MEGAN SHERMAN: Around 200,000 youth under the age of 18 are charged in adult criminal
courts every year in the United States.
At any given moment in Baltimore City, Maryland, there are 95 youth in adult jails awaiting
trials where they have been charged as adults.
These cases are as a result of of an emerging trend in the United States, where in some
states like Maryland, youth may be automatically charged as adults with certain offenses.
The idea is that harsher mandatory sentencing guidelines will deter more young people from
crime.
But a growing number of people in places like Baltimore, a city with a soaring crime rate,
wonder whether more of an emphasis should be placed on rehabilitation rather than punishment
for some young offenders.
Gregg Hill was charged with four counts of armed robbery when he was just 16 years old.
He was held for five months in a juvenile wing of the general adult population Baltimore
City Detention Center, while awaiting his waiver hearing to determine whether he could
be sent back to the juvenile justice system or be formally tried as an adult.
GREGG HILL: I don't think anyone anywhere truly believes that the juvenile justice system
is reforming young offenders.
Like, you change people for the worse by incarcerating them in a system that does not lend itself
to helping them become better once they are released back onto the streets of Baltimore
City.
SHERMAN: A recent report by the Just Kids Partnership on Baltimore youth in the adult
criminal justice system found that youth housed in adult facilities are at significantly higher
risk of physical and psychological harm than those housed in juvenile detention centers.
Most children who are held for most of the time in pretrial adult jails end up being
charged as minors in the juvenile justice system.
However, the harsh conditions that young offenders are exposed to, as well as the lack of programs
and resources diverted to youth rehabilitation while inside general population jails like
the Baltimore City Detention Center can have lasting impacts on minors' social and psychological
development.
HILL: It was a culture shock.
Like, you see things that you never saw before.
So, like, you see people get beat up.
You see people get forced to do other people's laundry.
You see people who, like, get feces thrown on them, like, in their faces, and then COs
not letting them take a shower.
You're treated like--not--I don't want to say like a animal, but you're treated like
less than human, you're treated like a subhuman, like somebody who doesn't really exist.
SHERMAN: The Just Kids report also indicates that children caught up in the adult justice
system are more likely to commit more and more serious crimes once released from custody.
Baltimore Police Officer Ricardo Burrell and Bart Lubow of the Annie E. Casey Foundation
also note how spending time in an adult jail has the potential to only further hurting
[of] young offenders, especially in the absence of rehabilitative programs to help keep kids
from reentering the criminal justice system.
RICARDO BURRELL: Well, the whole thing is, if you in a negative environment, you going
to pick up negative things unless they have a program that's set in place while they are
incarcerated to help them develop.
Then they'll turn into a positive person.
But if the majority of time they spending time with people who are full-fledged criminals,
completely negative, they're going to pick up their bad habits to where they might [have]
went in knowing one thing, and now while they in there, they going to come out knowing several
different things.
BART LUBOW: --detention and corrections facilities, which have a century-long history of scandal
and abuse throughout this country, which are horribly expensive to operate, certainly relative
to what it might cost to provide other sorts of remedial supports to kids who are behaviorally
challenged and in terms of the results that they produce, most notably recidivism results,
which are pathetic.
A recent study completed in New York State that tracked sort of graduates of the state's
youth corrections system found that of the males, 85 percent were rearrested within--I
think it was five years of their release.
HILL: I mean, any jail, no matter what jail it is, is always going to be basically just
a breeding ground for better criminals.
Like, that's the end of it, in all essence, because no matter what you were doing, there's
somebody there who's been doing it longer than you.
In a sense, like, you will always come out of there a worse criminal than before you
went in.
Like, you're a colder person.
Like, you're willing to do--you're willing to go to further limits to survive.
SHERMAN: Maryland laws charging youth as adults disproportionately affect young black males
in Baltimore.
While African Americans comprise 63 percent of Baltimore's total population, they represented
99 percent of the youth held in pretrial detention facilities, in a trend reflected by national
rates of minority overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.
When Kimberly Armstrong's 14-year-old son was charged as an adult, she left her job
as a bus driver to pursue advocacy work with groups like Just Kids and to push for policy
changes in the youth criminal justice system.
Armstrong and many others see a history of endemic structural racism as a critical factor
in the disproportionate prevalence of minority youth being caught up in the adult criminal
justice system.
KIMBERLY ARMSTRONG: The system is designed to do exactly what it's doing.
Racism is now embedded in policy, whether you want to believe it or not.
It's embedded into policy.
