Juvenile Offenders

After more than a decade's worth of tough-on-crime policies dumped more juvenile offenders into adult prisons, the pendulum is swinging back, according to two new studies. A majority of Americans polled in MacArthur Foundation-sponsored surveys favor rehabilitation over incarceration and are willing to spend more money toward that end. The public's preference should be reflected in juvenile justice policies and law, but attitudes in many state capitals will have to change for that to happen.

When it comes to juvenile justice reforms, Gov. Martin O'Malley isn't just talking the talk. His proposed infusion of $21 million into the beleaguered state Department of Juvenile Services proves that he's serious about trying to improve the agency. He's putting precious dollars where they can make a difference in young people's lives. Supplemental budget appropriations, which this is, have been used in the past to fill budget needs that didn't make the chief executive's A-list or to fund new programs or to dole out pork.

With the Bowling Brook Preparatory School set to close Friday and the death of student Isaiah Simmons ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner, attention shifts to a Carroll County grand jury and possible criminal charges against staff who were restraining the 17-year-old when he died Jan. 23. But the focus shouldn't remain only there. The state Department of Juvenile Services, which licenses and inspects facilities in which it places troubled youths, has as much to answer for as does the residential center in Carroll County.

Gov. Martin O'Malley is asking the legislature to add $21 million to the budget of Maryland's troubled juvenile services system, including money to open the state's first new residential treatment program for youth offenders in more than a decade, officials said yesterday. The state is leaning toward using the site of the former Victor Cullen Academy in Frederick County, which closed in 2002, according to new Juvenile Services Secretary Donald W. DeVore. Acknowledging the problems that have beset large facilities, he said the new program would be smaller than those the state has run in the past.

Worthington Valley residents fighting a proposed group home for emotionally disturbed juvenile offenders in their neighborhood have bought the half-million dollar property, a move that could end a bitter, three-week battle to keep the facility out.Bruce Bertell, chief executive officer of Family Advocacy Services Inc., said yesterday that he had been notified by letter that a limited liability corporation called SK Management L.L.C. had purchased the sprawling four-bedroom brick Colonial he had rented for a group home.

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.

NOTHING WAS usual about the punishment inflicted on Charlie Squad members. The treatment was so cruel that it demands immediate explanations from Gov. Parris N. Glendening and the entire chain of command.Fourteen Charlie Squad members, subjects of a four-part Sun series, are juvenile offenders who were sent to the Savage Leadership Challenge in Garrett County for rehabilitation.Reporter Todd Richissin and photographer Andre F. Chung vividly documented assaults by leather-gloved guards -- fists to the throat, punches to the mouth, mashing faces into the ground -- at the Western Maryland boot camp.

Randallstown-area residents marshaled their own campaign yesterday against a proposal for a group home for juvenile offenders, saying that the home should not be placed there simply because it is unwanted in well-to-do Worthington Valley."

Two statewide coalitions of mental health advocates have asked Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to block a residential treatment center for seriously emotionally disturbed youths at Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County.In a two-page letter to Townsend, Maryland's Juvenile Justice Coalition said the proposed 24-bed facility at Hickey in Cub Hill is unnecessary because Maryland has enough residential treatment centers.Building another center, the coalition said, will siphon money from other less-intensive treatment options that are needed -- a position shared by the Coalition for a Full Continuum of Care.

It sounds like a scene from a daytime talk show: A youthful offender and his victim come together at an emotionally charged meeting that ends when both agree to a resolution.Such unorthodox scenarios will soon replace traditional courtroom proceedings in three Baltimore communities, where parents, neighbors and victims will dole out justice in some cases involving first-time juvenile offenders."Baltimore needs this, because there are a number of people in Baltimore who feel crime has gotten out of control," said Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

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.

State officials promoted new GPS technology last year as a way to constantly monitor juvenile offenders, enabling the state to know the exact location of troubled youths and help keep communities and victims safe. But the shooting of a 5-year-old girl, caught in the crossfire as two juvenile offenders argued July 2, has cast attention on the limitations of the devices. Even though the person suspected in the shooting, a 17-year-old with a long juvenile record, was wearing a monitoring unit on his leg, officials did not know his whereabouts in the lead-up to the shooting and its aftermath.

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.

Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services seemed to have learned the right lessons from the death of Isaiah Simmons III, the 17-year-old Baltimore boy who was killed in 2007 while being restrained at the Bowling Brook youth lockup in Carroll County. The sprawling facility was closed, and state leaders rightly used the death as a rallying cry for finally moving Maryland toward a system of small facilities for juvenile offenders - no more than 48 beds each - located in or near the communities the youths came from and connected with comprehensive family services.

Silver Oak Academy, a reform school for juvenile delinquents, will open this month in rural Carroll County with nine boys, slowly expanding to four dozen - just a fraction of the size it could be. The sprawling facility, with a 20,000-square-foot vocational training center and six dormitories, can accommodate at least triple that number, a legacy of the ambitious expansion plans of its previous owner, Bowling Brook Preparatory School, which was forced...

A Nevada company is seeking a license to operate a program for juvenile offenders at the old Bowling Brook Preparatory School in Carroll County. The type of program and the number of clients Rite of Passage would serve are not yet publicly known. But as state officials review the company's request, Maryland's efforts to reform the juvenile justice system should be uppermost in their minds. Juvenile offenders who need residential treatment should be in programs that serve no more than 48 teenagers and are close to their homes.

The stench of urine pervaded the place. Hundreds of youths accused of crimes or found delinquent crowded the center. Disruptive kids were left in solitary confinement for days. The health and safety of juvenile offenders in Maryland's care were woefully compromised by a deplorable facility and abusive staff. That was the scene at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County when federal monitors stepped in six years ago. Conditions at the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County were just as bad and thrust the state, rightly so, under the watch of federal civil rights monitors.

When juvenile offenders under the supervision of the state show up dead in Baltimore or are charged with murder, something's got to give. Somebody has to start asking questions about the teenagers, their daily lives and the system overseeing them. Those questions have been asked and provoked a more comprehensive review of hundreds of Baltimore cases, and the results so far are damning. A lax system of supervision, overwhelmed caseworkers and poor administrative oversight, all of which suggest a system that needs a comprehensive overhaul.

One juvenile offender hasn't been seen by his caseworker since June. Another is "possibly in Florida." Still others are "AWOL" and should be arrested for violating probation. And a handful of juvenile offenders in Baltimore "cannot be identified," meaning that their caseworkers aren't sure whom they are supposed to be supervising. The state Department of Juvenile Services is halfway through an unprecedented review of its Baltimore case files, and Secretary Donald W. DeVore said he is "very concerned" about the results.

The trumpeted increase in the state budget for services to juvenile offenders is somewhat of a mirage. More than half of the $29.6 million increase to the Department of Juvenile Services is to cover a shortfall in the agency's costs to house juvenile offenders in private residential treatment facilities, and not to fund new programs. While Gov. Martin O'Malley continues to reform the beleaguered system, the primary focus is in providing safe, secure facilities to treat Maryland's most troubled juveniles.