THE sound of fists pounding on metal invaded Melvin Morton’s office through an open window as he talked about the kids locked up at Coyner Springs Juvenile Detention Center.
“You hear the words `I don’t care’ a lot around here,” said Morton, acting superintendent of the Roanoke Valley’s jail for juveniles.
“You just heard a kid beating on the door of his cell a few minutes ago; he doesn’t care. I’ve had five suicide attempts here in the past month; those kids don’t care, either.”
At Coyner Springs and across Virginia, the growing number of kids who don’t care – about anything from skipping school to killing someone – has spawned a debate over what to do with the state’s juvenile justice system.
This month, two task forces that have been examining the system are expected to make conflicting recommendations to the General Assembly, setting the stage for one of the major issues of the 1996 legislative session.
Republican Gov. George Allen and his Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform want to revamp the system, shifting its primary focus from rehabilitating young offenders to sending more of them to prison.
The commission is suggesting that all violent offenders 14 and older be automatically tried as adults, that closed proceedings in juvenile courts be opened to public scrutiny, and that more nonviolent offenders be put in boot camp programs.
A second task force, appointed by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, is focusing more on crime prevention.
When the Commission on Youth task force, headed by Del. Jerrauld Jones, D-Norfolk, drew up its draft recommendations last month, the goal of reducing truancy topped the list. A proposal to incarcerate serious offenders longer was relegated to the back pages of the document.
In meetings and at public hearings, the punishment vs. prevention dichotomy of the two groups has become increasingly clear.
“Many juveniles get a second or third or even a fourth chance to kill and rape and maim,” Allen told his commission in October. “We have to send a message to these young thugs that there aren’t going to be any more free passes.”
But the “young thugs” who commit violent offenses account for only a fraction of all juvenile arrests in Virginia. Prevention efforts are aimed at a much broader – but harder to define – population.
Robert Shepherd, a University of Richmond law professor who serves on the Commission on Youth task force, said tough punishment alone treats the so-called epidemic of juvenile crime after the fact and ignores the symptoms.
“It would be like if the medical community had dealt with polio 40 years ago by saying that we’re going to improve our iron lungs, and we’re going to make better leg braces, but we’re not going to invest any money or resources toward finding a vaccine.”
Are kids running wild?
For those who say juvenile crime is out of control in Virginia, a glance at the newspaper headlines and the local evening news might support their argument.
A 15-year-old boy charged with fatally shooting a Wythe County sheriff’s deputy reportedly boasts that he “did a cop in the head.” … A Henry County teen-ager is accused of ending a crime spree by putting eight bullets into the body of a 15-year-old girl. … Two Roanoke cousins, ages 16 and 11, torch a historic church just because they wanted to see something burn.
The anecdotal evidence is bolstered by equally alarming statistics.
From 1980 to 1993, juvenile arrests in Virginia increased by 21 percent. Murders shot up by 277 percent during the same period. The total juvenile arrest rate in 1994 was the highest it has been in the past 15 years.
Criminologists warn that the worst is yet to come, pointing to projections that the number of juveniles in the “crime-prone” age group of 13 to 17 is expected to increase 30 percent by 2005.
“If we sit idle now, all indications are that we will see a frightening increase in violent juvenile offenses in the near future,” Attorney General Jim Gilmore, a Republican, said at a recent public hearing in Roanoke.
No one disputes that juvenile crime is on the rise in Virginia. But some question whether it’s as bad as depicted on the evening news or in the dire predictions made by the governor’s commission.
Other statistics tell a different story:
Even though Virginia’s juvenile crime rate went up at a time the national rate was declining, the state still ranks below the national average in the proportion of total arrests for violent crime committed by juveniles.
“What that probably means is that Virginia is finally catching up with the rest of the country,” said Linda Nablo, a senior policy analyst with the Action Alliance for Virginia’s Children and Youth. “Not that we should be proud of that, but we’re not out of control with a horde of young criminals running through the streets.”
