Kids and Crime: Inside Juvenile Justice

Kids and Crime: Inside Juvenile Justice

Lots of answers, but no easy fixes

By Wendy Thomas Russell, Staff Writer

Article Launched: 05/23/2008 05:13:48 PM PDT

When Long Beach Police Sgt. Kevin Coy recently came across a 14-year-old girl riding in a car with a paroled gang member, her neck marbled in hickeys, he did what police officers are paid to do. He checked to see if any crimes had been committed - they hadn't - and let her go with a terse warning about the danger of her lifestyle.

What Coy didn't do was drive the girl home, contact her mother, refer her to a social-service program or delve much deeper into her situation. Was she abusing drugs? Was she sexually active? Was she failing school? Could she have been helped?

We may never know.

The story of this anonymous 14-year-old underscores the monumental need for individual attention, early intervention and a network of resources sorely lacking in Long Beach, according to a cadre of community advocates and others interviewed by the Press-Telegram. Without an organized system - and the funding to support it - the out-of-control train of juvenile crime here will almost certainly continue to blaze forward, they contend.

During a three-and-a-half-year period recently studied by the Press-Telegram, more than 10,000 Long Beach children were arrested or cited for crimes ranging from truancy and loitering to assault and armed robbery. More than a quarter of them were repeat offenders. Especially troubling, data shows, the number of annual juvenile arrests has remained relatively steady over the last 10 years, despite a downward trend nationwide.

In Long Beach and other urban centers, childhood problems often fall on the shoulders of police and schools, neither of which is fully equipped to deal with them, and neither of which should have to.

A report delivered to the City Council this month listed dozens of programs and agencies attempting to combat gang and youth crime here.

It may be unreasonable to hope the city will ever halt juvenile crime - especially given the state's budget crisis - but making a dent in the problem is achievable in the long term.

"It took quite a while until we got to this point," said Deputy City Manager Reginald Harrison, who helped generate the City Council report. "And it's going to take some time and investment before we can turn this ship around, so to speak."

Here are eight ways to help fuel the turnaround:

1. Intervene early

It's hardly surprising that teenagers make up the bulk of the juvenile court system's client base.

After all, teens are much more at risk of getting involved with drugs and alcohol, of resorting to violence to settle scores, of challenging authority, of suffering the onset of mental illness, and of looking outside their own dysfunctional families for comfort and stability.

But go back several years earlier, experts say, and you'll detect red flags beginning in elementary school: defiance of teachers, learning disabilities and low self-esteem, to name a few.

Focus on those children and their families, and the crime rate will fall, said Robert Di Stefano, CEO of ChildNet Youth & Family Services in Long Beach.

"In all my years that I've been dealing with delinquents, which is 30 to 35 years," Di Stefano said, "the single variable that's present in these children's backgrounds was an early problem, a serious problem, when they were 8, 9 and 10 years old."

Long Beach Juvenile Court Judge Gibson Lee agreed, saying the underlying issues rarely change over time, but the ability to deal with them becomes exponentially more difficult as children age.

"Take care of the twig before it gets bent and grows into a crooked tree," he said.

Police also have noted that violence is becoming increasingly prevalent among middle school children, a shift from years past.

"I think the best place to intervene, really, is late elementary school and middle school," Di Stefano said. "After middle school, they're really playing catch-up."

2. Focus on grades

The Long Beach Unified School District has made great strides on a number of fronts. It has pioneered school uniforms, created magnet schools that mix children of socioeconomic backgrounds, instituted dozens of programs aimed at at-risk children and improved its handling of special-needs kids.

But school dropout rates are still high - an estimated 21 percent of LBUSD high school student don't graduate - and thousands of students fail classes annually because they can't keep up with the schoolwork or have simply become truant.

Robert Taylor, Los Angeles County's chief probation officer, said the educational divide directly correlates with crime.

"When you get a kid in a (probation) camp, and he's 14 years old and he's reading at a third-grade level, that didn't happen the day he arrived at the camp," Taylor said. "This kid has been neglected for a long period of time throughout the system."

National statistics show that 85 percent of juvenile offenders have trouble reading, and that's a percentage that haunts Eleanore Schmidt, director of Library Services for the city of Long Beach.

She said introducing low-income children to books and libraries before kindergarten is essential. And she cited the Long Beach Public Library Foundation's "Raising a Reader" program as an excellent model for doing just that.

