CRACK DOWN ON KIDS GIVING UP ON THE YOUNG
Males, Mike & Docuyanan, Faye
CRACKDOEN ON Kids Giving Up on the Young BY MIKE MALES AND FAYE DOCUYANAN Madness is the word Stephen Bruner uses to describe the summer of 1992. "The things I did, things I had done to me. . . ....
...and since then the state has incarcerated a higher percentage of its youths than any other state...
...says Gilbert Aruvao of SIPA...
...Why are Asians getting stupider faster than anyone else...
...We want to empower these young people to change the social and economic circumstances of their lives," he says...
...Juveniles convicted of drug offenses in adult court receive lengthy mandatory sentences...
...Instead of prevention and rehabilitation programs, more prisons are being built to warehouse juveniles along with adults...
...Of California's fifty-eight counties, thirty-one with a total of 2.5 million people recorded zero teenage murders in 1993...
...It's really hard for them to change...
...A lot of people regret it after...
...it was staff-kid...
...There's a new prison built every eight months...
...There's a larger madness...
...We approach juvenile crime as a public-health problem, not a law-enforcement problem," says Thompson...
...County is a clear illustration...
...Instead, they talk about an insidious culture of poverty, and thev argue relentlessly that only more cops and more prisons will bring down juvenile crime...
...140.l)0(i-inmale system is the third-largest in the world: only the United States as a whole and China have larger inmate s\stems...
...Their perception of their situation is very correct...
...That's frightening," he says...
...Very skewed—six out seven of those who are arrested for violl juvenile crimes are black or Hispanic...
...It's not just "poverty, per L.A...
...Nor can some "innate" teenage qualities be the cause, since by definition those qualities are as present in youths in areas where violent teenage crime is rare as in areas where it is com"We see kids from all walks of life," sag Harry Hartmann, counselor with the L Office of Education...
...In California, studies by the state corrections department show that youths serve sentences 60 percent longer than adults for the same crimes...
...It was the summer after eighth grade...
...There's still a racial element, sure," says Thompson...
...Supreme Court to execute fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds (and lost only on a 5-4 vote...
...just twenty-four were white...
...Jennifer, seventeen, at the Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA...
...An initial evaluation showed that Thompson's program was more effective than law-enforcement approaches in preventing recidivism among delinquent youths as well as preventing younger members of their families from following in their older siblings' footsteps...
...ff more prisons and surer sentences were the solutions to crime and delinquency...
...From 1995 through 1996, four new prisons, costing $839 million, will open their doors...
...Seven new prisons opened in California from 19S9 to 1994...
...North-western's James Allen Fox...
...Society wants to kill these kids," says Thompson...
...But today's reigning criminal-justice experts—UCLA's James Q. Wilson...
...Oklahoma imprisons more of its citizens than any other state except Texas...
...it is now sweeping the nation...
...It's the Clinton Administration, too...
...Ts he OK with you, 'cause if he's OK with you, he's OK with me.' " says Bruner...
...Twenty thousand more Oklahoma City children and teenagers live in poverty than a quarter of a century ago...
...But the reason is not media violence, rap music, or gun availability—easy scapegoats that have little to do with the patterns of violence in real life...
...You go to school with them, people ask of this guy you know...
...They didn't get out like I did...
...It was kid-kid...
...Juveniles are being waived into adult court at lower and lower ages...
...Males is author of "The Scapegoat Generation: America's War Against Adolescents," to be issued by Common Courage Press this spring...
...He doesn't push charity or altruism...
...And we've created a hellacious environment.' This is not just some teenage rite-of-pas-sage problem...
...But if stupid, confused kids were the whole problem, why are black kids in Los Angeles a dozen times stupider than white kids...
...Madness, Thompson suggests, is "the natural, predictable reaction" of youths to the "larger, hostile adult culture that is anti-youth, particularly anti-African-American youth...
...The real problem, he writes, is "wrong behavior" by a fraction of the population (he pegs it at b percent) with bad temperament, concentrated in chaotic families and "disorderly neighborhoods...
...The alienation of young people from the traditional institutions is profound...
...When he talks to Oklahoma City's business groups, Thompson finds growing concern over the costs of more prisons and "alarm in the white community because the gangs are becoming more integrated...
...California inaugurated the new era of imprisoning juvenile offenders in Ronald Reagan's second term as governor in 1971...
...now they're up for murder one...
...Now they are fast becoming passe for juveniles, as well...
...Gary Taylor, deputy director of Legal Aid of Western Oklahoma, recounts his agency's efforts to reform a juvenile prison system whose brutality and punitive excesses had been exposed nationally...
