The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Juvenile Justice

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by grants from exxon corporation allied chemical corporation and the corporation for public broadcasting it's b it's b an inning yesterday both houses of the new york state legislature swiftly passed a crime bill under which uses young as thirteen will be tried for murder in adult courts moreover thirteen year olds convicted of murder or received mandatory sentences and seven years to life use of fourteen and over will be tried in adult courts for a variety of violent crimes besides murder

in recent years at other states have amended juvenile crime laws but new york's action is regarded as the toughest so far with the lowest age limit the new approach is a departure from the tradition that the court's serve to protect and reform the juvenile offenders to a new concern with protecting society from them tonight why this drastic change and what will be the effect on juvenile crime guinea problem a final legislative and political push for that property or blogger directly out of one particular case two weeks ago a fifteen year old new york city youth admitted killing two subway passengers and attempting to kill its own weight motor man despite a long history of violent crime he was sentenced to five years in a youth detention center the judge had no choice because that was the maximum punishment allowed under new york law the recent rash of well publicized violent crimes involving juveniles go beyond new york however there was the case in texas the thirteen year old son of former presidential press secretary george christian shot and killed his teacher in

philadelphia a youth was convicted of the sixth right committed since she was fifteen in los angeles two teenage boys beat two elderly women one of them to death in san francisco five years endured a chinatown restaurant and started shooting five died eleven were wounded earlier this week in a watchman dc suburb a fifteen year old boy it was charged with murdering a county tax assessor the youth allegedly tied up that they can get him and shot him in the back of the head execution style robbery with the apparent motive the youth and killed a young neighborhood girl a year ago that have been released to the custody of his mother robin one of those and new york who successfully urge the new measures are new york governors hugh carey is just parents but judge in albany county court who has dealt with a lot of young offenders judge harris why is this change in the treatment of young offenders necessary in your view i think that what happened what happened yesterday in the state

legislature was the expression of public policy that the people want it buffers the wall that we have to separate crime into to really categories have to separate the violent crime and that nonviolent crime with a state legislature was dealing with was the violent crime and go what they stated there was that we get into a violent crime aspect then the emphasis has to be on the act itself and not on the factor that the year that the a person was a youth you work for or that he was young and it's a statement thought to the people that that the people have the right to have us respect for their route for that their public institutions and that wear a dangerous individual regardless other factories thirteen years of age that the first of that the first inception has to be the predictability as to when he's going to be doing this again not rehabilitation of this individual we have three numbers i started out by saying we're not talking about non violent crime maybe some young individual a shoplifter this

may be normal in the quotation marks but it is a yard bizarre act for any person how whether he dr laurie be old to kill somebody and consequently there must be something wrong they're in society has the right to protect itself and the state legislature said that it's the so called righteous it was to what protect itself that has to be dominate over the age of the individual with respect to our violent crime doesn't make you all a guitar uncomfortable isn't jerk off a survey court presiding officer to abandon the traditional protective stances of the courts towards young offenders have a quarter more just in protecting young offenders perhaps than protecting says it doesn't bother me at all because i don't know maybe these may be cliches but the matter how young you are you have no right to harmony but and also that that when you're thirteen years of age or your forty fifty years of age you have to be responsible for euronext and don't forget that we are done that we have spent millions of dollars for education for

community programs and for all of the kind of activities before the you've got to the age of fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and something seemed to go wrong here we tried all the rehabilitation was possible now of the state legislature said that they said two things we're going to try to increase the penalties as a deterrent it's gonna be a yuck a term for this individual from our from utterly future crimes if he doesn't want to go to jail that he had been he had better not commit crimes and for all those youths outside all those individuals outside were trying to make a determination as to what they want to do whether they want to work not a crime or not they're going to know that if they want a player criminal big leagues of socal violent crimes that they can expect a matter what their age is a big leap punishments and you personally does your experience as a prosecutor and as a judge have you abandoned the idea of rehabilitating certain groups of young people who commit violent crimes is it pointless to try in your view i think that there comes a time when we have tried all these matters when we deal with individuals we are sending we are sending young

offenders outside of the violent crime feel to jail right away what we have done is to place them on probation we have given them all all part of rehabilitative techniques that we know we've given in short sentences in jail a sixty day shot since fallen by four years ten months probation give them a taste of what the alternative is to be honest right now we're going to get more time in jail when they still keep on repeating crimes the tour comes a point that we've tried all of the techniques are the only thing that we know what to do is to work just indicate that the individual is some cortical individual that to what protect society from this criminal he must be on people's be taken out of society for a certain depth that period of time job second term i do not justice systems vary widely from state to state massachusetts system is generally believed to be the most liberal when they'd be institutionalized approach to handling juvenile offenders the man who put that system in place is jerome miller formerly the head of the state's corrections department he also ran the pennsylvania no no assistance in the past he's now doing research on juvenile corrections under government grant for the justice

