The Juvenile Correctional System Just Is Not Getting the Job Done
Since I was a little girl, I have always heard the saying “There are two things in this world you cannot escape… Death and Taxes. For most of my life I believed this was true, and so far I haven’t been proven otherwise. But the older and wiser I became, I realized there is a third thing in this world we cannot escape. Everyone talks about it, everyone knows about it, and almost everyone has come in contact with it in some way shape or form. The thing I am talking about is crime! Crime is intertwined in our lives a lot more than we ever could realize. Crime is so common in our society today that we almost think of it as apart of the norm. We commit crimes and don’t think twice about them. That music I downloaded illegally on my phone last night was a crime. That text message you sent when you were at the light this morning was a crime. Just take a second and think to yourself when was the last time you went a whole day without hearing about a crime taking place or seeing one take place or even committing one. Every time you turn on the television or check your phone something about a crime is coming up. Most crimes go unseen and unpunished, but the very serious crimes that are caught land you in a place called prison.
The official definition of prison in the Merriam-Webster dictionary says “that prison is a building in which people are legally held as a punishment for a crime they have committed or while awaiting trial. Some common synonyms for prison include jail, detention center, and correctional facility. The first prison was said to have been created in Ancient Rome thousands of years ago. Now fast forward to 2018 there are tens of thousands of correctional facilities in the world housing nearly 11 million people. According to Prison Policy Initiative (Graph 1) this year there are more than two million people housed in about seven thousand correctional facilities across the country. That doesn’t include the other four million people, who are either on probation or parole. The question many have asked, “Why are there so many people incarcerated?” Let me tell you why, because the system does not work. Which system in particular do I think is the most ineffective in rehabilitating crime doers? The Juvenile Correctional System.
In the legal system any person or persons under the age of eighteen are known as juveniles. Since the beginning of the United States it was protocol to try and punish juveniles and their adult counterparts the same. This was the case up until 1899, when our first Juvenile Court System was established. It was agreed that this would be better for the youth because at early ages many didn’t know or understand the gravity that some of the crimes they committed had on other people’s lives. Originally “Early juvenile institutions in the United States were based on the English Bridewell institution which emphasized the teaching of life and trade skills. The idea behind teaching skills was that criminality was a result of the social environment and often was a survival mechanism. If youth were taught other skills, they were more likely to make meaningful contributions to society upon their release.”
Now more than one hundred years later, there are about fifty thousand juveniles in jail. This number might sound minuscule compared to the two million people in jail. Only about three percent of the total jail population are made up of juveniles. As stated by by the National Institute of Justice, “The Pittsburgh Youth Study found that 52 to 57 percent of juvenile delinquents continue to offend up to age 25.” What that means in a nutshell is that the because of the ineffective juvenile system the young that were misbehaving continued on their path of mischief and became the adults that are misbehaving. Three percent doesn’t sound like that much, but when you take into account that probably close to twenty-five percent of the adults in jail had some type of record prior to their eighteenth birthdays it makes you think a little bit.
What is wrong with the Juvenile Correctional System? Here is a better question, what is right? I went home to Albany this past weekend, and while I was there I decide to ask a few people what they thought about the Juvenile system. The first person I asked was my god-mother, Janelle Gentry. She has been working at the Dougherty County Youth Detention Center (YDC) for as long as I can remember. The first question I asked her was, “How effective do you think the rehabilitation system is for the people that come in here?” Her response was, “Contrary to what people are told by the news and the administration of these detention centers, there is little to no rehabilitating going on here. About eighty percent of the kids that are here, have been here before. They are supposed to come in to serve time for crimes they have committed and hopefully learn from them and not make the same mistake, but most go out and do the same things and are right back in here in a matter of days.” The next question I asked was, “What do you feel is the biggest reason why the system is ineffective?” Her response was, “The amount of solitary confinement these kids are in while here. Humans are social creatures. Our natural instinct is to be around creatures like ourselves. Only a few of the kids that come in here are in really bad spots mentally, most of the kids that come in here aren’t really bad kids. They say yes ma’am and no ma’am, but I can tell how long a child has been here. The longer one is in here, the more I can see them retreating from their calmer and happier state into the darker state due to the lack of socialization that they get. Then they are released back into society in a worse spot than before.”
The second interviewee was my former classmate Juwan Thomas. Throughout high school Juwan had spent some of his time in YDC. I asked him “What was one of the positives that he got out of being in there?” He said, “Some of the counselors in there were really good people and genuinely cared about me and wanted me to do better with myself. They took the time to talk to me whenever they could, but it was so many people in there that it wasn’t very often.” My next question was, “What was one negative from being in there?” His response was, “Well, just like there were good counselors, they had bad ones too. People just there to collect a check, they didn’t care about us at all. Some counselors would tell the inmates that we would never amount to anything and that we were a waste of functioning organs.”