...In Wisconsin, ten-year-olds can now be tried as adults for murder...
...In short, we are giving up on human beings at a younger and younger age...
...The Golden Slate's biggest growth m'Society wants to kill these kids...
...The nationwide trend is to get tough on juvenile crime," says Gary Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan are social ecology doctoral students at (he University of California, Irvine...
...Los Angeles County and Oklahoma City officials stress prevention but note that it is underfunded...
...Yet arrest figures over the last decade show Oklahoma's juvenile violence growing at twice the already alarming national pace...
...Why are you in it?'" Jennifer says...
...The death penalty...
...Office of Education...
...Many of these youths were wrongly imprisoned: they had been removed from their homes because their parents were abusive or neglectful, or the youths had committed minor offenses like curfew violations or truancy...
...There were many, many kids who were in the system because they were poor and in need of supervision, and they turned them into monsters," Rionda said...
...today, they confine 28,000 prisoners...
...News & World Report pointed out in November 1995...
...They don't know...
...Bruner is training in office management and in television production and editing through Thompson's program...
...Bv 1993...
...strange coincidence, that is just about 1 proportion of the county's youths poverty who are black or Hispanic...
...And it's not just the states...
...Racism is here...
...Says Bruner: "There are white kids in black gangs, blacks in Mexican gangs, Mexicans in white gangs, blacks in white gangs, Asians in black gangs...
...But] racism is not just black or white...
...He and his gang Panic Zone hung out where the rural black community of Spencer intersects the southeast Oklahoma City suburb of Midwest City...
...Intervene, then trace the pathology back to its source...
...The adults most responsive to Thompson's approach are in the business community, Republicans more than Democrats, he notes...
...Rionda's firm did not have to look hard to find Freddy Taylor's co-inmates: most were now in state prison serving terms for major felonies...
...This is the legacy we're leaving: armed camps...
...It is hardly that...
...Us per-capita income is much higher, and its general poverty rate lower, than the United States as a whole...
...If forcing youths into the adult prisons and administering harsh punishment is the remedy, Oklahoma, like California, should be a paradise of peace...
...Yeah, that was some stupid shit.' They thought it was so cool...
...You can't run away from it...
...Each one is full upon opening...
...There was no notion of rehabilitation, San Francisco lawyers for convicted murderer Freddy Lee Taylor investigated his incarceration in the Oklahoma juvenile prison system and found "a concentration-camp environment," attorney Robert Rionda said...
...Oklahoma wants to try thirteen-year-olds as adults and petitioned the Supreme Court to allow executions of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds...
...If you're in a subcultural group, it's no different in society's eyes whether you're in a gang or not...
...I tried to ask them...
...former Robert Kennedy aide Adam Wahnsky—dismiss poverty as a cause of youth violence...
...It will bring "30,000 more muggers, killers, and thieves than we have now...
...In recent years, twice as many Oklahoma youths have been placed in the adult prison system as in the juvenile system...
...Blacks and Hispanics predominated, but Asian Americans comprise the fastest-rising group of violent juveniles...
...Beatings, sexual assaults, hog tying, extreme medical punishments, extreme isolation," said Taylor...
...Shooting them in the street...
...In the thirty-one counties free of teenage killers, the same blood-soaked media and rock and rap music are readily available (more, since white suburban families over-subscribe to cable TV), and guns are easy to obtain...
...He rattles off the names of a dozen gangs—Hoover Street, Westside, Candlewood, 6-0—that inhabit the district...
...at a cost of $1.3 billion, to accommodate 16,000 more prisoners...
...Writing in the September 1994 Commentary, Wilson calls the growing adolescent population "'a cloud" that '"lurks , . . just beyond the horizon...
...It's who's in the 'hood.' " The 1995 Kids Count Factbook lists 47,000 impoverished children and adolescents in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area—21,000 whites, 13.500 blacks, 4,500 Native Americans, 3,000 Asian Americans, 5,000 Latinos...
...As youth poverty mushrooms and the attitudes of the larger society become harsher, the traditional markers of race and class are sliding toward new realignments...
...Eleven hundred new slate laws passed during the 1980s set longer, more certain prison terms, especially for imcniles...
...Shooting them in the street...
...a local community center, rattles off the names of twenty youth gangs, takes a breath, admits she has left some out...
...I tell parents who want to release their kid to the [juvenile-justice] system: he-might come out worse than when he went in...
...Thompson's program uses employment training and a variety of family services to reintegrate youths who have already been convicted back into their communities...
...Wilson downplays poverty, racism, poor schools, and unemployment as "not . . . major causes of crime at all...
