Back to the Dark Ages

By Tate Hausman, AlterNet. Posted April 26, 2000.

Chris Peterson landed in jail after failing to pay a $73 traffic violation. He should have gone to a juvenile facility, but his father thought a stint in adult prison would toughen up 17-year-old Chris. After all, old-fashioned discipline builds character, right?

Wrong.

In his first night at the jail, Chris was beaten, taunted and tortured by the five inmates who shared his cell. All the assailants had extensive criminal records, and two had abused a young inmate in the same cell the previous week. Chris died from his massive wounds -- a victim of senseless, old-fashioned discipline.

Horror stories like Chris Peterson's are, unfortunately, all too common -- the tragic and predictable result of throwing minors into adult jails. According to a Columbia University study, juveniles in adult facilities are five times more likely to be raped, two times more likely to be beaten and eight times more likely to attempt suicide than those in juvenile facilities.

"Twenty-three years ago safeguards keeping kids and adults apart were introduced because youths in jails were being raped within 24 hours," says Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. If we repealed such safeguards, Schiraldi contends, we would roll back "to the dark ages, and give the green light to the abuse of 13-year-old [offenders]."

On September 14, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) tried to roll us back to the dark ages. And he kept it real, real quiet.

While the nation was mesmerized by Monicagate, Senator Hatch and Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) smuggled the most punitive juvenile-crime bill of the last 25 years, the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Act (bill S-10), through a badly distracted House of Representatives. As Hatch and Sessions crafted it, S-10 would:

-- Allow juveniles as young as 13 to be incarcerated in adult jails while they await trial.
-- Pressure state prosecutors to try juveniles in adult courts.
-- Open juvenile's court proceedings and criminal records to the public, including to schools, colleges and employers.
-- Require school expulsion for juveniles who possess or use alcohol, drugs or tobacco on school grounds.
-- Allow status offenders (such as truants, curfew violators or runaways -- crimes only because the offender is a minor) to be locked up in adult jails for up to 72 hours.

Despite its controversial nature -- or maybe because of its controversial nature -- Hatch and Sessions employed a variety of underhanded tactics to sneak S-10 into our law books, instead of opening it up to full congressional debate. To pass S-10 through the House, they attached it as an amendment to the Missing and Exploited Children's Act, a non-controversial bill (who would vote against helping kidnapped kids?) that was expected to pass by unanimous consent.

House Republicans then scheduled the Missing and Exploited Children's Act vote for primary day, when almost 30 congressional members were absent, most campaigning in their home states. The congressional docket on primary day would have listed, along with other non-controversial bills (such as a resolution to congratulate Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa) "a bill to authorize appropriations for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." No mention of the juvenile-crime amendment. House members passed the bill with a simple voice vote.

"This bill takes parliamentary procedure to a whole different level," says Kim Wade, Legislative Council at the Children's Defense Fund. "There's always been procedural tricks for pushing bills through, but to skip all Senate debate for a bill this controversial is truly sneaky."

Luckily, Democratic congressional staffers picked up on the furtive strategy before the bill returned to the Senate for its final confirmation. Soon newspapers across the country got wind of S-10's sly passage and wrote scathing editorials that chastised either the Republican procedures, the bill's contents, or both. Responding to the public outcry, Democratic senators finally halted S-10's uncontested sail through the legislature.

Although their initial progress has been stymied, Hatch and Sessions are still trying to turn their juvenile-crime bill into the law of the land. Understandably so -- pressure on Congress to pass such legislation has increased dramatically in the last year. Some experts believe the pressure comes from heightened public fear of young, violent criminals -- fear especially fueled by the media coverage of recent school shootings.

"Youth violence has been decreasing since the early 1990's, but fear of youth violence is up," says Wade. "Television news coverage of violent kids has gone through the ceiling. There weren't many more school shootings last year than in years past, but the media hype made us believe that there were. And the demonizing of kids fuels these crime bills."

Marc Schindler, staff attorney at the Youth Law Center, has a slightly different take on what fuels crime bills like S-10.

"They're actually not so focused on the school shootings, because all of those happened in rural, white communities," says Schindler. "This crime legislation is aimed at urban, minority youth -- the gangs and so-called 'super-predator' criminals that scare America so much. [S-10] feeds on fears of violent minority youth."

Whatever its impetus, the Violent and Repeat Youth Offender Act has accrued a wide variety of critics -- children's organizations, gun rights activists (who resist even the mildest forms of gun control), state governments (who object to federal mandates such as S-10 that will undermine their own plans for stemming youth violence) and even Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. And that's not including the outraged citizens who have seen the agonies that juveniles suffer in adult jails -- like Janice Peterson, Chris's mother, who is active in the campaign against S-10.

After this public uproar, youth crime legislation in the future will likely be subject to the intense scrutiny that such a controversial issue requires -- the intense scrutiny that Hatch and Session hoped to avoid. Had their back-room maneuvering gone unnoticed, not only would they have threatened the safety and well being of thousands of teens, they would have seriously undermined the sanctity of our democratic process.

It makes you wonder: Who's really dangerous for America?

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