When Kids Go Bad

By Richard Lacayo

Frank Jackson knows something about violent crime. As head of the Dangerous Offenders Task Force in Wake County, North Carolina, he's been around his share. Even so, this tape makes him cringe. It's a 911 call made to police the night of July 27. A young woman is phoning for help from her apartment in Fuquay-Varina, about 15 miles from Raleigh. Just before the tape goes dead -- police believe the phone was ripped from the wall -- she can be heard screaming, "Don't harm my baby!" Jackson knows what happened next. Over the next several minutes she was beaten bloody with a mop handle and raped. The attacker was a neighbor who had apparently become infatuated with her. The woman, who survived, is 22. The accused rapist, Andre Green, is 13.

Green will be the first youthful offender tried under a North Carolina law passed earlier this year that permits children as young as 13 to be tried as adults. If convicted of rape, Green, who confessed to the crime but has no previous criminal record, will not be eligible for parole for 20 years. Jackson, who will prosecute the case, thinks Green is somebody who can't be let off lightly. He also wonders if lengthy confinement won't make Green worse. "It's kind of scary to think what kind of monster may be created," Jackson says. "He could be released at the age of 33 after having been raised in the department of corrections with some of the most hardened criminals North Carolina has to offer."

The American juvenile-justice system was designed 100 years ago to reform kids found guilty of minor crimes. Increasingly these days, the system is overwhelmed by the Andre Greens, by pint-size drug runners and by 16-year-old gunmen. The response on the part of lawmakers has been largely to siphon the worst of them out of that system by lowering the age at which juveniles charged with serious crimes -- usually including murder, rape and armed assault -- can be tried in adult courts. Last week California Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill lowering the threshold to 14. Earlier this year Arkansas did the same, and Georgia decided that youths from the ages of 14 through 17 who are charged with certain crimes will be tried as adults automatically. This being election time, candidates around the country are engaged in a kind of reverse auction to see who would send even younger felons to the adult system. Fourteen? Why not 13? Why not 12?

Even if the spectacle of politics coming to grips with pathology is not pretty, who can deny that when 11-year-olds like Robert ("Yummy") Sandifer kill or when a 14-year-old drives nails into the heels of a younger boy -- a recent episode from Somerset, Pennsylvania -- there is good reason to be unnerved? A breeding ground of poverty and broken families and drugs and guns and violence, real or just pictured, has brought forth a violent generation. "We need to throw out our entire juvenile-justice system," says Gil Garcetti, the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, whose biggest headache, after the O.J. trial, is the city's youth gangs. "We should replace it with one that both protects society from violent juvenile criminals and efficiently rehabilitates youths who can be saved -- and can differentiate between the two."

During the past six years, there has been a significant increase in juvenile crime in the most serious categories: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Homicide arrests of kids ages 10 through 14 rose from 194 to 301 between 1988 and 1992. In 1986 a majority of cases in New York City's Family Court were misdemeanors; today more than 90% are felonies. Though killers under the age of 15 are still relatively rare -- over the past three years in L.A., for instance, those 14 or younger accounted for just 17 of the 460 homicides committed by kids under 18 -- younger kids are increasingly involved in deadlier crime. "There is far more gratuitous violence and far more anger, more shooting," says Judge Susan R. Winfield, who presides over the Family Division of the Washington, D.C., Superior Court. "Youngsters used to shoot each other in the body. Then in the head. Now they shoot each other in the face."

Gunfire has become sufficiently common in and around classrooms, mostly in the inner city, that an astonishing number of schools have started to treat their own corridors as potential crime scenes. Some are tearing out lockers to deny hiding places for handguns or banning carryalls and bookbags for the same reason.

No segment of society is immune to the problem. The most famous youthful offenders of the '90s, Erik Menendez, at 19, of Beverly Hills, California, and Amy Fisher, at 17, of Merrick, Long Island, came from mostly white communities of nice houses. But it's in the inner cities where an interlocking universe of guns, gangs and the drug trade has made mayhem a career path for kids and equipped them with the means to do maximum damage along the way. Children ) involved in the drug trade get guns to defend themselves against older kids who want their money. For the ones still on a piggy-bank budget, the streets offer rent-a-guns for $20 an hour. Who can be surprised, then, that on a typical day last year about 100,000 juveniles were in lockup across the country?

With the omnibus crime bill that just squeezed through Congress, the Federal Government made its partial gesture toward a solution. Under the new law, it's a crime for juveniles to possess a handgun or for any adult to transfer one to them except in certain supervised situations. It also provides for programs -- like those that keep schools open later -- intended to discourage kids from finding trouble.

Those were the very provisions that some Republicans denounced as "pork." Yet while crime control can be one of the most contentious issues in American life, there is something resembling an emerging ideological consensus on one thing: some kids are beyond help. You can hear it even when talking with Attorney General Janet Reno, who believes crime has its roots among neglected children. She still stresses the need for "a continuum" of government attention that begins with prenatal care and includes the school system, housing authorities, health services and job-training programs. But she also recognizes that the continuum will sometimes end in an early jail cell. "It's imperative for serious juvenile offenders to know they will face a sanction," she says. "Too many of them don't understand what punishment means because they have been raised in a world with no understanding of reward and punishment."

