Juvenile Justice System

It was not the Waldorf teenager's first time behind bars, and his lengthy criminal record - multiple auto thefts, assault, drug charges - persuaded the juvenile courts that he could not be trusted back in the community. And so Dennis, 17, spent six months dodging gang fights in a state-run juvenile jail in Prince George's County while officials tried to find a reformatory with room for him. Conditions in the jail were "ridiculous, bad, dirty - a lot of fights every day," he said. "I didn't learn anything."

ON FEB. 13, The Sun ran an article under the headline, "Boy pleads guilty to murder solicitation; Teen asked classmate to kill, Arundel court told."The article was about a 15-year-old youth who offered a Glen Burnie teen-ager $100 to kill a classmate who annoyed him by asking too many questions in class. No one was hurt by the threat made on a bus outside Old Mill Senior High School. But the incident took an unexpected twist when the Glen Burnie boy tried to extort $500 from the teen who asked him to commit the crime.

Troubled children need home-based treatment solutionsThe Sun's recent coverage of Maryland's juvenile justice system has raised concerns for all of us. Understanding why young people violate basic social rules is critical if we are to help them get back on track.We know that many in the juvenile justice system need treatment for mental illness. A 1998 report found that 53 percent of Maryland's detained youth had a diagnosable mental disorder and 26 percent needed immediate care.Research shows that treatment is most effective when when children are treated early in a normal environment.

Under pressure for a series of security breaches -- including the rape of a staff member -- the company operating two Maryland juvenile jails has responded by firing a $7-an-hour dishwasher who was assigned guard duty because of a staff shortage.The dishwasher, Dwane Williams, 38, and others say he was fired to divert attention to staff shortages that have forced numerous employees at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School to work double shifts and have left some shifts uncovered.Williams said that he had not been disciplined since he began work there almost a year ago and that his supervisor told him as she fired him that he had been an "outstanding" employee.

The state's Department of Juvenile Justice is investigating whether a teen-ager who was involved in a gang rape last year received adequate counseling before he was released from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School by a Montgomery County judge this week.The judge released the 16-year-old boy after determining that he was not receiving the type of sex offender counseling he needed while he was at the school in Baltimore County for 14 months.The decision Tuesday by District Judge Dennis McHugh to release the boy to receive counseling while in the care of relatives prompted sharp criticism from a Montgomery County prosecutor, along with others who questioned the lack of resources of the juvenile justice system.

NEW YORK -- The nation was stunned recently when it learned that the two Chicago boys ages 7 and 8 who had been charged with the brutal sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old girl in July couldn't have done it.After several weeks of media denunciation of the boys, prosecutors told the court that the state police lab had found semen on the victim's underwear. Forensic experts said it is only remotely possible for boys this young to produce semen.Prosecutors asked that charges against the boys be dropped "in the interests of justice."

Dismissing the Glendening administration's claims of safer streets, Ellen R. Sauerbrey unveiled a wide-ranging anti-crime program yesterday in which she called for an overhaul of Maryland's juvenile justice system and an end to parole for all violent offenders.Speaking at a street-corner news conference in Baltimore's Pigtown neighborhood, the Republican gubernatorial front-runner produced a list of proposals to improve public safety in a state that she claimed has the fourth-worst violent crime rate in the nation.

Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. honored 13 programs in Carroll County yesterday for their effectiveness in helping at-risk youngsters and battling juvenile crime.During a visit to Westminster, Curran also named two other Carroll programs as finalists in his "Spotlight on Prevention," a statewide tour to recognize crime prevention programs.Seven Carroll County public school programs were recognized. Some aim at helping parents become their children's first teachers or helping high school dropouts earn equivalency diplomas.

RECENTLY released statistics on juvenile arrests look lik progress, but it's far too early to declare victory.The state's 7 percent reduction in juvenile arrests for violent crime from 1996 to 1997 is an indicator that doesn't tell us about crimes committed by teens who have not been taken into police custody for their misdeeds.Moreover, the juvenile justice system is in no danger of going out of business.Still, the results look impressive: Juvenile arrests in connection with serious crimes -- murder, robbery, rape and aggravated assault -- were down substantially.

WHEN IT COMES to punishing juvenile offenders, there is lots of rhetoric but not enough in the way of thoughtful steps being taken. It is easier to brand young law-breakers as career criminals-in-training than to come up with programs that might deter them from lives of crime or to separate the incorrigible from the redeemable.Unfortunately, Marna McLendon, the state's attorney in Howard County, believes that public humiliation would be good for all juvenile offenders. She wants to go one step farther than the General Assembly did this year when it removed some of the long-standing confidentiality for juvenile records and proceedings.

