YOUTH JUSTICE: GOING FORWARD OR BACKWARD?

In Chicago on Tuesday, child advocates will gather to mark the 100th
anniversary of the country's first juvenile court, which opened on the
city's West Side on July 3, 1899. Reformers such as Jane Addams pushed the
Illinois Legislature to recognize that children were developmentally
different from adults and should not be thrown into the same jails or held
to the same legal standards.

A moral government, they argued, should act as "kind and just parents,''
aiming for rehabilitation rather than the crippling punishments of the
adult system.

I wonder what Addams and her fellow reformers would think of our juvenile
justice system today.

We have laws now in many states that allow children as young as 13 to be
tried and sentenced as adults for first-degree murder. In 24 states, judges
can sentence 16-year-olds to death. The only other countries in the world
that execute juvenile offenders are Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

We have the distinction, however, of executing more child offenders than
all those other countries combined over the last decade. The latest was
Oklahoma murderer Sean Sellers, who was 16 when he killed his mother,
stepfather and a store clerk. It was discovered after his trial that he had
suffered a childhood brain injury and that he was diagnosed as having
Multiple Personality Disorder.

No matter. On February 3, he was executed for a crime he committed at an
age when the government ruled him too young to drink alcohol, smoke
cigarettes, serve in the armed forces or vote for the governor, who could
have stayed his execution. He was too young, for that matter, to have a
jury of his peers.

I understand why we're blurring the distinction between child offenders and
adults. Some children are capable of adult viciousness. They're shooting up
schools and beating each other senseless. We're scared. We want the
violence to stop.

But here's the question: Has treating child offenders as harshly as we
treat adults decreased juvenile crime?

Look at New York and Florida, which have the most unforgiving juvenile
justice systems.

In the 1980s, Florida pioneered the practice of giving prosecutors, rather
than judges, total discretion in whether to try a child as an adult. Two
hundred percent more children have been locked up in adult Florida prisons
since the law went into effect. In New York, any 14-year-old arrested for a
violent crime is automatically tried as an adult. Any 16-year-old arrested
for any felony faces adult prosecution.

Throwing so many children into adult prisons has had the effect of making
New York and Florida Nos. 1 and 2 nationally in terms of their rate of
juvenile crime.

"It's very medieval,'' says Dan MacAllair of the Center on Juvenile and
Criminal Justice in San Francisco. "It completely ignores 100 years of
developmental research.''

On the March 2000 ballot, Californians will be asked to follow the lead of
New York, Florida and other states in shifting decision-making in juvenile
cases to prosecutors and requiring mandatory incarceration for a wide array
of juvenile offenses -- eroding the power of judges to act as "kind and
just parents.''

Sometimes, when I hear our politicians lecturing other countries on human
rights, I wonder how they decide which humans and which rights.