Series: Facing the Fear Paying the Price. EDITOR’S NOTE – This series is a combined project of The Associated Press, the Newport News Daily Press, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Roanoke Times & World-News and The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk
JOSEPH Copeland’s juvenile rap sheet reads like a road map to his current home at Southampton Correctional Center.
Three pages long, it starts in 1989. Copeland was 14, growing up in a Roanoke housing project. His first arrest, for malicious wounding, led to probation. “After that,” Copeland says, “I just started doing everything.”
Copeland was charged 25 times during the next two years for offenses ranging from shoplifting to drug dealing. At 16, he shot and killed an innocent stranger who stood in the way of a $10 cocaine debt Copeland was trying to collect.
Before going to court, Copeland was told that prosecutors would seek a life sentence. “If they’re trying to give me all that time,” he remembers telling his lawyer, “then maybe I should have put more bullets in him.”
Kids like Copeland are killing, robbing, raping and maiming in record numbers in Virginia.
But while growing juvenile crime often is cited by Gov. George Allen as one reason for abolishing parole, the governor’s proposal hardly does anything to deal with young offenders before they become the adult inmates of tomorrow.
From 1980 to 1992, the arrest rate for juveniles who committed violent crimes in Virginia shot up by nearly 61 percent. The juvenile arrest rate for murder increased by nearly 280 percent during the same period – from 21 in 1980 to 77 last year.
If current projections hold true, the numbers will only get worse.
That’s because the number of people in the 15-24 age group – the most crime-prone population – will increase toward the turn of the century. As the baby boomers’ babies come of criminal age, the state will experience a crime wave of unprecedented proportions, experts predict.
The demographic forecast often is cited as the Allen administration prepares for a future of violence by today’s toddlers, preschoolers and adolescents.
“We’ve got to get ready for it,” says Secretary of Public Safety Jerry Kilgore, a member of Allen’s Commission on Parole Abolition and Sentencing Reform. “They’ve got to understand there is going to be swift and sure punishment.”
The number of Virginia males 13 to 17 years old is expected to increase 30 percent – from 200,000 to 260,000 – by 2005. The Department of Criminal Justice Services projects a 114 percent increase in serious juvenile offenses between 1992 and 2002.
The dire predictions come as the state’s juvenile justice system is swamped with a new breed of criminals.
Many are the products of inner-city despair, growing up in broken homes and on mean streets where two things are all too prevalent – drugs and guns.
Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn served on a Commission on Youth task force that studied serious juvenile offenders. He said many youths see no future beyond their day-to-day survival in a world of dead ends.
“There are a lot of kids out there who not only have a sense of hopelessness,” Gwynn said, “but they don’t value their own lives.”
Or the lives they take.
“You look in their eyes, and there’s nothing,” Gwynn said. “No sorrow. No remorse. Nothing.”
“You sell drugs, you get a gun”
As a child, Joseph “Huggy” Copeland wanted his life to be just like the movies.
Movies like “Scarface” and “New Jack City.”
Copeland was so impressed by “New Jack City,” a movie full of cocaine and gang killings, that he bought the video. “I used to watch it all the time,” he said. Later in life, seconds after committing society’s most serious crime, Copeland would recite a line from the movie.
“That’s how I wanted everything; just like it was in that movie,” Copeland said.
Early in life, he set goals for himself.
“My goal was to be the best drug dealer that I could be,” Copeland said.
By the time he was 15, Copeland was living on the streets. He stayed away from home for weeks at a time, living in motel rooms paid for by cocaine profits that, he says, were as high as $4,000 a night.
After experiencing a turbulent family life and dropping out of school, Copeland found his first positive reinforcements in the expensive clothes, flashy lifestyle and heady power that came with being a drug dealer.
“You would get, like, famous,” he said. “Everybody knows you and you’re the one that everybody wants to hang with. … You feel like you’re in control; that you’ve got all the power.”
About that time, he got his first gun – a .357-caliber Magnum provided by one of his customers.
“It came with the territory; you sell drugs, you get a gun,” Copeland said. “And it makes you look bigger.”
With each new crime, Copeland moved one step closer to Southampton. Looking back on the first 16 years of his life, it took all the routes most likely to lead a young man to either a prison yard or a graveyard.
He grew up on welfare, raised by a mother with a history of convictions for assault and marijuana possession.
His father’s address is listed in court records as “unknown.”
He got in trouble for fighting in school and was placed in alternative education, where he met many of his drug-dealing friends before dropping out of the ninth grade.