The case of 17-year-old Lamont Davis, who was arrested last month and charged as an adult with shooting a 5-year-old girl in the head and wounding another youth, should have been a wake-up call for the state Department of Juvenile Services. The teen had been under DJS monitoring for a year when the shooting occurred, and during that time he had been arrested four times. He was awaiting sentencing in juvenile court after confessing to an assault and robbery committed in April. Anyone looking at Mr. Davis' record could have guessed he should never have been allowed back on the streets.

In May 2005, then-Mayor Martin O'Malley announced a 10-point plan to reform Maryland's juvenile justice system. He told Marylanders that "the community deserves juvenile justice that is responsive, effective and accountable to the public." Now, more than four years later and almost three years into his term as governor, the juvenile justice system in Maryland remains, as it was described in the O'Malley transition report, dangerously dysfunctional. Two years ago, Mr. O'Malley appointed Connecticut's juvenile justice director, Donald W. DeVore, to head Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services.

At 17, Lamont Davis has been arrested 15 times since age 10, including charges of drug dealing, carjacking with a handgun and assaults. Yet he's spent just a handful of weeks in juvenile treatment facilities over the years and was sent home in July after admitting to charges in a robbery. Days later, the Baltimore teen was arrested on charges that he critically wounded a 5-year-old girl as he shot at another youth. That Davis now faces more serious criminal charges than ever, city prosecutors and some public officials say, highlights a dangerous problem in the juvenile justice system: Because it emphasizes rehabilitation over punishment, teens who are lightly sanctioned for early offenses sometimes graduate to more violent crimes.

Lamont Davis, the 17-year-old arrested and charged as an adult in the shooting of 5-year-old Raven Wyatt, should never have been on the streets. He had been arrested 15 times since he was 10, and he had been committed to the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services since February 2008, during which time he was arrested and charged in four separate incidents. Yet in June, a juvenile court judge let him out of the secure detention facility where he had been held after his last arrest in April for assaulting and robbing a teenage girl.

Kory Johnson said he has never been in trouble with the law, but the 15-year-old East Baltimore resident and his mother marched yesterday to call attention to Maryland's "broken" juvenile justice system. "Punishment without rehabilitation is not the answer," said Francine Tucker, Kory's mother. The group of about 120 marched from the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center on Gay Street to the state Department of Juvenile Services headquarters on Fayette Street, chanting "juvenile reform" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome."

Maryland is a wealthy state, but the well-being of its children doesn't reflect that prosperity. Even though the percentage of children living in poverty is the lowest in the country, children in 18 other states fare better than Maryland's 1.3 million kids. That's the overall assessment of how Maryland ranks on 10 measures of child well-being, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual Kids Count. Rather than bemoan the findings, Maryland should use them as a guide to improving the lives of its youngest citizens.

Farron Tates sits in a Baltimore jail cell charged with murder. He's a 16-year-old who started selling drugs on the corner to make some money. His early troubles with the law mirror the experience of many Baltimore kids in the juvenile justice system. Truants or worse, they get arrested once, twice, often for the same type of crime, and end up back on the street with little supervision at home or from the system. But in Farron's case, the juvenile court lacked a critical piece of information about his home life - his mother had her own troubles with drugs and the law. Until now, there has been no requirement or policy that juvenile caseworkers conduct criminal background checks on the parents or caretakers who supervise their young charges.

Friends and family will gather tomorrow in Westminster to remember East Baltimore teenager Isaiah Simmons, whose death at a private reformatory one year ago helped spark reforms in Maryland's long-troubled juvenile justice system. Simmons died Jan. 23 while being forcibly restrained by staff at the Bowling Brook Preparatory School in Carroll County. His death was ruled a homicide and misdemeanor charges are pending against six former counselors. The death of the 17-year-old father of a toddler girl was a catalyst for immediate changes to the state's juvenile justice system: The 50-year-old private academy was closed, and officials banned face-down restraints - of the sort used on Simmons - at state-run institutions.

Mentors can turn kids away from life learned on streets Julie Bykowicz captures the pessimistic attitude of city's juvenile justice system in "Arrest a child, rescue a life" (Dec. 23) - an article that underscores the incongruous correlation between incarcerating a child and delivering that same child from harm's way. But it is no wonder that expectations are so low for a child caught in a city juvenile justice system that is more often measured by its failures than its successes and in a city where we are more likely to note the number of yearly homicide victims and shootings among the young than the number of high school graduates and youth leaders.

Four years before an indifferent, drowsy press and public finally fumed at the news that a prosecutor and judge tossed the book at six black teens in a small Louisiana town for beating up a white teen after a racially charged incident, investigators sternly warned that the state's juvenile justice system was horribly mangled. The legislative investigating team found that the state couldn't lock up juveniles fast enough for mostly nonviolent crimes. The team noted that the sentences slapped on them were wildly out of proportion to their crimes, and that the kids had almost no access to counseling, job and skills training, and family support programs that could ensure that they didn't wind up back in the slammer.