department here in washington us know what you think of the judge terrence new york approached well i think it's nonsense newark is going through a cannoli time up there right now for juveniles out what the judge doesn't say of course is the new york already handles most adolescents other eastern indeed most states in the union would consider jewels when you're carting harrelson as adults when he's talking about treating juveniles as adult he's talking about thirteen year olds and fourteen year olds and fifty murals that new york already sends to adult prison sixteen year old seventeen year which most eastern states do not do new york prison has over two thousand youngsters in adult prisons for what's wrong with the basic approach to send the forty seven year old recruit well i guess set what's wrong with sending people into systems where they're going to be as systematically are raped brutalize and croats out what's good about it oh there's no reason we can't have security in three people recently i'm not suggesting you a rapist or a murderer run loose in the

streets and we don't do that in massachusetts are why are you suggesting that one thing for those so youngsters secure small settings that are secure that they can't run from where some decent care where they're less likely to be criminalized thought and i don't think your approach is to have anything to do with cutting crime in fact beilenson in massachusetts which on any given day now doesn't put in a locked city more than seventy five kids in the whole state for population of up to seven million violent crime is it's been going for aggressively down they're only about twenty five kids in the adult system for the whole state of the seventeen look at new york with over two thousand already the article he talks about the oil oh we tried all the techniques and your technique he mentions incidentally is jail and mourning and probation which we know doesn't work it's quite inadequate women tried many techniques what you have a new york is not a system of permissiveness versus jailing of a system of neglect and bureaucratic playoffs versus jailing indicators in jail or is on the street with nothing of the

very foundation just recently completed a study were the major findings is to that effect but the better agencies that should be doing something about you know who are violent prone are dealing with them they're rejecting them out of hand and they're running the streets do you disagree with judge harris's point that there are in fact some kids who are who cannot be rehabilitated i would never want to disagree with that in theory because i don't want to give up on anyone i would i would say that the number of kids that probably the best effort on going turnaround i still want to give a jolly good try in the meanwhile there's no reason to mistreat people we can have security and still three people a decently there's no reason to suggest we should be putting thirteen year olds in state prisons one of these guys can make new york the laughingstock of the world music just nonsense at the same time the european nations are moving in the direction that massachusetts recently a six nation conference in belgium on that we have the sort of nuts sort of behavior going on in new

york but i don't know what they're talking about accidental is judged is not your juvenile cases he's a local judge running for election i understand i understand why but you start hearing that you look at your youthful hundred cases i would doubt the judge tears as practical constantly will fundamentally i think which are likely to see between these two positions there's a lot of experts who share something of age philosophy franklin simmering as the director of the center for studies in criminal justice of the interest of chicago and he's the author of a report on juvenile crime published in april by the twentieth century fun mr zimmer news with us tonight in chicago just a simmering first of all your grave that the system of handling of juvenile offenders up till now has not worked i think the system of handling juvenile offenders hasn't worked the system of handling adult offenders hasn't worked it seems to me to be a kind of a tie for last place in both principle and practice well on rehabilitation efforts for a certain

group of violent and violence prone young people pointless or do some kinds of rehabilitation work in your view we don't know what kinds of rehabilitation efforts work whether they work or not as an expression of social concern about a nation's young rehabilitation efforts are i think necessary for our sake of not the bears are adult courts and stiffer sentences the answer as the new york legislature decided yet today's interview i don't think that's what the new york legislature decided the new york legislature decided to advertise heavy criminal sanctions in practice i don't think the new york system in manhattan is any more punitive than the massachusetts system the jerome miller was describing a good sign and the list of those descriptions of an arab solution was to put

people in these doctors sixteen in jail is the massachusetts one is not to do so mr miller said that there were no more than seventy odd kids wade into the adult system in massachusetts turns out that there were only forty one homicide arrests of new york when juveniles in the city of new york last year were talking about a trivial number of youthful offenders song of home will be elected by the prosecutor to be publicly sacrificed in the name of the tax but mostly the system will remain inefficient both too lenient and to sit there and spectacular places that make the new york times ej you say it's a game it's a shell game what did election year what do you think the impact on the new europe legislature's action will be on other states across the country all state legislatures are addicted to passing new get tough regimes that generally have very little effect on the juvenile justice systems new york

already has an institution called a family court and family courts try things called designated felonies bail family doesn't sound like designated found me it sounds a little bit like alice in wonderland this system came into effect in nineteen seventy six it's too lenient now for the legislature you can only send the kid up for five years so now instead they have the creation of a system of waiting designated felons from the family court to the adult court where they can get like i imagine like proposition thirteen in this election year that you're going to see proposals at least of this kind was symbolic than having actual impact and a number of states they're not going to make a lot of difference if they do not have any principal basis they often don't make much sense and specifically