His uncle, a former convict who became Copeland’s father figure, was shot and killed in a Roanoke street fight in 1990. One of Copeland’s best friends went to prison for that murder.
While Copeland was hit particularly hard by crime – his younger brother and a cousin also went to prison; his 4-year-old niece was wounded in the crossfire of a gunbattle in a Roanoke park; his former girlfriend was murdered – officials say his troubled background is all too common among today’s youth.
“It’s such a complex problem, and poverty plays a big part,” said Dennis Waite, chief psychologist with the Department of Youth and Family Services.
“When kids grow up in that environment and they don’t see a legitimate way out, the role models they see for getting out are the drug dealers driving expensive cars,” Waite said.
In 1982, juveniles accounted for less than 1 percent of all arrests for sales of schedule I or II drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, according to the Governor’s Commission on Violent Crime in Virginia. By 1992, juveniles represented about 13 percent of all such arrests.
The same financial woes that lure children to drugs often prevent their parents from intervening.
“There are a lot of folks out there who are struggling just to survive, and parenting becomes not real high on their priority list,” said Robert Wade, director of juvenile probation in Lynchburg.
Not all juvenile crime can be attributed to the inner-city ills of drugs and guns, as has been shown by several high-profile cases in which middle-class youths from rural areas have been accused of killing their parents, and by the recent conviction of an Isle of Wight high school valedictorian on burglary and grand larceny charges.
Gwynn, the Newport News prosecutor, says some affluent youths commit crimes just to get their parents’ attention.
“The parents will say: `We don’t know what happened,”’ Gwynn said. “’We bought him a car and sent him to Europe last summer.”’
Still, violent and repeat offenders like Copeland are the examples most often trotted out before commission meetings and public hearings on the Allen proposal.
When he was 14, Copeland got locked up for the first time.
“It was fun” at Coyner Springs, the Juvenile Detention Center for Roanoke, he said. “All my friends that got in trouble were there, so it was like we were still in the neighborhood. … It wasn’t that bad. I was like, `I could do this again.”’
After a brief stint in Coyner Springs, Copeland went to juvenile court on a charge of malicious wounding. He had been arrested after taking a swing at his girlfriend’s stepfather, who was angry because she had run off with Copeland. A knife that Copeland was holding sliced the man’s forehead.
A judge reduced the charge to unlawful wounding. Copeland was placed on probation and ordered to perform 30 hours of community service. It was his first taste of a juvenile justice system that stresses rehabilitation over incarceration.
In Copeland’s case, it didn’t work.
One year and nine arrests later – mostly for assaults and property crimes that resulted in more probation – Copeland was back in court on a drug charge. He was dealt the most severe punishment the juvenile court could deliver – an indeterminate commitment to the state Department of Youth and Family Services.
Copeland was sent to the Hanover Learning Center near Richmond.
What did he learn there?
“I learned how to steal cars,” he said.
“When you get in an institutional setting like that, and everybody is young and they’re coming in for drugs or a murder charge … it’s like a competition,” with each youth boasting about his criminal achievements, Copeland said.
“It gives you ideas …I’m hearing the same thing every day, so I’m saying: `I’m going to try that when I get out.”’
Two months shy of his 16th birthday, Copeland was released from Hanover. He had served eight months – not enough time in the mind of Betty Jo Anthony, a Roanoke prosecutor who would later try him for murder.
“I think that if we made some serious punishment a part of juvenile dispositions, in addition to our rehabilitative efforts, we could teach them there is always a consequence to their actions,” Anthony said.
“I don’t think we always do that, and I think Copeland is an example.”
`Some children we cannot save’
But the system is getting tougher.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly lowered from 15 to 14 the age at which a juvenile can be tried as an adult on a serious crime.
When someone is tried in juvenile court, the most serious punishment he or she can receive is incarceration in a state learning center until their 21th birthday. Offenders transferred to Circuit Court can be sentenced either as juveniles or adults.
Legislators also passed a bill this year that allows judges, in the cases of serious offenders who remain in the juvenile court, to sentence them to a learning center for specific terms of up to seven years or until their 21st birthday. Previously, juveniles were sentenced to indeterminate terms, with judges setting a 12-month minimum in only the most serious cases.
How long a juvenile spends in detention is usually decided at the learning center. In effect, learning center officials are the equivalent to the adult system’s parole board as they consider the seriousness of the offense and the youth’s adjustment to incarceration.
The new determinate sentencing law is expected to increase overcrowding at state learning centers already described in a 1992 study as “the stuff of Dickens” for problems with overcrowding and unsafe conditions.
