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Hard Cases: Turning around kids in trouble
Sunday, September 05, 1999 By Jack Kelly, Post-Gazette National Bureau
First Of Four Parts
The slaughter at Columbine High School last spring, the worst in a string of school slayings, took 15 lives and tied the country in knots as it tried to figure out why -- and what to do about youth violence.
Congress has reflected the national confusion. Over the summer, pre-existing juvenile-justice legislation was layered with proposals to control guns, the Internet and violence in movies. Other measures, such as posting the Ten Commandments in schools, attempted to promote virtue and right thinking.
As the pile of proposals got heavier, the effort collapsed. So as schools reopen across the country, Congress must take up the issue again.
Hard to find in the clutter of emotion and solution-seeking has been some relatively good news: While sudden acts of homicide by previously uncriminal children seem to have risen slightly in frequency -- from almost never to once in a while -- juvenile violence overall is in decline.
After soaring in the early 1990s, the rate of teen violence has dropped like a rock since 1993. It is now below the rate for 1989.
It is still high. A teen-ager in the United States is twice as likely as a teen-ager in Canada to commit a violent crime. Homicide remains the second-leading cause of death among Americans 15 to 24 years old. And young men in that age range -- especially the 19-, 18-, and 17-year-olds -- account for most criminal violence.
Nevertheless, the trend is promising, and a great deal has been learned about how to reach juveniles in trouble before they become hard-core criminals.
Boys 15 with 11 arrests
More than half of all juvenile crimes are committed by 6 percent of the juveniles who commit crimes. Sociologist James Q. Wilson, now with the University of California, Los Angeles, summed up the attributes of the hard core this way:
"They tend to have criminal parents, to live in cold or discordant families, to have a low verbal intelligence quotient and to do poorly in school, to be emotionally cold and temperamentally impulsive, to abuse alcohol and drugs at the earliest opportunity and to reside in poor, disorderly communities."
The Justice Department did a profile of "serious habitual offenders" among juveniles. The averages produced a 15-year-old male who had been arrested 11 to 14 times, five times for felonies. In 46 percent of the cases, one or both parents had an arrest record, as did 53 percent of siblings. There was no father figure in 59 percent of cases.
The relationship between single-parent households and crime is strong, and researchers have found that 14 percent to 26 percent of habitual offenders were abused or neglected as children, a figure that rises as high as 70 percent when relying solely on claims by the offenders themselves.
Treatment programs that work provide troubled young people with the structure, guidance, attention and love they often do not get at home.
A family environment
The average age of students at the world famous Boys Town outside of Omaha, Neb., is 14, nearly half of them girls. Some are as young as 10 and some as old as 18. About four in five have problems with substance abuse.
Boys and girls live in groups of eight in family homes, each run by a couple whose full-time job is to parent the kids.
Pat Garcia, 32, from Albuquerque, N.M., has been a family counselor for six years. He was a student at Boys Town from 1975 to 1985.
"I wanted to deal with kids who were having problems," he said. "I knew where the work I wanted to do was being done."
Boys and girls live in separate homes, two to a room. Each has assigned chores, which rotate weekly. Students are given latitude in how they may decorate their rooms but must keep them neat.
There is a television set in each home, even though students are kept so busy with school, homework, athletics and chores that they don't have much chance to watch it. Music that glorifies violence or degrades women is not allowed.
The scene is similar at George Junior Republic in Grove City, Mercer County, where 450 boys 9 through 18 years old also live in groups of eight in family homes run by married couples, most of whom have children of their own. Rules and the daily routine are pretty much the same as at Boys Town.
"The thing that most of the boys seem to be missing is an intact family," said Richard Losasso, vice president. "We provide a family environment as much as we can."
At Royal Haven, a horse farm in Sisters, Ore., Steve Gage, a former Marine, and his wife, Karen, do what Boys Town and George Junior Republic do, but on a smaller scale.
Royal Haven is a working farm, but the Gages spend most of their time parenting troubled teen-age girls. The 15 currently in residence range in age from 12 to 17 and come from all over the country. Almost all have abused drugs.
The girls do chores and attend the local high school. Either of the Gages drives the girls to school and picks them up afterward. Meals are eaten together, homework is monitored, music and television are censored.
In operation since 1992, Royal Haven had its first "postgraduate" last year. Laine, 18, a slim, athletic blonde from New York City, asked to stay on after she completed high school. A mediocre student before coming to Royal Haven, she was student of the year at Sisters High School last year. She attends the local community college, where she is earning straight A's.
"I like the structure," she said. "You are not allowed to slack off here."
Structure, consequences
If there is a one-word answer to the problem of juvenile crime, experts say, it is "parenting."
"The best programs do what responsible parents should be doing all along," said Judge James Ray of the Lucas County juvenile court in Toledo, Ohio.
Gary Emmons, headmaster of the Brush Ranch School, a private boarding school in the mountains northeast of Santa Fe, N.M., agrees. He said: "Every juvenile treatment program that works has five elements:
"First, strong positive role models, especially male role models for boys.
"Second, a highly structured environment -- no rap music or gang clothes, little or no television, very little free time.
"Third, lots and lots of attention.
"Fourth, immediate, predictable consequences for inappropriate behavior.
"And fifth, opportunities to develop self-respect through genuine accomplishment."