i think talking about a real life time for a thirteen year old is bizarre whether or not he is incorrigible and the problem your cabdriver one set is the trading for tim ewald miners like thirteen year olds that's one way of looking at it but the truth there is that when you have somebody who's both the same and has killed another human being you have a very special problem you cannot make him twenty five are legislatively out and you can't make him into a a purse snatcher for shoplifting we our motives are mixed we have a need to protect him and as a need for social protection which is always been reflected in the actual performance of juvenile courts it has never been the case it's been a fairytale to say that armed robbers have been treated with only their best interest in mind in any juvenile system anywhere in this country the centers are jammed or for you to respond to the

first of all mr miller says that the whole mayors a whole new archive day is nonsense really the laughingstock of the world sure what the writer art well first of all they said that i was running for election which i'm not i was just elected two years ago i got eight more years ago my time so i've got no political motivation for the approach that i think secondly as far as tracking books are concerned i think i read about three bucks a week on on on not on a criminal matter so i spent quite a bit of time in court as a batter fighting for coming on down here i went to the state legislature put on me to get a copy of the crime package and so i am utterly conversed with that so i think that the i am as intellectual as mr miller is that i think that one other thing that on down are on leon de of firing line jim i see them comment on and i see the con game that goes on and so on i think i think this visit ring stated aer fact which is an important the fact that in the state of new york he said it was in the city of the new york in it in the year nineteen

seventy seven there were approximately twelve point on the size of which forty four we're killing his body our purses less than sixteen years of age now what i'm saying there is that we're not talking in terms of big numbers but with respect of those forty four the people of the state of new york have the right to have an analysis made as to whether those forty four are people are going to be dangerous individuals are so that when they get out of jail after five years under the old law there perhaps there might be some are repetition or that i'm saying is that with a small number of juveniles that is involved that the important thing we get into the violent crimes and as i said on violent crimes you can expect a kid to maybe take your car now and then for joy rides or to take a piece of property that he was a young a small item and to a certain extent that's tolerated as something that kids will do but when someone goes out to kill somebody whether it's thirty years of age or not there's something wrong that individual i was five years of age it may not have known that it was wrong to take a piece of property but i certainly know that it was

wrong to go up on somebody myers on a large white guys i said no quarrel with the idea to secure said that if the judges go in in the secure said alot setting from which a violent you cannot believe but i but i like to know you know wearing in his are reading as a judge find anywhere that prisons are in any way helpful in terms of deterring crime or an arbitrary juvenile crime he knows any of the literature on prisons when you know that a thirteen year old is going to be a victim the minute he walks in the door well we know two things that while they are violent criminal is in jail the surly deters them from continued crying well i think that's just logical was in jail isn't committing crime and as far as all the thousands and all the millions of people outside it would appear that it would also be logical that there are some people out there who are not committing crimes because they don't want to have the families that go with the crops i want to give a quick example i mean in pennsylvania principally when exactly the opposite direction to

we remove some four hundred from an adult prison four hundred true panel additional six hundred back in the community now some of those four hundred about forty were dangerous in terms of violent crimes for those forty we develop options small eight or ten dead units but had enough staff enough supervision to avoid the kinds of crimes are indigenous presence would guarantee public safety acquiring pennsylvania as it is everywhere probably unrelated to what anything we did is going down bounces going down gang killings are down and you can have secure setting for those few odd i agree very strongly professors entering into small number unfortunately i've been around politics and of having an odd couple governor steps know that this sort of playing on this theme hasn't carries with it many dangers for society and then when i get back to you mr zimmer and on on the on the miller approached the massachusetts pennsylvania pro cheerleaders said you look at it as an objective outsider as a system now hold out bore hole in terms of big demonstrably results than other money our approach like his system as is protected by

a lottery that new york didn't have until it passed its own legislation yesterday his system has always allowed the waiver and indeed now had prosecutorial action a very serious young felons all into the criminal court system so that half the homicide defendants in philadelphia which we happen to study all are going to criminal courts and receiving sentences up to life imprisonment before they ever are eligible for the marvelous rehabilitative programs at gitmo was talking about those kids don't go and that will assist them in essence you can say that the new york legislation that you're talking about has adopted the pennsylvania plan that it is operating in a context where they have a maximum jurisdictional age of eight team we know for a fact dr miller that half of all homicides defendants in philadelphia a way didn't you don't really know for a fact but the sentences they receive there are tougher than those