A consensus is also developing about the juvenile-justice system. It takes forever to punish kids who seriously break the law, and it devotes far too much time and money to hardened young criminals while neglecting wayward kids who could still be turned around. "We can't look a kid in the eye and tell him that we can't spend a thousand dollars on him when he's 12 or 13 but that we'll be happy to reserve a jail cell for him and spend a hundred grand a year on him later," says North Carolina attorney general Mike Easley. "It's not just bad policy; it's bad arithmetic."

For some experienced offenders, the prospect of jail can make a real difference in their decisions about what crimes they are willing to commit. L.A.'s Garcetti recalls the calculating questions of a teen who raised his hand when the district attorney appeared at a detention center last April. "If I kill someone," the kid asked, "can I be executed?"

"Not at this age, no," said Garcetti.

"What if I kill more than one person?"

"Under current California law, you cannot be executed."

"Right now, I'm under 16. If I kill someone, I get out of prison when I'm 25, right?"

"Right," said Garcetti, who eventually cut off the unnerving questions by predicting, "People are so tired, so fearful and so disgusted that I think you're going to see some real changes in juvenile laws."

But few young offenders are so calculating. "These kids don't think before they do things," insists Dwayne of Atlanta, at 18 a seasoned criminal whose list of felony arrests includes armed robbery and assault. "It ain't like they stop to think, 'Now what they gonna do to me if I get caught?' " Nearby, 17-year-old DeMarcus (grand-theft auto, aggravated assault) sums up another problem: prison doesn't usually last forever, and life on the outside is an open invitation to go bad again. "They send you straight back into the same situation," he says. "The house is dirty when you left it, and it's dirty when you get back."

So the people who work with young offenders generally favor punishment for some and something like tough love for the rest. The larger problem, as always, is figuring which of the best-intended programs are better than jail cells. "Nobody has tracked the process carefully enough to find out who is good at it, in what states and by what means," says James Q. Wilson, the well-known authority on crime policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Knowing what works might help the Florida judge who has to decide this week on what to do about Percy Campbell. Eighteen months ago, Percy was a 12-year- old arrested for attempted burglary in northwest Fort Lauderdale. As it turned out, he already had more than 30 arrests for a total of 57 crimes on his rap sheet, some of them felonies. No surprise -- he also had a mother in jail for murder and an uncle who had taught him how to steal cars.

Dennis Grant, a church elder in Fort Lauderdale, thought he could help. He gained permission to have Percy placed in the custody of his grandmother, whom Grant arranged to have relocated from a neighborhood ruled by the crack trade. The boy stayed out of trouble until June, when he broke into a neighbor's home. So it now appears that his grandmother's home wasn't the best place to ! be. She was arrested on shoplifting charges last week. This week a Broward County judge decides whether to try Percy as an adult or to turn him back to Grant one more time. "These kids can be changed," Grant insists. "We need to break the cycle." The prosecutors demur. "This child is being glorified," grumbles assistant state attorney Susan Aramony. "Maybe it's time to spend the resources on someone else who may benefit from them."

Percy's case highlights a key dilemma: how to distinguish kids who may be beyond change from the ones who aren't. In an article in this month's Commentary, James Q. Wilson observes that numerous studies of young criminals tend toward a shared conclusion: in any given age group, only 6% of the boys will be responsible for at least half of the serious crimes committed by all boys of that age. What do those kids have in common? Criminal parents, many of them -- more than half of all kids in long-term juvenile institutions in the U.S. have immediate relatives who have been incarcerated. A low verbal- intelligence quotient and poor grades are also common. The boys tend to be both emotionally cold and impulsive. From an early age they drink and get high. By an early age too, they make their first noticeable trouble, sometimes around the third grade.

If every offender who fit that profile were beyond help, judges would know better which kids to consign to lockups. They aren't all beyond help, so authorities stumble around in the dark. Indeed, the records of young offenders are generally closed, so previous offenses aren't always disclosed to judges who rule on subsequent ones. When New York State passed its juvenile-offender law in 1978, the outcome was regarded as the toughest new arrangement in the nation. On the surface, it was: those from 13 through 15 accused of heinous felonies were moved from Family Court, where the maximum penalty was 18 months regardless of the crime, to the State Supreme Court. But the law allows only for lighter sentences than would be given to adults who are convicted of equivalent crimes -- meaning the kids are often back on the streets in a few years, jobless, with a felony conviction that makes employment more difficult to find. The inadequacies of the system led Justice Michael Corriero to push for the creation of the job he now holds. He takes on all juvenile-offender cases that come through Manhattan Supreme Court. In this capacity, he has the power to fashion a midway solution for some offenders, determining whether to send convicted kids to hard time or, if he believes them salvageable, to a community-based program that keeps close tabs while offering drug counseling, job training or schooling. Still, says Corriero, "even though the legislature gave us the bodies of these kids, they gave us no support services. We don't have a probation-department representative who tells me the Family Court history. We don't have any mental-health services to refer them to. We don't have any residential programs. We don't have any resources that the Family Court has."

Corriero wants to return all the cases to Family Court but give judges discretion to bat the worst kids back to stand trial as adults. That won't work, says Peter Reinharz, who heads the Family Court Division. It would still load too many desperate characters into a system underequipped to deal with them. "I don't know what the solution is," says Reinharz, but "I can tell you what it isn't. You're looking at it."

With reporting by Richard Behar/New York, Nina Burleigh/Washington, Scott Norvell/Atlanta and James Willwerth/Los Angeles