The large percentage changes cited by the governor’s commission are often based on small numbers.
For example, the frequently cited 277 percent increase in murder arrests is based on the 1980 total of 21 statewide. That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all juvenile arrests. After peaking at 77 in 1993, the number of juveniles charged with murder was down to 65 last year.
Often left unsaid is the fact that 1980, which is used as the base year to compute the alarming statistics, was an unusually low-crime year. The increase in juvenile murder arrests is less drastic when tracked from 1975, when there were 42.
Despite all the rhetoric about how “young predators” are running amok in Virginia, charges of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault in 1993 accounted for just 3 percent of all juvenile arrests.
Franklin Slayton – who resigned last year along with five other members of the Department of Youth and Family Service’s board of directors, citing “philosophical differences” with the Allen administration – says too much attention is being focused on too few juveniles.
“They will regale you with horrible stories about the terrible things that kids have done, and they are all horrible stories,” Slayton said. “The administration has focused on the worst of the worst, and that’s easy to do because what you do with those people is no tough decision.
“But where they are copping out, in my opinion, is on the question of what to do with the large number of juveniles that can be turned around and rehabilitated.”
Some say that an entire generation has been demonized by media magnification and political posturing.
“There is just a lot of hype and media hysteria about how violent and nasty kids are today,” said Philip Trompeter, a Roanoke County Juvenile and Domestic Relations judge.
“I think that kids are really being vilified. I still believe inherently in the goodness of kids. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I really don’t think I’ve ever met a bad-seed kid.”
But with public opinion polls consistently showing that Virginians rank crime among their uppermost concerns, politicians on both sides have been quick to respond.
After making the abolishment of parole his campaign centerpiece two years ago, Allen has turned his attention to a new generation of criminals. One of his first steps was to appoint Gilmore, who is expected to run for governor in 1997, to head his Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform.
“The governor-wannabe Gilmore commission has styled this to be a major threat and something that has to be dealt with right now,” said Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg. DeBoer said he believes the proposals are “96 percent political,” but added, “I could be off by a margin of 3 percent either way.”
When crimes becomes politicized, prevention is “hard to sell to people,” said Jones, the delegate who heads the Commission on Youth group. “It does not reduce itself to a good sound bite. People don’t run for office saying `I’m going to eliminate truancy,’ they say, `We’ve got to get tough on those murderers.”’
Given the role that politics is playing in juvenile justice debate, some say the Allen administration is selecting only those statistics that support its agenda.
“I think the governor is the grand chef of cooked statistics,” said John Flannery, a Leesburg lawyer who locked horns with the Allen administration over parole last year as a spokesman for Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants.
Shepherd, the Commission on Youth task force member, agrees. “Some of the data tends to be a little phony,” he said. “I think the public needs to look at the data with a very skeptical magnifying glass, regardless of who it is coming from.”
Or is the system the problem?
On a December morning last year, Wythe County Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Dicker drove his patrol car to a tidy frame house on Wytheville’s Church Street, where a 15-year-old boy was gutting squirrels in the front yard after an early-morning hunt.
Dicker was carrying juvenile petitions for Christopher Shawn Wheeler, charging the teen with auto theft and petty larceny.
Those charges paled in comparison with what happened next.
Wheeler is accused of using his hunting rifle to shoot Dicker in the head, then pulling the deputy’s handgun from its holster and firing a second, fatal shot as Dicker struggled to stand up.
Wheeler was charged with capital murder. A judge has ruled that he should be tried as an adult. Prosecutors may seek the death penalty. But the system’s response comes too late to suit Wythe County Sheriff Wayne Pike.
Noting that the petitions Dicker carried were the 12th and 13th to be filed against Wheeler, Pike says the juvenile justice system fails to adequately punish young offenders who return to court again and again.
“I’ve had them tell me, `You can’t do nothing to me,”’ Pike said.
“And they’re exactly right.”
