JUSTICE FOR KIDS

THE noted American psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger made a disturbing but
fascinating observation about human society in his 1968 book "The Crime of
Punishment" - "Society, secretly wants crime, needs crime, and gains
definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it. We consider
crime; we punish offenders for it; but we need it.

That's a hard-saying worth contemplating. For sure, we condemn crime and
punish offenders. But do we secretly want crime, need crime? Do we really
gain satisfaction from the present mishandling of crime?

And what is this mishandling? The prison-industrial complex is one of the
fastest growing economic sectors in America today. Amnesty International
recently cited U.S. prisons for various human rights violations.

Our pandering politicians try to out-do each other every year, seeing who
can come up with the toughest" crime bill.

Our police are becoming more like paramilitary units and millions are
"entertained" each week by one of the many cops-in real-live-situations
shows that seem to be cropping up on TV with more and more frequency.

Is all of this part of our crime and punishment ritual - evidence of our
"need" for crime? One thing is certain: we need a national conversation
about crime and our (mis?)handling of it.

If we were to have this national conversation, I think it would be wise to
start by looking carefully at the history *of juvenile justice system. In
1882, an aspiring young lawyer named John Altgeld, who would go on to
become governor of Illinois, toured the Chicago House of Corrections and
found that hundreds of children, including some as young as eight, were
being jailed alongside adults.

Chicago reformers like Altgeld, Jane Addams, Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop
organized and pushed state lawmakers to create a separate justice system
for juveniles.

The result? On July 1, 1899, the Illinois Juvenile Court Act was passed,
establishing the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago.

The Supreme Court acted to replace the informal, nonadversarial court
proceedings that had been in place for nearly half a century with more
formal proceedings - ordering juvenile courts, for example, to protect
children's due process rights.

Over the last 20 years or so the "get-tough" crowd has renewed their
efforts to dismantle the system, making predictions of a coming wave of
"superpredators."

Between 1992 and 1995 over 40 states re-arranged their laws to make it much
easier to put juveniles in adult court. In most states, juveniles can be
tried as adults for even nonviolent crimes, and some states have
established mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for juveniles.

As a result 200,000 children are now tried as adults each year, according
to a recent Amnesty International report.

So thousands of juveniles are being locked up in adult prisons, where,
according to studies, they are eight times more likely to commit suicide,
five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and twice as likely to be
assaulted by staff, than in juvenile facilities.

All of this despite empirical data that shows a decline in serious youth
crime. According to the Justice Department's "Crime in the United States"
report, the Juvenile homicide arrest rate dropped again for the fourth
straight year - 45 percent since 1993.

On June 29 an important press conference is being held in Chicago,
featuring a number of former juvenile delinquents who have gone on to
become success stories - people like Pepperdine University premed student
and one-time gang member Jeremy Estrada. "If they had thrown me in an adult
jail, I'd probably still be in a gang, or even dead," he says.