At a Tender Age / Castaways / High Risk

...Can we afford it...

...Then he put on his shoes and shirt and sauntered home...

...the killer was never convicted...

...That's about all we can do, given present knowledge...

...Oxnard, California, for example, found that after a concentrated effort to get its SHOs off the street, violent crimes dropped 38 percent in 1987, more than double the drop in the next best California city, while most other cities experienced increases...

...They simply do not learn the "thou shalt nots" upon which civilized behavior is based, and which most kids learn from parents and peers as automatically as they learn to talk...

...The largest of the twenty cities is Jacksonville, with 658,000...

...Nobody got him to pre-kindergarten, for which he was eligible at four, or even to kindergarten at five...

...Putting them all behind bars permanently after the third offense would be an easily affordable and quite cheap way to cut a huge chunk out of our atrocious crime rates...

...Kramer describes New York's juvenile justice nonsystem principally through well-edited tape-recorded interviews with prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, social workers, and so on...

...This dubious claim aside, High Risk is nevertheless admirable for its from-the-trenches view and its powerful descriptions of psychopathic children, including Jeffery Baily, the Florida swimming-pool killer...

...Fifteen years hence, Magid may be admitting to the same sort of disillusionment Cadwalader of Penikese Island feels today...

...D r. Magid, a Colorado psychologist, thinks he understands the cause of and cure for criminal psychopathy...

...The Justice Department recently pointed out that a RAND Corporation study of 2,190 jail and prison inmates in Michigan, Texas, and California showed they committed an average of 187 crimes a year while on the street, costing an estimated $430,000 each in law enforcement expenditures, victim losses, and private security THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 49 measures...

...The boys worked out fine on the island, and wentback to predatory violence as soon as they went ashore...

...Then he gets priority attention from probation authorities, and if he is arrested anew, police and prosecutors give him special attention...

...Rita Kramer's book is a description of the New York juvenile criminal justice system—its laws, courts, and "caring" bureaucracies...

...Wayne had admitted a mugging, among other things...

...His mother bore him at age 15, and his father disappeared before his birth...

...Ultimately he was shuffled off to a 70-yearold great-grandmother, who barely managed to feed him...

...When I look objectively at the trail of destruction left by our own graduates, I cannot avoid the conclusion that the world would have been a better place if most of the kids I grew to like at Penikese had never been born...

...G iven present knowledge, incarceration seems the only effective disposition for young psychopaths...

...Juvenile criminal records alone rarely permit identification until he is well into his crime career, but if his school performance and home situation are included, the age at which chronics are identified can be moved up several years, and possibly to the thirteenth birthday, RAND Corporation research indicates...

...Magid does not mention the compelling Danish twin and adoption studies by Sarnoff Mednick and Karl Christiansen, or Hans Eysenck's now classic Crime and Personality (third edition...

...Tired of standing, he pulled a lawn chair to the edge of the pool so he could watch until Nicki stopped struggling and sank lifeless to the bottom...

...Supreme Court...

...pushed three-year-old Nicki Brown into the deep end of the swimming pool at a Florida motel near Disney World...

...These cases and the books that recount them present a crucial question: What do we do with killer kids and other incorrigible youngsters who are identifiable habitual predatory offenders by the time they are thirteen or so...

...With Marine Corps toughness, Cadwalader sums up his own book well: "not only the story of a school but also of the fall from innocence of those who started it...

...He had gone next door, entered his neighbor's home, and simply helped himself to everything that struck his fancy...

...She does summarize Charles Murray's Chicago study, Beyond Probation, which shattered the liberal shibboleth that imprisoning juveniles turns them into worse criminals...

...We get only anecdotal evidence...

...But some leading criminologists and psychologists suggest we may be close to developing methods for identifying potential psychopaths as early as their third year, and for diverting them from lives of predatory violence...

...Violent Youth and Juvenile Justice, the Central Park rapist-killer was identifiable in the second grade as a likely future serious habitual offender (SHO) and potential killer kid...

...Robert Heck, who monitorsSHOCAP for the Office of Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control, reports the numbers consistently run about 1.6 to 1.9 percent of all juveniles arrested, or eighteen to twenty-five youngsters per 100,000 population...

...Then he lived with a great-uncle, who was also murdered...

...In July 1984, fourteen-year-old Wayne M., with two other boys, ages 12 and 16, grabbed a 51-year-old "street lady" who slept on the park benches in New York's Central Park...