"Literacy is really, I think, one of the greatest challenges that we have in this city," she said.

Grades play into children's sense of self-esteem, which lays the foundation for their ability to ward off drugs and alcohol, stay out of gangs and avoid other potentially destructive behavior, experts say.

And the cycle is vicious: Poor grades beget insecurities, which beget behavioral problems, which beget poor grades.

In a few short years, the child can be lost.

"School is where a kid spends the majority of their time growing up," said attorney Carly Munson, speaking at a conference hosted by the Children's Institute in Los Angeles last October. "If that's not working well for the kid, that's a huge piece of their puzzle that's missing."

3. Help parents be parents

One need not speak long about juvenile crime before the conversation invariably steers to the subject of parenting.

"The only way we're going to change the child's mindset is to change what's going on in the home," said LBPD Lt. Ty Hatfield. "Until we do that, any progress the child makes in the system will fall apart once they're back in the control of their families."

Hatfield, who teaches a 15-hour parenting course, titled "Redirecting Child Behavior," said parents who go through the free class rave about it afterward. But getting them to show up in the first place is a constant challenge.

"To be frank, it's been hard to fill," Hatfield said. "Parents don't seem to be too interested in it, especially the ones who come here and pick up their kids" after they've been in trouble with the law.

"It would be nice," he added, if parents would be "encouraged or supported to take a parenting class to be more effective in the home."

Kathy Hughes, ChildNet's vice-president of community-based services, agreed that offering classes and support groups to parents is pivotal, but there also must be enticements provided - such as transportation and childcare.

"Who's going to watch (a mother's) five wild kids running up and down the hallway while she's in there figuring out how to parent them," Hughes said. "You have to make everything so convenient."

Chief Probation Officer Taylor also maintained that more parents need to be taught the importance of education, so they buy into the school system and can better direct aid to their own kids.

"Unless the parents advocate for their children," he said, "nobody is going to tell them what's wrong with their child or how they can get additional services."

4. Create a network

Not everything works for everyone.

A child's age, upbringing and neighborhood are just a few of the many factors affecting the success of one program and the failure of another.

The good news is that the city of Long Beach, the school district and numerous nonprofit organizations offer a wealth of opportunities for young people.

There are mentoring programs, such as Operation Jumpstart and Long Beach BLAST; after-school programs, such as the Boys & Girls Club and the Police Athletic League; gang-intervention programs; peaceful-resolution workshops; and an array of substance-abuse centers, mental-health services and parenting courses.

Getting people connected to these groups - and attracting the funds and volunteers to keep them alive and growing - is the tough part.

"I think what's missing is really a comprehensive approach to working with community-based organizations," said Jessica Quintana, the executive director of Centro Community Hispanic Association (CHA).

She said the city's strategy is disjointed, particularly in the black, Hispanic and Cambodian neighborhoods where needs are highest.

"They really need to start to work with their ethnic, community-based organizations," she said.

Di Stefano said the key lies in collaboration - and that's not always easy to attain.

"Teachers want to teach," he said. "Counselors want to counsel... People's natural inclination is to do what they do and let other people do what they do, and it's not viewed as a whole."

Deputy City Manager Harrison said the need for collaboration has been noted, too, by city officials. One grant being sought by the city, he said, would provide for a "violence prevention coordinator" who would attempt to coordinate services already offered throughout the city.

"So much of the activities are fragmented," he said. "Oftentimes, parents aren't aware of referral opportunities or program opportunities."

5. Don't let go

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Nash said studies have shown that children's behavior improves under court supervision, but that kids often slide back into old habits when released from that control.

That being the case, he said, a lack of persistence - or "continuum of care," as it's often called - may be the single greatest threat to the juvenile justice system.

"Continuity of service is important on a lot of different levels," he said.

Improving the system may hinge on bringing police, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, social workers and mental-health professionals closer together - and on working cases long after court supervision has ended.

At a Children's Institute conference in October, Nash spoke about a pilot program in Pasadena aimed at improving how the courts deal with "crossover youth," those who commit crimes while already under the supervision of the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

He told a story that illustrated the difficulty of getting law-enforcement officers to embrace different roles.

"I met with about 300 probation officers about three years ago," he said. "I told them that they need to think and act like social workers, in addition to being probation officers. And they wanted to lynch me. So it wasn't a universally shared proposition."

