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Indiana County 'adult time' teen lockup for teens has been left with vacant beds
Friday, November 23, 2001 By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In 1995, at the height of concern about juvenile crime, Pennsylvania lawmakers decided to send teen-agers convicted of "adult crimes" to serve "adult time" in a new prison designed just for them.
They built it, and no one came.
Well, almost no one. In the $71 million prison in Indiana County with nearly 600 beds, there are 155 "adult crime" perpetrators. And the prospects for increasing that population appear dim.
Juvenile crime has fallen every year since 1994 -- the year before Pennsylvania passed the law designed to try more teens in criminal courtrooms instead of juvenile ones and punish them in prison instead of reform school.
When the new prison for juveniles, called the State Correctional Institution at Pine Grove, finally opened in January, it got 140 young offenders from another prison, Houtzdale, Clearfield County. And in the months since, another 61 youths arrived, but 46 graduated and left.
Faced with a virtually vacant priso, the state Corrections Department began sending older offenders to Pine Grove. Currently, 225 are there, increasing to 25 the average age at what was to have been a juvenile prison. The bill to run the prison this year was $20 million, making the price for each inmate $53,000, nearly twice the $28,000 it costs to house an average prisoner for a year in Pennsylvania.
Pine Grove officials now are trying to drum up more business by talking up the facility's programs to judges, hoping to persuade them to keep juveniles charged as adults in criminal court. Teens convicted there are sent to Pine Grove, but if judges move the cases to juvenile court, convicted youths are sent to reform schools.
In a similar effort to emphasize the prison's positive points, State Corrections Secretary Jeffrey A. Beard gave a tour recently to state Sen. Allen G. Kukovich, D-Manor, who opposed the "adult time" law that took effect in 1996 and who has called for its re-evaluation.
Beard showed Kukovich the prison's special rooms, where classes limited to about eight youths each receive instruction toward high school diplomas.
Kukovich also saw the vocational training wing where teens can learn skills ranging from computer-assisted drafting to automotive repair. Prison Superintendent Barry Johnson described the facility's individual and group counseling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. Kukovich watched as youths learned teamwork inside the prison's gymnasium and spoke to one prisoner who said he liked Pine Grove a lot better than Houtzdale, where he'd been housed earlier with many more adults and much less concern for his individual reformation.
Beard said the rehabilitative efforts at Pine Grove followed the philosophy of the entire state corrections system, which provides similar services to adults in other prisons in an attempt to prevent them from re-offending when they're released.
The rehabilitative regimen at Pine Grove was based on that at Glenn Mills, a Delaware County reform school. An obvious difference between the two facilities is the razor wire surrounding the prison. A less visual difference is that the young men sent to Pine Grove will carry criminal records for the rest of their lives
Records make it difficult to enroll in some colleges and training programs and to secure many types of jobs. A youth sent to Glenn Mills escapes the burden of a criminal record because he's "adjudicated delinquent" in juvenile court, a civil proceeding, not convicted in criminal court.
Kukovich said he was impressed with Pine Grove and glad the corrections system was providing rehabilitative treatment similar to that provided at reform schools. But he expressed concern about the detrimental effect of the lifelong criminal record on those rehabilitative efforts.
Studies have shown that teens tried as adults and sent to prison are more likely to commit new crimes, more serious ones and do it more quickly than similar youths who committed similar initial crimes but who were tried in juvenile court and sent to reform school.
Lack of reform school treatment and exposure to hardened, older criminals in adult prisons are believed to contribute to that difference. At Pine Grove, the teens are separated from the adult criminals, and they do receive reform school treatment. But researchers also have said the criminal record is a factor in the high recidivism for youths tried as adults.
Before the "adult time" law passed, Kukovich had proposed sending serious juvenile offenders to the state's Youth Development Centers, which are razor-wire enclosed reform schools, for longer periods than currently permitted. That way, youths would have gotten the longer "adult" sentences but not the life-long criminal records.
As it turned out, his proposal would have been significantly cheaper than constructing a new prison for juveniles that is now going begging for prisoners.
It's too late now, though, to go back to that original proposal, Kukovich said in a telephone interview recently. "Once I lost on these issues, there was no way to do a Harry Potter thing with the magic wand and go back and do that."
So, now, he said, he's trying to figure out a way to take some action that would be in the best interest of the taxpayer and protect public safety but would also not engender opposition from "adult time" supporters and the corrections department.
"I have to balance what is possible with what is not," he said.
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