...Enough of his friends remain trapped in the justice system...
...For his contribution to the madness, Bruner spent his ninth grade in an Oklahoma juvenile lockup...
...These kids are at risk of extinction if they depend upon adults to protect them," Thompson says...
...If it can't do that, then killing their spirit.' dustry is corrections...
...But its youth poverty rate is staggering: 200,000 impoverished adolescents live in the county...
...Juvenile crime is on the rise...
...California's forty-one-prison...
...We don't fight each other that way...
...But this has gone beyond race now...
...It is not just parents who fail them, but an adult society increasingly angry and punishing toward its youth...
...closely tied to youth poverty and thl growing opportunity gap between wealthier, older people and destitute, younger people...
...The social services, academia, are bound like serfs to the status quo...
...As vouth poverty rises and becomes more concentrated in destitute urban neighborhoods, violence becomes more concentrated in vounger age groups...
...Instead of proposing more money for alleviating poverty or for crime prevention, they want more law enforcement—at a cost of tens of billions of dollars...
...Nonwhite youths, white youths on the wrong side, "we are all targets...
...I tell them, 'You're going to die in fifteen or twenty years, and you have grandchildren...
...The source inevitably turns out to be "the low social, educational, and economic status of the families and communities" violent youths come from...
...The trend began in California...
...L.A...
...A November 1995 Daily Oklahoman series on the metropolis's exploding poverty reported that these adolescents are increasingly isolated, jammed together in a chain of destitute neighborhoods ringing downtown and extending eastward past the suburbs...
...Central Los Angeles, which has roughly the same number of people, reported more than 200 teen murders...
...Rehabilitation and reintegration into the community are concepts that have already fallen out of fashion for adult criminals...
...Poverty in a society of affluence, in which your self-esteem is tied to failure to achieve that affluence," is a more accurate explanation for our uniquely high level of violence, says Gilbert Geiss, a criminologist formerly with the University of California, Irvine...
...Sensational press accounts make J seem as though juvenile crime is pattern less...
...The New York Times reported in December that "proposals by the Administration would allow more access to juvenile records and give federal prosecutors discretion to charge serious juvenile offenders as adults...
...County is home to one in fifteen teenage murderers in the United States...
...Juvenile crime...
...Taylor of Legal Aid of Western Oklahoma...
...If we don't learn how to share with the people who are now powerless, this culture is ultimately going to acquire the means to bring our society to an end...
...If it can't do that, then killing their spirit...
...Thompson himself spent three years in prison in the 1970s at Terminal Island and Lompoc for armed bank robbery on behalf of the San Francisco Black Panther chapter...
...For that incorrigible 25 percent (of youth offenders), prisons may be the only way to go," says Harry Hartmann of the L.A...
...Bruner sees that as surrender...
...Now Bruner works as an intern for Wayne Thompson at the Oklahoma Health Care Project in Founder's Tower overlooking the city's opulent northwest side...
...Los Angeles County (population 9 million) has more teen murders than the dozen largest industrial nations outside the United States combined...
...The most effective prevention effort by far is to raise fewer children in poverty, However, "reducing child poverty, much less eliminating it, is no longer a paramount priority for either political party," U.S...
...Bruner says the system is rigged: "I believe they want to keep me and every other black male and minority male and poor kid in the system permanently, send us all to the penitentiary...
...Of L.A.'s 459 teen murder arrestees in 1994...
...Princeton's John D'lulio...
...California should be a haven where citizens leave doors unlocked and stroll midnight streets unmen-aced...
...Today, state after state is imposing harsher penalties on juveniles who run afoul of the law...
...The death penalty...
...That is the perception of the young people who are being ground up in this culture and the grinder of the juvenile-justice system...
...Rather, the reason is rising youth poverty...
...If even one-tenth of that number must be imprisoned more or less permanently, the state's minority teenage male population will require four new prisons every year to contain them...
...Wayne Thompson in Oklahoma City takes prevention seriously...
...They're going to have to live with the environment we've created...
...In 1988, Oklahoma petitioned the U.S...
...But "the races i skewed to blacks and Hispanics," he \ knowledges...
...In California in 1994, 140.000 persons under the age of twenty were arrested for felonies—including one out of five black males, and one in ten Hispanic males ages sixteen through nineteen...
...Kids had no choice but to hang with us...
...a state corrections study found teenagers served terms nearly a year longer than adults for equivalent offenses...
...The clientele served by the program is small—fewer than 100 youths per year...
...It isn't a race thing...
...Its vast basin harbors such a bewildering array of gangs and posses that estimates of the number of youths allied with them at any one time are almost impossible to pin down...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