...But he does admit to having had an overdose of idealism when in 1973 he started a unique school, a kind of gentle but austere Alcatraz for hardcore Massachusetts delinquents on a tiny island near Martha's Vineyard...

...What do we do with those we have given up on...

...bureaucrats in the Reagan Justice Department inspired a couple of vicious Jack Anderson columns that portrayed Mednick's proposal as a lunatic "Cuckoo's Nest" mind control plot...

...When Wayne was five he saw his mother's head blown off by one of her boyfriends...

...Jeffery, Ken Magid and Carole McKelI Eugene H. Methvin is a senior editor at I Reader's Digest...

...We believed changing the environment would change the kid...

...It costs just $25,000 a year to build a prison cell and keep a prisoner in it—a $405,000 "profit" for society per prisoner per year...

...If nothing else, it's an improvement on the whipping post and the chain gang...

...I get a letter from Andy-=`Hey, George, I got good news and bad news...

...Magid's thesis is that the chief cause of psychopathy is a failure of attachment between child and mother and that most of the failure occurs in the first two years of life...

...17.95 HIGH RISK: CHILDREN WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey/Bantam Books/18.95 Eugene H. Methvin In 1986, nine-year-old Jeffery Baily, Jr...

...Henry's case demonstrates a common refrain by mothers of psychopaths, reported in the pioneering two-volume 1976 work by Samuel Yochelson and Stanton E. Samenow, The Criminal Personality...

...Magid mentions growing evidence for a genetic role in the development of killer kids, but assigns it secondary significance...

...By spending as much as twenty hours a week with each of his five 14- to 16-year-olds, the probation officer was able to keep them from recidivism...

...He is no mushy-hearted liberal: a former Marine Corps officer whose military career ended with a land mine in Vietnam...

...Yes and no...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 Wayne was grouped with ten other young monsters and a special ed teacher who concluded she had to get rid of him and two others or lose them all...

...Can we afford not to do it...

...Jeffery knew Nicki could not swim...

...Another Justice Department program begun in 1983 indicates we can identify criminal psychopaths as young as their thirteenth birthday, and suggests the number of these hardcore predators may be surprisingly low...

...Good news is I'm gonna be a father...

...The state of Florida charged Jeffery with murder...

...Bad news is I'm in Walpole, 10 to 20"--and I wonder how many other of our alumni have already fathered probably doomed children of their own...

...Manhattan's tabloids termed it the "thrill-kill rape and slaying...

...The first thing the child learns is that he is not the boss...

...As Rita Kramer tells the story in her book At a Tender Age...

...He documents the reasons for our growing crop of "unattached" children: rising teenage pregnancies, divorce and disrupted families, child abuse, the sharp rise in working mothers and use of day-care centers for children in the tender years, and so on...

...By the time Jeffery was arraigned for murder, his father was on his second prison term...

...A promising research program by Ohio State criminologist Simon Dinitz and others at the Ohio penitentiary was scrubbed as a result of civil libertarian hysterics in the early 1970s...

...While the psychologist was wrestling with paperwork and bureaucracies trying to get Wayne into a special school, he committed his murder...

...Four are in prison, and the fifth died at age 16 of cirrhosis of the liver...

...Are we, then, at a hopeless dead end where we can only "lock 'em up and throw the key away...

...Foster Cline, whose mental health clinic is located in Evergreen, Colorado...

...And after their third offense, the system ought to put them behind bars for a while—a significant while...

...With a highly qualified and motivated staff and a good counselor-to-delinquent ratio, he gave it his best for a decade before admitting—well, not quite failure, but certainly disappointment...

...Before we get too indignant about welfare, black teenage profligacy, and the other putative causes of the SHO phenomenon, we should consider the story of the youth we will call Henry, in order to spare an already grievously abused mother...

...While criteria vary, generally three or more arrests before the eighteenth birthday will cause authorities to look hard, and then based on how serious and how early the youngster's offenses are, he may be tagged a SHO...

...vey tell us in High Risk: Children Without a Conscience, was born to a 17-year-old poor black girl and teenage father living on welfare in a South Florida ghetto...

...At twenty-five per 100,000, out of 245 million Americans we would have 61,250 SHOs between their fourteenth and eighteenth birthdays...

...Henry's mother, looking back at the early signs of his psychopathy, told a consulting psychologist: "Henry committed his first crime when he was two years old...

...And where are they today...

...Jeffery and Wayne are typical of the bumper crop of killer kids America is raising today, many of them children of teen child-mothers supported by public welfare who are incapable of mothering and in need of it themselves...

