"JUVENILE CRIME"

On May 26, 2000, the last day of classes before summer vacation,

Nathaniel Brazil, a 13year-old honors student, t ook a stolen gun to school

and shot Barry Grunow, his English teacher, because Grunow would not let

him into a classroom to say goodbye to two girls. Palm Beach County,

Florida, prosecutors charged the student as an adult with first-degree

murder.

In his room in a stark triplex on H Street, his mother, Polly Powell,

wondered how anyone could call him an adult when it seems like only

yesterday that her son was playing in the dirt with a yellow Tonka truck.

"He is not a man," she said. He doesn't shave. He can't drive a car, or go

into the service. He can't buy cigarettes or beer, or a lottery ticket. He's a

child," she said, and like any other he is impulsive, eager to impress friends,

ignorant of the long-term consequences of the things he does. He is

charged as an adult, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison,

rather than as a juvenile, which might have ended in his being sent to a

juvenile detention center for a few years. He is being held in a special ward

reserved for teenagers in the county jail.

Whether such a charge is appropriate is the same question being asked in

other states with school shootings, as courts decide how to punish killers

too young to see an R-rated movie. California's Little Hoover Commission in

1994 reported some disturbing statistics about juvenile crime: 30-40% of

urbanized youth will be arrested before their 18th birthdays: 250,000

California youths out of 3.5 million ore arrested annually: between 1983

and 1992 the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes doubled.

Many feel that current law is inadequate to reduce juvenile crime,

contending that juvenile offenders should be treated on a par with adult

offenders. Others believe that efforts should be focused on remediating

the causes of juvenile crime instead of increasing the population of

teenaged prison inmates, which they believe rehabilitation efforts.

"Our juvenile justice system is outdated, designed to address infractions

like truancy and petty theft. These were serious problems a century ago,

but they bear no resemblance to the 'routine' infractions of the present

day: everything from rape to crimes involving guns to cold-blooded

murder," claims Tom Reilly, a district attorney in Massachusetts. "How can

we possibly treat cold-blooded juvenile killers as 'delinquents' and not as

the dangerous predators their own actions prove them to be? When a

person, any person, brings himself to a point where he deliberately murders

another human being, there is no going back. A mere hope for

rehabilitation is nothing but a gamble on other people's lives. The public

has a right to expect that a killer will never, ever have the chance to kill

again Juveniles accused of murder should be tried as adults and, if

convicted, sentenced as adults."

Advocates of stronger punishment argue that the juvenile cour1 system is

ineffective because it does not hold juveniles fully accountable for their

crimes. They cite numerous cases of juvenile offenders being released

without punishment, only to commit the same crimes again. If America's

youth are becoming more violent, they say, then solutions such as

lengthier prison sentences for teenage offenders, however unpleasant,

must be enforced in order to protect innocent victims. One common

rallying cry proclaims that if you "do the crime, do the time."

Opponents of these increasing penalties, such as Laurence Steinberg, o f

Temple University, are concerned about the implications of punishment

through adult vs. juvenile court. The adult system is an adversarial model;

the juvenile system is a more cooperative model, allowing the court to take

personal circumstances and age into account. In the juvenile system, the

names of juveniles are protected, and their record is erased when they

become adults. Steinberg believes the juvenile system is better equipped

to consider a broader range of circumstances in juvenile cases, thus

allowing more appropriate means of punishment rather than o

one-size-fits-all model of the adult system, which removes this

discretionary power from juvenile courts.

Abbe Smith, deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard

Law School, says, "Subjecting children to punishment with adults defines

cruel and unusual punishment. Sexual and physical assault are already

prevalent in adult prisons. One can imagine the scale of these offenses if

we send in a fresh crop of younger and more vulnerable prey." Instead of

spending millions of dollars annually to house juvenile offenders in state

prisons, these funds would be better spent on juvenile justice programs

that have been shown to work, appropriate after school activities,

counseling, and funds for poverty-ravaged neighborhoods.

Cases like Nathaniel Brazill's have caused some Florida lawmakers t o

consider legislation to create some middle ground. For now, defendants like

Brazill can only be sentenced to hard time in a state prison for adults,

perhaps for the rest of their lives. But some lawmakers are considering

legislation that would allow judges to take age into consideration, perhaps

allowing younger offenders t o serve time in a juvenile center and then in a

state prison rather than locking them away in a state prison.

The debate will continue. On the one hand, we live in a society that

increasingly demands that all offenders, whether adult or juveniles, be held

accountable for their crimes. An offender who is off the street cannot

commit additional crimes. On the other hand, we live in a society that also

recognizes the special pressures that juveniles face in a culture that is

generally perceived to be a violent one, conditions which may need

alternatives to increased or required prison terms.

There are no easy answers. But lives are at stake, both for juvenile

offenders and their victims.