Wheeler had been through the juvenile court’s revolving door so many times that shortly after he was charged with murder, Pike said, “he made a comment that he hoped he could get his gun back when all of this was over.”
The state’s juvenile justice system, created in the 1970s “to deal largely with vandalism and childish pranks,” is ill-equipped to cope with youngsters like Wheeler, an interim report of the Gilmore commission concluded in October.
The commission’s proposals go to the very heart of the current system, which was founded on the premise that most young lawbreakers are salvageable and can be molded into productive adults.
With that in mind, state law defines the primary objective of the juvenile courts as “protecting the welfare of the child.” The Gilmore commission wants to substitute “protecting the public.”
The commission is proposing that the state build, at a cost of $64 million, a separate prison for young offenders between 14 and 18 who are tried as adults for crimes of violence.
Such a prison is needed, critics of the current system say, because juvenile court judges are not sending enough youths to correctional centers. And when the judges do, the argument goes, the young offenders don’t stay long enough.
The average time served in juvenile correctional centers for murder is 5.8 years, according to the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services. For rape, the average is 4.6 years. For robbery, 1.4 years.
But most of the juveniles who go to court are never committed. Of nearly 3,000 cases studied by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, only 7 percent of the juveniles were sent to correctional centers. The incarceration rate went up to 21 percent for violent offenders.
JLARC’s review, the most comprehensive study to date of the state’s juvenile justice system, found that offenders who are put on probation and return to court on new charges often receive the same or a lesser punishment.
“From the early ’80s on, we’ve seen a system where juveniles were given second chance after second chance after second chance,” Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney Donald Caldwell said.
“In many cases, in trying to help them, I think we’ve sent them the absolute wrong message. What we have done is breed a population of youths who think that they just can’t be touched.”
But Joseph Clarke, a juvenile court judge in Roanoke, believes that committing youths should be a last resort.
“Some people can look at the statistics and suggest that we are not committing enough,” Clarke said. “But another way of looking at commitments is that they are an admission that we have failed in the community with our resources and efforts to deal with the child.”
The JLARC report agreed, noting that juvenile court judges need more treatment programs – not empty cells – as sentencing options. In fiscal year 1992, the study found, structured treatment was available to less than 20 percent of the juveniles who went to court, leaving judges torn between the extremes of probation or incarceration.
Because violent offenders account for such a small percentage of youths who come to court, JLARC director Philip Leone concluded, “there does not appear to be a need for sweeping changes in the intent of the state’s juvenile code.”
Or is the problem much bigger?
Back at Coyner Springs, the pounding of fists has subsided, and Melvin Morton returns to the question at hand.
“I believe that kids are meaner today,” he said. “And I don’t blame them.
“With each generation, these kids are having to go through life with a yoke that the previous generation has left them to carry. If these kids are mean, it’s because of something we did to them.”
Many of the state’s youngest criminals are the product of kids having kids, and they grow up with little or no parental supervision. “In many cases these kids come from backgrounds that are simply indescribable,” said Wayne Turnage, a JLARC analyst who headed the study.
Of the 1,470 youths sent to juvenile correctional centers in 1993, only 13 percent came from a home with both natural parents. Forty-three percent had been identified as having learning problems, just as many had histories of substance abuse, 25 percent had been physically or sexually abused, and 17 percent had admitted considering suicide.
Building more prisons for those juveniles, critics of the Allen plan argue, will divert funding from education and other social programs that might help them stay out of trouble.
James Unnever and Donald Shoemaker, criminology professors at Radford University and Virginia Tech, recently completed a statewide study showing that localities that have fewer educational resources have correspondingly higher juvenile arrest rates.
Even the most hardened prosecutors will acknowledge – after first venting about how the system lets kids go with a slap on the wrist – that the ultimate solution comes down to better prevention efforts.
“I think most people realize that the real answer lies in helping these kids, and that they are kids,” said Nablo, of the Action Alliance for Virginia’s Children and Youth.
“As dangerous as they may be, they are still kids.”