As you can see the Juvenile System has major issued that need to be fixed for the system to be able to work. One of the well documented flaws in the Juvenile system is its prejudice against minorities in particular African American males. The inconsistency in the sentences for crimes by minorities have become more and more noticeable in recent years. In the 1999 National Report Series for Juvenile Justice Bulletin it stated, “Black youth accounted for 15% of the juvenile population in 1997 but 26% of all juvenile arrests and 44% of arrests for violent offenses. White males (9%) were less likely to have ever been arrested than black males (13%) or Hispanic males (12%). Further, a greater proportion of black males (7%) and Hispanic males (6%) than white males (4%) were arrested more than once.”
Another glaring issue in the Juvenile System is our swiftness to put one in it. If the Juvenile system was working in the way that it was originally created to do so, that would be a different story. I wouldn’t mind saying send one who is misbehaving to the system because they will come out better people than before they went it. I believe that there are two types of common juvenile crime. One type of Juvenile crime is violent crime. These crimes include but are not limited to murder, rape, theft. When these type of crimes occur, one should be punished to the fullest extent. The other type of crime is a non-violent crime more commonly known as misdemeanors. This includes things such drug-related crime, harassment, hazing, and probation violations. For these crimes, it is not always necessary to stick a child in the system. They are put in the system and institutionalized. To be institutionalized means that a person has been doing something so long that it becomes a normal part of there lives.
As aforementioned in the paper, there are around fifty thousand Juveniles incarcerated at this time right now. Of that fifty thousand, nearly ten thousand Juveniles are locked up for non-violent crimes. Eighty-five percent of the Juveniles locked up are for technical violations rather than new crimes, with another twenty percent coming from status offenses. Status offenses are infractions of the law that do not apply to adults but only youth because of their age. Some common status offenses a running away and truancy. You cannot tell me that because I did not want to go to school I should be put in solitary confinement for a certain period of time. If we believe that Juvenile truancy is an offense punishable by solitary confinement, why are we not arresting adults decided they did not want to go to College or adults who faked being sick simply because they did not want to go to work today. Molly Crabapple said it best, “I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're – have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books.”
There is hope for the future though, but only if as a society we decide to make a change to help our youth who are put in this cycle break out of it and learn from there mistakes and become better sisters, brothers, children, and citizens. One way that we can help fix the Juvenile system is to show support. We have to show them that we care. I am not talking about the fake support that we are giving now but genuine help and assistance where they need it. Just think back to your childhood, when you messed up or maybe failed a test. I am sure your parents reprimanded you or maybe even disciplined you, but did they ever stop being your parents and stop showing you love and affection. Well just imagine you making a mistake or doing something you probably didn’t have any business and they just stopped loving you. That is how many juveniles have been done, they made a mistake at an early age and their family, friends and society labeled them as “trouble” for the rest of their lives. We say we want to help and rehabilitate our youth, but are telling lies to ourselves. Be real with yourself, I have heard countless people say that given the chance we would do this or that to help this lost young person. But if we were given the chance how many of us would actually do so…False Support. Here is a statistic that really shows how little support our society actually gives to our juveniles. As I stated earlier there are nearly seven thousand correctional facilities in the United States, whereas only five thousand colleges. Our actions speak louder than our words, so what is this saying?
Another solution that I believe would be quite useful for improving our Juvenile Correctional System is by funding only what works. According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, in 2010, the federal government spent nearly eighty billion dollars in corrections. In the chart on page 8 it shows, that number is four times the amount that the government spent in 1980. Why is the government having to spend so much more money on jails than before? For one there are more people in jail and the number of repeat offenders is at an all-time high. What does that tell us? The system isn’t working, so why would we keep feeding our resources into something that does not work? If you had a car, that engine had gone dead and you cannot get the car to cut on, would you go buy a new set of tires for that car?
Have you ever been to a community center? Most are run-down, have limited space, and run on a very tight budget, but guess what else is commonly found in them? Children, on a daily basis kids go there to have a good time, socialize, and participate in sports. You can just listen to the many testimonials of children that grew up in the community center and it kept them away from gangs, drugs, and jail. These centers have long track records, that show they are beneficial for the youth and can have positive effects on their lives, why would we not put our money into these? I mentioned earlier about how these center’s budgets are extremely tight. Now let’s just say for hypothetical purposes a community center’s operating budget is around 85k and there are twenty thousand in the United States. Take half of the money that we are shoving into a broken system and put it there. Eighty billion divided evenly by twenty thousand is two million. That is a lot of money, now community centers have bigger spaces, better utilities, better supplies, have bigger operating budgets so they can higher more staff, all of that culminates into helping more children.
The Juvenile Correctional System is far from perfect, and isn’t fulfilling its intended purpose. Once in the Juvenile System, it makes it harder to ever get out of it. Statistics have shown that people who enter the system at an early age are more likely than not to stay in the system into adulthood. For us as a society to move forward and address this issue, we must first acknowledge that there is one. We must work to stop inequality and prejudice in our system. Also we must not be so swift in admitting our youth into the system for non legitimate reasons. We can help our youth by supporting them and showing that we do indeed care for them, and also investing in places that actually help them.