We're not advocating on the behalf of anyone who is committing a crime and know that they're
committed a crime and that they should not be punished as so.
But what we are saying of--is the injustice in it, in not being fair to all people, because
you can have two kids make the same mistake or commit the same crime, one be Caucasian
and one be African American, and depending where they live at, the African-American child
is going to get twice the penalty, and the Caucasian child will probably walk out of
the courtroom and never anything may never happen to him.
LUBOW: If you have underfunded, undertrained public defender staff, and virtually all of
the kids are represented by public defenders, and those kids who are arrested are disproportionately
youth of color, they're going to have weak defenses and are going to face the greatest
jeopardy from the legal process.
If you have white middle-class kids whose parents can afford private attorneys who can
devote the time and have the relationships to actually bring an individual case to a
judge's or a prosecutor's attention, you're going to get a better result.
SHERMAN: Recent census data indicates that one out of every four Baltimoreans live below
the poverty line, with black children hit particularly hard.
Gregg Hill explains how poverty and a lack of employment opportunities can often push
young people like himself into crime in order to make ends meet.
HILL: There were about 10, 11, 12 of us living in a two-bedroom apartment.
At the time, we were working.
We were in high school full-time.
We didn't see selling drugs as a option for us.
Being 16 in Baltimore City, there's not really too many jobs that will hire you that were
paying more than what we were getting paid now.
So at that time, being that we couldn't afford to really feed the children who lived in our
home, we couldn't afford to keep all our bills paid, the lights on, so forth, we decided
that robbing people would be a good option for us.
People never look at the situations that create these criminals in the first place.
So it's not like, you know, criminals are just something--like, they're a anomaly to
the human race.
Criminals are people who are forced into that life by basic human need, by the lack of a
basic human need.
SHERMAN: Having the desire to get a quality education in economically depressed areas
in cities like Baltimore may not be enough to ensure that young people stay in school.
Kim Armstrong notes how long-standing inequalities in school funding and a lack of investment
in young people create a system of underperforming schools that impact young people at an early
age.
ARMSTRONG: The schools look like prisons.
When you go to other counties or you go to other areas, these schools are beautiful.
So it's psychological impacts that also can penetrate these young kids, these young children
at a early age.
And if someone is continually telling you that you are nothing and you're never going
to be anything, at some point you start believing that.
So if you don't believe and care about yourself, what makes you think that these children are
going to grow up to have some type of compassion [incompr.]
SHERMAN: According to Baltimore Police Sergeant Carrie Everett, education plays a critical
role in the socialization of young people.
She notes how a lack of sufficient educational opportunities for incarcerated youth can often
increase the chances that they will return to a life of crime once they are released.
CARRIE EVERETT: Education is much more than just reading a book, you know, and taking
a class or taking a test.
There's so much more to having good schools.
The socialization, all that is important.
It teaches you civics.
You know, it teaches you being able to work through your problems constructively and not
destructively.
Most youth, if they're incarcerated at a young age, they're not given the proper opportunity
to get education, even work jobs.
So when they come back out into society as an adult, they have now been what I call classified
incarcerated and they have that mentality.
So they don't have the proper education, nor the proper attributes that it takes to move
on forward, so they--sometimes they resort back to those crimes that facilitated them
going back--I mean, going into jail to begin with.
SHERMAN: Gregg says that in addition to better educational opportunities and options for
youth, effective targeted job training programs could go a long way in reforming the youth
criminal justice system, to rehabilitate youth rather than cycle them back into criminal
activities.
HILL: I think one thing that the justice system could do is instead of taking these first-time
offenders and simply putting them on probation, like, that probation should include but not
be limited to job training.
You have youth, a whole force of youth, who are being currently arrested, incarcerated,
sent away to other states, that could be staying home, receiving job training, becoming skilled
workers, becoming, you know, the next generation of Baltimore business owners.
You know, you have culinary arts schools, you have a plethora of training facilities
in the city that are not being utilized, because people are not being given the opportunities
or the information to utilize those things.
So I think first the juvenile justice system needs to start extending these services, the
full capacity of these services, to juveniles.
SHERMAN: There are a number of groups across Baltimore organizing at the local, state,
and national levels to push for deep changes to the youth criminal justice system.
There is a proposal to build a $100 million youth detention center that will house youth
who have been charged as adults in Baltimore.
The project has been a matter of great controversy, with critics saying that evidence shows that
it is more effective to spend money on programs that will keep youth out of jail rather than
building more institutions that will lock them up.
This is Megan Sherman reporting with The Real News Network.