Juvenile Justice
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union JUVENILE JUSTICE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS "We beg delinquents for our life, " cornmented Robert Lowell in his poem about Central Park. "Behind each bush, perhaps a...
...That's when her troubles started to pile up...
...Miller recalls that on a visit to the Lyman School he found a map prominently displayed on the gameroom wall...
...Utah soon followed Massachusetts in deinstitutionalizing its reformatories...
...In retrospect it seems all too likely that some of the children I interviewed eventually learned how to wield knives and lurk behind bushes...
...A subsequent report, moreover, stated that "her behavior improved at home...
...Behind each bush, perhaps a knife...
...The results, I hoped, would be journalistically useful...
...Perhaps quite a few others ended up in prison...
...Me, I'm scared too...
...A social worker's report noted that Maria "performed her service hours erratically...
...One morning in 1972 he announced he was closing all the training schools...
...One is a confession: "The Things I've Done...
...He had no previous record of arrests...
...Thus it was that at the probation violation hearing held because of Maria's initial poor performance the social worker recommended the girl be sent to the Montrose Training School (read reformatory) because she had technically violated her probation...
...The judge agreed...
...One of the poems, quoted here in its entirety, was called "Bananas": The man at the store, he's scared I'll steal his bananas if he just blinks...
...Forty dollars were instantly recovered, but apparently her aunt pressed charges anyway...
...Maria was living with her grandparents...
...But the climate had changed...
...She arrived late and left early on occasion...
...He estimates that 90 per cent of the half-million children we lock up each year could either be sent home or placed in group residences, at no added risk to public safety...
...people wanted tough treatment of muggers and purse-snatchers...
...I know that two died of drug overdoses...
...I think of these mild miscreants as Magic Marker children: They searched for their identities illegally...
...Later, Miller went to Pennsylvania and then to Illinois, hoping in both states to dismantle the old systems...
...It plans to shut down Montrose and Hickey in 1988...
...Nonetheless, in time she " completed the required community service hours...
...Society's club can be more lethal than the child's penknife...
...But Lowell, who could see both sides of a scary situation, penned two additional lines: each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with a club...
...I wouldn't say...
...There are some who say that Miller started "a quiet revolution" in the way society treats its young delinquents...
...The club and the knife seem equally intimidating...
...In a more sensible world that would have been that—no further official intervention in Maria's life...
...But many have been guilty of far pettier mistakes, ranging from shoplifting to joy-riding in a stolen auto...
...The things I've thought/and not been caught,/who will believe me...
...Drawn by staff members, it advertised several likely prison escape routes...
...In quite a few states it remains legal to lock up children for such routine misconduct as truancy, disobedience or running away from home...
...Now a writing assignment concerning the idiosyncrasies of juvenile justice has introduced me anew to scores of such children—with one important difference: Most of the youths I have recently met are locked up for their sins...
...She is there to this day...
...They told of children headed for big trouble, kids for whom deviance was really a comfortable way of mainstrearning...
...Despite Miller's best efforts, most of the old training schools in Illinois and Pennsylvania remain going concerns...
...The state of Maryland, as it happens, is among those taking Miller's advice...
...With a little luck this year, Maria will be home for Christmas...
...The unions objected but the Governor supported me and so did the press...
...Small residential groups, with lots of kindly supervision, are now standard fare in Massachusetts for kids whose crimes and misdemeanors would elsewhere have landed them in reformatories...
...But Maria was not...
...the angry clerk kept asking...
...Now Miller runs a small consulting firm—the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives—in Alexandria, Virginia, where he contines to work for deinstitutionalization...
...I wanted it to write my name in purple flames upon a certain wall...
...In many instances I would return to the scene with a draft in hand, checking with my source for accuracy of feeling...
...The boy had been in detention 37 days, while a Public Defender and officials of the court argued about his case...
...Where is the danger here and who is the criminal...
...It was not an extraordinary request: Many Hickey and Montrose inmates are routinely granted such holiday privileges...
...Miller was not popular in the DYS bureaucracy...
...The incidence of training school escapes, for instance, rose dramatically...
...The source's word was final...
...It was as simple as that," he says...
...I collected much of the material by interviewing children in Harlem and on the Lower East Side of New York...
...Some, it is true, have committed substantial crimes, including assault and battery, armed robbery, even manslaughter and rape...
...Many of the errors that deliver children into the hands of the state turn out not to be crimes in any but a Dickensian sense...
...Maria was not incarcerated at first...
...In the end, says Miller, "I decided that incrementalism wasn't always the best approach...
...The bicycle thief's place of detention, for instance, was actually a spacious house in Middleton, Massachusetts, where about 25 children are looked after by as many counselors and therapists...
...She was put on probation and sentenced to 75 hours of community service...
...A judge ruled that she could not be trusted to return to prison...
...In Maryland I was told the story of a 16-year-old girl—call her Maria—who for more than two years has been caught in the toils of state-administered justice, all because she stole $84 from her aunt...
...Massachusetts has never looked back...
...What is your name...
...At first, he told me in a recent interview, " I tried to make the training schools more humane—less brutality, fewer restrictions—but the staffs there fought any changes.' They did their creative best to embarrass Miller...
...Yet the Middleton Center has not had a single runaway child in 38 months...
...The couplet neatly sums up the dilemma of someone out for an evening stroll in the city's manicured woods: He doesn't know whether he'll be amused or mugged...
...Not surprisingly, the poems seem more reportorial than lyric...
...Typically, a child's difficulties with the system begin with a minor delinquency, allowing the courts to commit major delinquencies of their own...
...Thanks to an administrative iconoclast named Jerome Miller, who headed the Department of Youth Services (DYS) in the early '70s, the system has been "deinstitutionalized"—that is, all the big juvenile training schools have been mercifully shut down...
...Even so, Massachusetts is light-years ahead of most other states in its treatment of juvenile lawbreakers...
...From Montrose Maria was shunted to another reformatory, the Hickey School, where a double fence stands 15-feet high and is topped with razor wire...
...What is your name...
...But in the world of juvenile justice misery tends to escalate...
...No bars guard the windows and no locks secure the doors...
...Her parents had vanished...
...In a poetry book I wrote long ago for and about inner-city children (Looking for a Place, 1969) I tried to take into account the same parallel streams of adrenaline...
...Another is a justification of sorts: They caught me once when I was small, the time I stole a Magic Marker...
...We would sit on a stoop or on a playground bench and go over the manuscript...
...Crime on the streets" had become a vote-getting issue...
...At a juvenile detention center in Massachusetts I met a 12-year-old boy who had been caught stealing a bicycle from his stepfather's next-door neighbor...
...Last December Maria asked that she be allowed to go home for the Christmas weekend...
...The courts don't like to let go...
...On re-reading these poems—there are some 40 in all—I have been surprised at how many deal with children's crimes...
Vol. 71 • February 1998 • No. 2
