Training the Next Generation of Criminals

I remember when my son, as a teenager, made a new acquaintance in his league ice hockey team here in LA. Chris, a pretty damned good goaltender, met a new young man, 17, who was his new team captain, a guy named Mike. Hockey is a really tough sport, no matter what position you play, and protecting your goalie is a sacred duty to every player on the ice. Mike was from the other side of the tracks. Tats. Pants worn down below his shorts. Shaved his head. Tough dude from a Mexican-American part of town. In his gang, he was a shot-caller, tougher than the rest, but he just loved ice hockey as the perfect expression of his physical skills. Mike took protecting Chris very seriously.

As time passed, we discovered what an exceptional mind Mike had, how fiercely loyal he could be, and what a wonderful sense of humor he had. He did the best he could in the neighborhood in which he was raised, by his single parent mom who was always there for him. We didn’t want to know about the other side of his life, but he was a profoundly impressive young man when you spent time with him, one-on-one. Mike and Chris became friends. And we all learned how where you live and the world around you impact what your choices are and what you become.

In a world of insanely thin public school budgets and pressure to reduce social programs, kids born into the inner city have a pretty rotten chance of bettering themselves in the mainstream work world. And God help those with felony convictions after the age of 18 (or where they are tried as an adult); their prospects in the legitimate educational/work world are almost always toast.

The hard-dollar cost of moving kids-becoming-young-adults into the criminal justice system is incredible. Forgetting about the prosecutors, defense lawyers (or what parades as a defense lawyer), courts, probation officers, and even the billions and billions of dollars ex-convicts will never earn in the legitimate work world, it cost anywhere from $25K to $50K a year to house incarcerated inmates. Once in prison, they are accorded the finest education in criminal activity imaginable, often getting gang-mandated tattoos that alone will ban them from the work world (even beyond their criminal record).

But that negative educational process often starts in the juvenile justice system years earlier. And too many juvenile judges believe that incarceration is just the kind of tough love these kids need to be scared straight. But is that assumption remotely correct?

“[E]vidence has mounted in recent years that locking up juveniles, especially those who pose no risk to public safety, does more harm than good. Most juvenile offenders outgrow delinquent behavior, studies find. And incarceration — the most costly alternative for taxpayers — appears to do little to prevent recidivism and often has the opposite effect, driving juveniles deeper into criminal behavior.

“‘Once kids get in the system, they tend to come back, and the farther they go, the more likely they are to keep going,’ said Edward Mulvey, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the author of a major study of delinquent youths.

“Slowly, policy makers have begun to heed this message. After decades when states grew more punitive in their approach to juvenile crime, locking up more and more youths, more than a dozen have now revised statutes or regulations to avoid the overuse of incarceration, among them New Jersey and Indiana.

“But judges are not always so quick to follow. And often the judges most resistant to change are those most determined to help troubled youths, juvenile delinquency experts say…

“[T]his fall, the Casey Foundation, taking note of the high detention rates, expanded its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative to Prince George’s County [Maryland]. Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children’s Law and Policy in Washington [D.C.], is leading the effort, which offers training and technical assistance to help jurisdictions reduce overreliance on locked detention and develop other ways of holding juveniles accountable. Mr. Soler and his staff have prepared an assessment of the county’s juvenile system, based on interviews with all parties, including [the relevant judges].

‘We want judges to understand that the juvenile system is not the solution to all the problems of children and families,’ Mr. Soler said… Among other things, the initiative encourages the use of standardized measures that rate how likely a juvenile is to flee or commit another offense…” New York Times, December 19^th. But community pressure pushes many judges to place offenders into detention facilities, often for very significant periods of time. Until those pressures relent, the taxpayers will continue to pay for these youths’ indoctrination on how to conduct criminal activities with much greater efficiency and skill. 

We are a society that spends tons of wasteful dollars on programs that really wind up hurting us horribly and costing us vast multiples of what the empty slogans tell us we are saving. Americans decreasingly apply result-oriented common sense to macro-social problem solving, preferring instead to outsource the determination to mythology and fear-mongering without analysis. It screwed us in Iraq, and it has led to our being a country with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the earth’s incarcerated prisoners. We just cannot afford to continue to waste precious dollars this way anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and decision-making without factual basis is seldom effective, but it seems increasingly to be the American way!