that come to adult we also know that what's going to happen in the arctic is not forty for kids once arrested for homicide ultimately convicted and waved tried as adults nonsense not even twenty four my best guess would be fifteen question is why those fifty how are they going to be selected what sense does it may and on the deterrence point it strikes me that it was let's let the muslim or respond to those who have reported as michael ramos well as a professor's airing is not correct in fact early in pennsylvania there are not many if any sixteen year olds in the adult system rejected a princess faces crow program there are crops really fifty interstate system will been bombed over these would be people in the seventeen and eighteen year old old range that already held as adults in new york new york as i said has well over two thousand an adult systems in pennsylvania we have fifty pennsylvania has a population of thirty million new york has a population of eighty nine and in massachusetts in fact last year there were twenty

five juveniles found over to adult court in the whole state and they're probably less than a dozen and those would be seventeen and in new york they were already been in the adult system so i don't think the obvious facts are accurate yeah you want a series of inventors and that we have to talk about oregon also juveniles worn killers were juveniles who are or who aren't committing robberies who are committing rage toward who are of war are out to make their say and the felonies as defined in the yet in the end the state of new york law so that when i just dealing with those forty four or those are twenty one a thirty year old who might come into the adult system as odd as a so called killers but getting back to mr miller statement this isn't the end of the arm of the of the state of new york legislation or that has happened has not been a determination by the legislature that these are thirteen fourteen fifteen year old people will begin to lasso so called adult to a certain extent this doesn't mean

that they're going to be sent to ottawa prisons are gonna be in the same fish in a so called as so called jails where we send the adults were you stated that the other wannabe build lies are gonna be out and that and they're right and obese itemize and so on these are necessary can competence of the oven of the jail the important thing that has occurred in the state of new york is a change in the attitude there were not going to look at the nature of the individual to begin with or what were dealing with violent crime but of the nature of the act itself so that the prior consideration as a protection of society we want to be able to analyze the youngster to find out that if we're going to be we had with him is he going to go out there it is ignored and as he going to what does repeat that the same vein sachs or some summer and is that and i ask i ask the us army the evidence of the rates for juvenile arrest appears to be tapering off since nineteen seventy five not only in new york and around the country needs to know iran

and the us is entering referred to that why after its past its peak is there this move now here to make this rather drastic change in the way things are done can you explain that if it isn't just an election year fever that but i mean you're an election coverage are is up for reelection well i think that the motivation of the sokol politician does not emanate from a politician robin i think that they've taken soundings outside on the street and the public wants this to be done the public is tired of the juveniles getting more fairly because they happen to be on people going out and killing in the uk and then they locked up and the names been desecrated as a matter of fact so that if you've got a thirty year old killer living next door to you that you don't even know that ah because they keep the secret and they have come to a point where they say killing us killing and the important thing is to look to the future to see the dangerousness of the individual try to do something to one we don't often say that we're not going to try to rehabilitate we will try but that is a secondary consideration the prime consideration is self protection and incidentally our lives you know on the whole we asked of the juvenile

or of those young offender argue will forestall evil day has to go to jail as to what just keep his hands in his pocket and keep his feet out of other people's property that's not really too much for society ask of him professor zittrain in chicago why if the statistics if they're to be believed show a decline in arrests for violent crimes and juvenile ages is there this commotion in the public now that's reflected in these legislative actions do you think well i think i also just catching up with the statistics a few years ago is that it well now that there's an awful lot of fat in fashion that is involved in and public perceptions of what criminal risks are some years ago it was career criminals in the state of illinois was the class acts felony controversy over on mandatory minimum sentences i think there are two important elements to the very special moon of new york and particularly new york city one is that every other major state in the union including those benign treatment regimes of

massachusetts in pennsylvania has as a safety valve a process where a juvenile offender and that is an older agent as an adoptive mother pointed out you can become an instant adult book as a juvenile court judge or a prosecutor decides that his act simply takes and beyond the pale of the juvenile justice system similar did not have a waiver and now it responds with an enthusiasm and creates away more opportunity which is really probably a lot of it at least in the new rhetorical terms more forceful off more on so active than that which exist in the other major states but new york also has a deeper set of feelings about crime which is a function i think of a tube of giuliani's of the city of new york our first new

york is it is a compact city where the rich live too close to the poor and vice versa that all what areas such as chicago was successfully freezers and when we have a we have about fifteen seconds to give us the measure the well of public panic about crime will well mr tj maxx in the juvenile field career criminals that the family is largely a function of fashion and this year the juvenile offenders just in fashion well secured but to pursue this further begun so time consuming that you learn much of the season in chicago with you know dr miller and you're in washington and the merchant but solvable my word of that tomorrow night you know the night at age seventy one analogy that he'll layer for three four five

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