More youths in adult jails

FLORIDA

Most juveniles in adult court are there for nonviolent crimes, and black and Hispanic youths represent seven of every 10 juveniles who end up in adult jails or prisons, a new report said.

Florida's policies to crack down in the 1990s on spiraling juvenile crime have disproportionately snared black and Hispanic youths, sending more of them to adult jails even though most of their alleged crimes involve nonviolent offenses, a new report by a youth advocacy group says.

According to a report released this week by the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Youth Justice, as many as 200,000 young people nationally are prosecuted as adults each year. The number of juveniles held in adult jails and prisons, the report says, has increased by 208 percent since the 1990s.

But supporters of trying juveniles who commit certain crimes as adults questioned the validity of the report's findings because the youth justice group's mission is to do away with such laws, even when violent youths as old as 17 commit heinous crimes. Supporters of current laws said that even when youths are incarcerated, they are kept away from adult inmates, and housed with others of similar age.

The increase in youth incarceration comes despite federal laws that prohibit imprisoning minors in adult correctional facilities. Those restrictions do not apply to youths who are prosecuted as adults. Currently, 40 states permit or require that youths charged as adults be held in jail -- instead of juvenile detention -- while awaiting trial.

The report examines the consequences of laws in Florida and six other states. Black and Hispanic youths in Florida represent seven of every 10 juveniles in adult jails and prisons, the group reported. An examination of records from the state's Juvenile Justice Department shows that about 58 percent of minority youth cases that wind up in adult court are for nonviolent crimes.

The report states that youths in adult prisons are ``at risk of abuse, sexual assault, suicide and death.''

Florida law gives prosecutors discretion to transfer certain violent crime cases involving youths as young as 14 to adult court.

The report echoes a 2001 Miami Herald investigation that found that burglaries, drug charges and thefts account for the majority of cases landing juveniles in the state's adult court system.

A state Department of Corrections study later that year found that Florida's youngest inmates were far more likely than adult convicts to continue committing crimes after prison. More than 51 of every 100 juvenile inmates committed a new felony within two years of release from Florida prisons, the Corrections Department found, compared to about 33 of every 100 inmates overall.

Although justice officials say the Corrections Department report showed only that crime is often a young person's game, critics cited it as further proof of the consequences of treating juveniles as adults. ''We knew this is the direction it was heading in,'' said Carlos Martinez, Miami-Dade assistant chief public defender and contributor to the report. ``You're just throwing them away.''

Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, chairman of the Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee, would not comment until he had a chance to read the report.

Ed Griffith, spokesman for the Miami-Dade state attorney's office, declined to speak to the report's specifics, but questioned the authors' motivations. ''A report by a group vehemently opposed to any use of adult courts for individuals under the age of 18, even the 17-and-one-half-year-old violent killer, that states such uses are always inappropriate should not surprise anyone,'' Griffith said. ``It would have been more surprising and balanced if the report had at least taken an objective view and recognized the circumstances where such legal choices are appropriate.''

The report specifically mentions cases involving South Florida youths that sparked debate about juvenile justice policy:

Anthony Laster, a 15-year-old mentally disabled West Palm Beach student, was accused of stealing $2 in lunch money. The teen had no previous criminal record and did not have a weapon. Prosecutors charged him with strong-arm robbery, extortion and petty theft. He spent weeks in county jail awaiting trial. When the case drew national attention, prosecutors dropped the charges.
Dominique, a 16-year-old Cuban girl in South Miami-Dade, was charged with armed robbery and held in the adult system even though it was her first offense. She was sentenced to two months in jail at the Women's Annex in Miami and a year of probation. Dominique and three other girls lived in the same unit, separated from adult inmates. But that also meant they sometimes did not get recreation time because guards did not want to lock down the rest of the facility, the report said.

The youth justice group maintains that state laws, including Florida's, ignore scientific evidence that the adolescent brain is less developed. That could affect their decision-making and reasoning skills, said Shay Bilchik, a former Miami prosecutor and director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform and Systems Integration at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington.

Bilchik pointed to a recent study that compared juveniles in New York who were sentenced as adults with New Jersey youths who were held in juvenile facilities.

The New York offenders were more likely to commit another offense at a faster rate and commit a more serious offense than the New Jersey youths, he said. ''That's the trifecta of bad crime policy,'' Bilchik said.

Andrea Robinson, with Ronnie Greene and Gary Fineout
22 March 2007

http://www.miamiherald.com/467/story/49229.html

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