Although Allen’s proposal to abolish parole would affect only juveniles who are tried and sentenced as adults, those numbers are growing, too.
From 1988 to 1992, the number of juveniles transferred to adult courts and convicted increased by nearly 45 percent, from 285 to 412. That ranked Virginia eighth out of 44 states and the District of Columbia in terms of the per capita number of juveniles tried as adults, according to the state study.
“Regrettably, we have to recognize the fact that there are some children we cannot save,” Gwynn, the Newport News prosecutor, said. “And I think the changes in the system are starting to reflect that reality.”
`The world is mine’
For most of Nov. 12, 1991, Copeland had been smoking “blunts,” marijuana cigars, and drinking beer from 40-ounce bottles.
As he and his friends cruised town, Copeland became upset when his girlfriend gave $100 to a neighborhood drunk just because Christmas was near.
“That really set me off,” Copeland said. His mood darkened even more after running into C.J. Switzer, a 16-year-old who owed Copeland $10 from an earlier crack purchase.
After drinking and stewing for several hours, Copeland decided to call the debt due.
It was close to midnight when he climbed the porch steps of 649 Day Avenue and pounded on the front door. In one hand Copeland held a beer; in the other a 9-mm semiautomatic.
Switzer’s uncle, 69-year-old Eldridge C. Ferris, answered the door.
“He came out the door with an attitude. … He was a real racial-type dude,” said Copeland, who is black, of Ferris, who was white. Copeland told police Ferris refused to get Switzer, then reached for what he thought was a gun.
Copeland fired twice, finished his beer, and walked back to a carload of waiting friends.
When police arrived a few minutes later, Ferris was still alive. He told police all he did was order Copeland away. He was not armed, and no gun was found nearby.
Meanwhile, Copeland was speeding away in a car full of scared teen-agers. “My adrenalin was up,” he said. “I said: `Don’t worry, I can handle this. The world is mine, and he’s just one less factor.”’
“The world is mine” is a line from “New Jack City,” the sinister movie that Copeland used as a model.
Three weeks later, Ferris died in Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Copeland was charged with first-degree murder.
He was sent back to Coyner Springs to await trial. Two days before Christmas, Copeland was writing a letter to his girlfriend. He went to the staff office and asked for a new pencil, extra sharp.
He then turned and plunged the pencil into the neck of Phillippe Cunningham, a part-time counselor who was seated at a nearby table. Authorities later learned it was part of a botched escape plan.
After being transferred to Circuit Court for trial as an adult, Copeland was convicted and sentenced to 52 years – 37 for killing Ferris and another 15 for wounding Cunningham.
He will be eligible for parole in 2003, when he is 28.
`Why would I try to be good?’
At a recent interview in the Southampton prison’s visiting room, Copeland was clean-cut, polite and disarmingly charming for someone convicted of wounding three men and killing a fourth.
He says life behind bars has transformed him from an angry, street-tough teen into a responsible adult.
The 16-year-old Copeland shot a man because “I had to kill him to get my point across to him.” The 19-year-old Copeland hopes that, confronted today with the same situation, he would walk away.
Since he’s been in prison, Copeland has become a Muslim, earned his general equivalency diploma, received treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, and completed an anger-control class.
He may not have done any of that, Copeland said, if there were no hope of parole and he had to stay locked up until 2042, his mandatory release date. By then, he would be 68 years old.
“I know it wouldn’t take a lot to set me off,” he said. “Why would I try to be good and do something positive if I was in here for the rest of my life?”
Cunningham, the man Copeland stabbed with the pencil, is now an instructor with the Medical University of South Carolina’s psychiatry department. He’s not ready to give up on Copeland.
“Of course when you’re the victim of a violent crime, there’s a lot of emotion and revenge-seeking that goes through your mind,” he said. But looking back on the incident, “It just reaffirmed my belief and faith that we should work to save these kids.”
Instead of locking young criminals up, Cunningham believes the system should devote more resources to community and family-based programs that attack the root causes of crime.
“I’m not ready to wash my hands of these kids, because we haven’t given them and their families all they need to be successful,” he said.
Cunningham says the system has already failed Copeland once. He hopes it will not fail him again when he finally walks free.
When that day comes, Cunningham says, Copeland will need supervision to help him apply what he has learned in prison. “That’s the critical question,” Cunningham said.
Copeland also wonders about life after prison, and the path it will take.
“You can lock me up forever and I can get all rehabilitated in here to where I’m just an angel and I’ve got wings,” he said. “But what about when I get back out on the street?”