...Communities are paying far more by releasing repeat offenders than by expanding prison capacity," concluded the Justice Department's analysis...

...Just as a deaf youngster cannot learn human speech normally, these children suffer from a neurological deficit that handicaps them in what psychologists call "avoidance learning...

...After taking turns raping and sodomizing her, they beat and kicked and clubbed her, and piled twigs around her and tried to set her on fire...

...In school, he stayed on suspension most of the time and was quickly shunted into the "emotionally handicapped" classes where, under the 1974 federal PL 94-142, harassed principals and teachers throw every budding criminal psychopath they can't cope with for want of effective rehabilitation programs and disciplinary powers (courtesy of the U.S...

...In "rage reduction" the child lies down between two rows of two to four trained "body holders...

...He couldn't read or sit still and was "a very disruptive force" in the classroom, according to his school psychologist...

...The school psychologist agreed...

...Cadwalader concludes: We shared without question the assumption that bad kids were simply the products of bad environments...

...And the University of Southern California's Mednick argues that the more violent and pathological a youngster is, the more likely that his behavior is strongly genetically influenced...

...What's more, "in community" criminals were able to continue their predatory behavior while undergoing "treatment...

...As irritation builds, the therapist talks and shouts along with the child...

...Perhaps the most revealing is the probation officer who reported on a two-year experiment in which he was given an unheard-of caseload of five for intensive supervision...

...So goes the theory, and three or four sessions within a couple of weeks are supposed to "cure" the "unattached" child...

...Some of his own illustrative cases and data, however, seem to suggest genetics as a primary cause...

...Justice persuaded twenty cities to install a "Serious Habitual Offender Comprehensive Action Program" (sHocAP) in which police, schools, welfare and probation workers, and prosecutors pool their information and find and focus on "the baddest of the bad" youngsters...

...So the time couldn't be riper for bold leadership in Washington to launch high priority research on the perplexing problem of early identification and treatment of the criminal psychopathic personality...

...He criticizes traditional therapies, and advocates "rage reduction therapy," a technique developed by Dr...

...I recall many walking time bombs whom we watched leave the island knowing they cannot be stopped until they have exploded at horrible cost in human suffering...

...And they go on from there: the kid has to learn to be lovable, loved, and loving...

...in sessions of up to eight hours, the therapist holds the patient's head in his lap, controls resistant responses, and provokes rage by fingering the patient's rib cage...

...Mednick and Eysenck are not mentioned...

...Such mothers invariably complain: "I couldn't seem to teach him not to do things," or, "He couldn't learn the meaning of the word no...

...Henry is white, raised in Arlington, Virginia, that great upper middle class bastion of Washington bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists...

...Murray showed that Chicago's judges did a fair job of picking out the worst kids and locking them away, and after incarceration their rate of offending was reduced even more sharply than that of less predatory youngsters given "in community" treatments...

...One had ten armed robbery charges before the program began...

...Nobody knows what to do with the Jefferys and Waynes and Henrys, and nobody seems willing to say there are just some kids we have to lock up and weld the door shut on...

...Eysenck, one of the great pioneers of psychometrics, says modern parents heavily influenced by Freud would be greatly relieved to know that they do 80 percent of what they do for or to theirchildren at the moment of conception...

...Only sixteen of the first 106 boys who came to Penikese in its first seven years, at a cost of about $25,000 each, "turned themselves around," and for the other ninety, Cadwalader's camp was but a way-station to Walpole or other incarceration...

...George Cadwalader isn't saying it, though he comes close in Castaways- The Penikese Island Experiment...

...The object is to stop the juvenile-delinquency revolving door and make the system do what it is theoretically supposed to do, but never has—as Rita Kramer's book so infuriatingly demonstrates...

...Ditto another research plan in 1984 by USC's Mednick to administer a battery of psychological and neurological tests to Los Angeles delinquents at the time of their first contact with police...

...Henry sits on Virginia's death row, having burglarized and raped an 82-year-old woman whom he then tortured to death with a poker up the rectum...

...The case is still pending...

...It is not a probing examination of the problem of youthful criminals, and it does not tap the considerable lode of recent research...

...The window of opportunity for dealing with the serious delinquent is only five years, from his thirteenth to his eighteenth birthday...

...He asked another neighboring child what the "icky white stuff' is that comes out of someone's nose when they're drowning...

...And he fairly sums up where we are as a nation: "How many chances does an individual deserve before we are justified in giving up on him...

...But does it work...