page of the Detroit
Free Press.
After an investigation, prosecutors decided that Needham was
a mixed-up kid who probably could be rehabilitated. They charged
Needham as a juvenile, not an adult, sparing the boy a possible
sentence of life in an adult prison. After pleading guilty, Needham
was sent to a Michigan reform school, where he earned his high
school equivalency diploma and had the benefit of a wide array
of counseling services. Released from the juvenile system at age
19, Needham went on to study at the University of Michigan and
earned a Ph.D. in mathematics before teaching at City College of
New York and eventually joining a computer firm. He became, as
Taylor Martin reported, a law-abiding taxpayer.
But kids who shoot other kids at school no longer are likely to
receive such consideration.
In October 1997, a 16-year-old boy in Pearl, Miss., killed his
mother then went to his high school and shot nine students, two
of them fatally. He got life in prison.
In December 1997, a 14-year-old killed three students and wounded
five others at his high school in West Paducah, Ky. He pleaded
guilty but mentally ill and also was sentenced to life in prison.
In March, 1998, boys aged 11 and 13 killed five and wounded 10
at their middle school in Jonesboro, Ark. Although both were convicted,
they were too young to be sent to prison and instead were ordered
to undergo treatment in the state's juvenile system until age 21.
A wave of school shootings culminated in the massacre at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two
students killed 12 people and wounded 23 others before committing
suicide.
Schools across the country stepped up security by placing security
guards and metal detectors at every entrance. Kids who even write
a note or express the thought that they might want to blow up their
school are thrown into detention and, sometimes charged as adults
with the crime of threatening to commit a violent act.
Because some of these kids – such as the two shooters at
Columbine – had histories of involvement with the juvenile
justice system, juvenile court became a convenient punching bag
for "law and order" politicians who talked about a supposed
new breed of "super predator" – a violent child
without a conscience. More than 100 years after juvenile courts
were created to protect and rehabilitate children, many child advocates
believe the pendulum has swung
backward, leaving kids with fewer protections from an overly strict
system of justice and exposure by the news media.
As a result of the juvenile crime increase of the late 1980s,
states began lowering the ages at which accused juveniles could
e tried as adults. Between 1992 and 1995 alone, 40 states and Washington,
D.C., enacted such laws. Today, children as young as 10 accused
of murder can be tried as adults in states like Florida and Texas.
A child of any age can be sentenced as an adult in Michigan, although
the decision on an adult sentence for a kid younger than 14 rests
with the juvenile court judge.
In the mid 1990s, Congress created financial incentives for states
to treat more serious juvenile offenders as adults, and journalists
began cracking the walls of confidentiality surrounding juvenile
justice.
There is much at stake for children, their families and society
in how the juvenile justice system works. Public opinion plays
an important role in how children are treated in our systems
of justice. And public opinion is informed by an active, engaged
and knowledgeable news media. As journalists, we try to be as
objective, fair and accurate as possible in covering crime. When
covering juvenile justice, the challenge to be accurate is even
greater because of the confidential nature of much of the system
and the propensity of public officials to grandstand about juvenile
crime. In reporting about troubled or troubling children, we
must work hard to be as fair as humanly possible.
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