His sentiments were echoed by youth professionals ranging from the Rev. Val Peter, executive director of Boys Town, to Maj. Scott Bowman, headmaster at the Robert Land Academy, a military boarding school for unruly adolescents in Wellandsport, Ontario.
There are differences of opinion, of course.
Robert Land Academy is like a Marine Corps boot camp. The school year begins with the boys going on a 50-mile hike, at the end of which they drag a cannon up a steep hill.
Peter disapproves of boot camps.
"The idea behind boot camps is 'Beat people up and they will shape up for the long haul.' We get better results by appealing to what's best in young people."
But both the Land Academy and Boys Town contain the five elements, and both get results superior to most government corrections programs at lower cost.
Recidivism 60 percent
Robert Land Academy considers itself successful when a boy has progressed to a higher level of education and remained there at least a year, while staying clear of drugs and alcohol. By this measure, the school claims an 84 percent success rate. Tuition, room and board amount to $17,300 per boy for a 10-month school year.
At Boys Town, Peter sets a similar standard, with the additional requirement of attendance at church services. Boys Town claims a success rate of 80 percent at an average annual cost of $32,485.
George Junior Republic uses methods comparable to Boys Town, and gets comparable results. Founded in 1909 by philanthropist William Ruben George to care for orphans, it switched emphasis in the 1950s to treating troubled adolescents. Roughly 75 percent of graduates stay out of trouble for at least a year, according to Executive Director Pat Farrone. Costs range from $34,675 to $59,860 per year, depending on the level of care required.
Such results compare favorably with virtually every government run youth corrections program in America.
In Ohio, it costs $63,440 a year to house a juvenile in a state facility. The recidivism rate after six months is nearly 35 percent.
In Pennsylvania, the average annual cost per juvenile at nine facilities run by the state Department of Public Welfare is $66,087. The department doesn't keep statistics on recidivism, but James Anderson, executive director of the Juvenile Court Judges Commission, said: "Historically, we have had a recidivism rate of 60 to 70 percent after 18 months. That's about the same as everywhere." He is working with the Pittsburgh-based National Center for Juvenile Justice to develop a system for tracking recidivism and other relevant measures, such as post-incarceration education and employment.
Youths need an activity
There wouldn't be so much need for residential treatment programs if parents, school officials and community leaders kept young people busier in the first place, according to Pueblo, Colo., District Attorney Gus Sandstrom, a former Green Beret who in 1980 co-founded the committee on juvenile justice for the National District Attorneys Association.
A friend of Sandstrom's runs a band camp. In 1992, 206 teen-agers attended. Sandstrom checked their history of police contacts. Six had contact in the previous year -- four as victims. A random check of 206 other Pueblo teen-agers who had no summer activity revealed 197 police contacts.
"It clearly tells you kids need an activity," he said.
A Boy Scout leader in his spare time, Sandstrom once challenged some troubled youths to climb with his troop up a "14er" -- one of Colorado's 54 mountains more than 14,000 feet tall.
"I told them if they made it to the top with my boys, I'd pay them $500," Sandstrom said. "Eleven tried. None collected. The point is to show boys you don't have to be bad to be tough, and being bad doesn't make you tough. It's worked."
Sandstrom believes that the juvenile crime rate could be cut nearly in half if the school day were extended by two hours and the school year by two weeks. "Most juvenile crime occurs between the hours of 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. -- after school gets out, but before the parents get home," he said.
Because most children who commit crimes also get poor grades, reducing opportunities to get in trouble by lengthening the school day could help on both counts at relatively low cost, Sandstrom argues: "Have a mandatory study hall with tutoring from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. for kids getting C's and below. Being excused from school early would be an incentive for kids to get good marks. And you could hire kids who are getting good grades as tutors. That would give them some pride, some pocket money, and keep them off the streets until their parents got home."
Sentenced as adults
One reason for the recent decline in the rate of violent crimes committed by young people may be the increasingly common practice of sentencing juvenile offenders as adults.
"There are a handful of kids who commit most violent juvenile crimes. If you take more of them off the street, and put them away for a longer period of time, the crime rate goes down," said Peter Reinharz, chief of the family court division of the New York City law department.
Another reason is the maturation of crack cocaine markets, according to Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1985, when the rate of violent crime began to soar, crack was just being introduced into America's cities, and gangs were battling for turf. With longer-term relationships now established between buyers and sellers, gangs no longer need to use firearms to gain or hold market share, he said.
The practice of sentencing juveniles as adults is highly controversial. But most within and without the juvenile court system, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, agree it was not designed to handle the number or violence of juvenile criminals today.
"Juvenile courts have yet to figure out whether they are a social service agency or a part of the criminal justice system," Reinharz said. Toledo's Judge Ray also complained that, "Juvenile courts are at the bottom of the food chain in terms of prestige and resources."
Most experts believe that to teach children it is wrong to break the law, they must be held accountable the first time they are caught, even if punishment is slight.
"The system lies to kids all the time," Sandstrom said. "We tell them they're going to get in trouble if they break the law. Then the cops pick them up and give them a lecture and release them. Then the first time they're taken before a judge, they get probation. They have maybe five major offenses before a judge finally slaps them. And then they ask: 'Why me?' "
Second Installment: Wilderness programs that take youths into the wild to cope and talk.
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