Still, Nash said steps have been made since then, and continue to be made. The pilot program, for instance, is proof that the model can change, he said.

Each child is assessed by a panel of experts, who create a comprehensive plan based on the child's family life, school situation, mental health and criminal behavior. Even more unusual, the child is tracked, and continues to be helped, long after the case ends.

"They're doing remarkable work in a way that's never been done before in our county," Nash said.

Giving that level of attention to every juvenile delinquent in Los Angeles County is one of Nash's dreams.

"To me, that would be the ultimate. We can only pray that that eventually occurs," he said.

6. Think holistically

The pilot program for crossover youths has its roots in a growing trend aimed at using holistic approaches to healing families in crisis. The most popular involves a national initiative known as "Wraparound."

ChildNet's Hughes described Wraparound as a "do-whatever-it-takes approach to keeping kids at home, stabilized and avoiding out-of-home placement" by giving families various kinds of support - financial, emotional, psychiatric and otherwise.

While it's been around for more than a decade, the strategy is only now becoming entrenched in Long Beach.

"The new kid in town," Hughes said, "is Wraparound."

The Wraparound model provides parents and children with counselors, offers crisis intervention and job services, and links families to an array of low- or no-cost resources. It's funded through the county and based on referrals from the Probation Department, Mental Health Department and DCFS.

Another model lauded for its success is called Multisystemic Therapy, a home-based service that links therapists to families with children, ages 12 to 17, who are on probation.

During a period of two to five months, therapists concentrate on empowering parents to identify strengths, develop natural support systems and address specific problems - such as parental substance abuse, high stress and poor relationships between partners.

The small number of families handled by each therapist allows for constant contact and better results.

7. Fund what works

Di Stefano, of ChildNet, likes to tell the story of a 12-year-old boy named Darren.

Five years ago, Darren was labeled a chronic problem and sent to the Long Beach Youth Home, a residential facility for troubled children run by ChildNet.

His grades were failing. He was self-conscious and defiant. When teachers spoke to him, he often looked away.

When Darren got to the youth home, he underwent a physical examination. The results were astounding: He was nearly deaf in one ear and hard-of-hearing in the other. He had been turning his head to the side not to defy teachers but because he had been struggling to hear them.

Nine months after receiving hearing aids, Darren was a model student, earning A's and B's in a regular classroom again.

"Once he started to understand that it wasn't his fault...he blossomed," Di Stefano said.

Still, despite its excellent reputation in the juvenile justice system, the Long Beach Youth Home fell victim last fall to dwindling resources and too few referrals.

It shut its doors in October. "It was just really a sad thing," Hughes said.

The lack of funding to support wayward youth is ironic, given the dollars spent on juvenile prisons.

According to a state estimate, taxpayers paid $218,000 a year in 2007 to house each youth at the California Department of Corrections' Division of Juvenile Justice, which has a population of about 2,000.

"It's difficult to find funding for the more incipient criminal pattern," Di Stefano said. "It's easy to find funding for the kids who are in juvenile prisons...because it's necessary at that point."

Harrison acknowledged that funding is tight, which necessitates a greater understanding of juvenile crime prevention throughout the city.

To that end, he said the city intends to involve universities in studying these prevention methods and "ensure that these programs, these vast array of programs, are targeting the at-risk youth that they are intended to target."

8. Take ownership

While police and schools are on the front lines of Long Beach juvenile-crime problem, they aren't necessarily the best-equipped to provide aid to children in crisis. The problem is: No one else is either.

Society continues to show ambivalence toward taking control of others' children, experts say, and where to the draw the line between rehabilitation and punishment remains controversial.

What appears to be certain is that communities, such as Long Beach, pay the consequences for the failings of their youngsters.

"There are families that cannot or will not control their children," Di Stefano said. "And we, as a society, have a vested interest in seeing that that gets done."

To make his point, Di Stefano cited the death of 13-year-old Jose Cano in the 14th Street Park last June.

In addition to the seven juveniles charged in connection with the stabbing, a 31-year-old mother has been accused of murder because she allegedly drove the youths - including her son - to and from the crime scene.

"If you do the math here," he said, "she was having babies at 15 years old. We're all outraged now about how she could do that, but where were we when she was 15 years old and trying to cope with being a mother?"

Staff Writer Tracy Manzer contributed to this report.

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