"JUVENILE CRIME"On May 26, 2000, the last day of classes before summer vacation,Nathaniel Brazil, a 13year-old honors student, took a stolen gun to schooland shot Barry Grunow, his English teacher, because Grunow would not lethim into a classroom to say goodbye to two girls. Palm Beach County,Florida, prosecutors charged the student as an adult with first-degreemurder.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 onlyyesterday 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 gointo the service. He can't buy cigarettes or beer, or a lottery ticket. He's achild," 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 ischarged 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 ajuvenile detention center for a few years. He is being held in a special wardreserved for teenagers in the county jail.Whether such a charge is appropriate is the same question being asked inother states with school shootings, as courts decide how to punish killerstoo young to see an R-rated movie. California's Little Hoover Commission in1994 reported some disturbing statistics about juvenile crime: 30-40% ofurbanized youth will be arrested before their 18th birthdays: 250,000California youths out of 3.5 million ore arrested annually: between 1983and 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 adultoffenders. Others believe that efforts should be focused on remediatingthe causes of juvenile crime instead of increasing the population ofteenaged prison inmates, which they believe rehabilitation efforts."Our juvenile justice system is outdated, designed to address infractionslike truancy and petty theft. These were serious problems a century ago,but they bear no resemblance to the 'routine' infractions of the presentday: everything from rape to crimes involving guns to cold-bloodedmurder," claims Tom Reilly, a district attorney in Massachusetts. "How canwe possibly treat cold-blooded juvenile killers as 'delinquents' and not asthe dangerous predators their own actions prove them to be? When aperson, any person, brings himself to a point where he deliberately murdersanother human being, there is no going back. A mere hope forrehabilitation is nothing but a gamble on other people's lives. The publichas a right to expect that a killer will never, ever have the chance to killagain Juveniles accused of murder should be tried as adults and, ifconvicted, sentenced as adults."Advocates of stronger punishment argue that the juvenile cour1 system isineffective because it does not hold juveniles fully accountable for theircrimes. They cite numerous cases of juvenile offenders being releasedwithout punishment, only to commit the same crimes again. If America'syouth are becoming more violent, they say, then solutions such aslengthier prison sentences for teenage offenders, however unpleasant,must be enforced in order to protect innocent victims. One commonrallying cry proclaims that if you "do the crime, do the time."Opponents of these increasing penalties, such as Laurence Steinberg, ofTemple University, are concerned about the implications of punishmentthrough adult vs. juvenile court. The adult system is an adversarial model;the juvenile system is a more cooperative model, allowing the court to takepersonal circumstances and age into account. In the juvenile system, thenames of juveniles are protected, and their record is erased when theybecome adults. Steinberg believes the juvenile system is better equippedto consider a broader range of circumstances in juvenile cases, thusallowing more appropriate means of punishment rather than oone-size-fits-all model of the adult system, which removes thisdiscretionary power from juvenile courts.Abbe Smith, deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute at HarvardLaw School, says, "Subjecting children to punishment with adults definescruel and unusual punishment. Sexual and physical assault are alreadyprevalent in adult prisons. One can imagine the scale of these offenses ifwe send in a fresh crop of younger and more vulnerable prey." Instead ofspending millions of dollars annually to house juvenile offenders in stateprisons, these funds would be better spent on juvenile justice programsthat 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 toconsider legislation to create some middle ground. For now, defendants likeBrazill can only be sentenced to hard time in a state prison for adults,perhaps for the rest of their lives. But some lawmakers are consideringlegislation that would allow judges to take age into consideration, perhapsallowing younger offenders to serve time in a juvenile center and then in astate prison rather than locking them away in a state prison.The debate will continue. On the one hand, we live in a society thatincreasingly demands that all offenders, whether adult or juveniles, be heldaccountable for their crimes. An offender who is off the street cannotcommit additional crimes. On the other hand, we live in a society that alsorecognizes the special pressures that juveniles face in a culture that isgenerally perceived to be a violent one, conditions which may needalternatives to increased or required prison terms.There are no easy answers. But lives are at stake, both for juvenileoffenders and their
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