by Patrice Gaines
NNPA News Service

“The Cost of Incarceration” is an eight-part occasional series written by former Washington Post reporter Patrice Gaines, author and co-founder of The Brown Angel Center, a program in Charlotte, N.C., that helps formerly incarcerated women become financially independent.

Dwayne Betts

Dwayne Betts speaks for the children too deep in rural prisons for us to hear their voices. Betts knows their suffering. When he was 16, he and a friend robbed and carjacked a man in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Betts was carrying the gun and he was tried as an adult. One day he was an honors student and class treasurer – and the next, it seemed, he was sentenced to 10 years in an adult prison. He served almost nine years. His accomplice was sentenced to nine years and served eight.

Today, Betts has earned a degree from the University of Maryland, started a book club for boys, is a published poet and has a new memoir, “A Question of Freedom.” He is also a spokesman for the Campaign for Youth Justice, a program dedicated to ending the practice of trying, sentencing, and incarcerating youth under 18 in the adult criminal justice system.

“I think there should be utter refusal to send children into a facility with adults,” said Betts. “We understand what these places are like and still, we send kids to them. The public thinks it’s just murderers and rapists that are sentenced as adults, but it’s a wide spectrum of crimes, even crimes with circumstances that suggest an underlined mental illness.”

In addition to charging more and more children as adults, the U.S. has also moved toward lengthier sentences for children. Three states sentence children 16 and above as adults: Connecticut, New York and North Carolina. Nine states sentence children 17 and older as adults and 38 states sentence children 18 and older as adults. As many as 150,000 children are sent to adult jails in this country every year.

According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, “African-American youth overwhelmingly receive harsher treatment than white youth in the juvenile justice system at most stages of case processing.”

Betts left home a child and returned an adult.

“I grew up in prison,” he said. “I had no memories of adulthood, which means I had to shape everything for myself.”

Last year, the Human Rights Watch calculated that there are 2,574 youth offenders serving life without parole in the United States. The Supreme Count is grappling now with the question of whether children should receive such hopelessly long sentences. In 2005 the court stopped the death penalty for those under the age of 18 at the time of their crime.

“There is no flexibility in sentencing children,” Betts said. “Instead of judging people, they judge their crimes. The problem is within a robbery there is a wide spectrum of circumstances. No one takes that into consideration. Especially with young people, this spectrum means a lot.”

In the last decade scientific research has proven that adolescents have significant neurological deficiencies that affect their judgment. This means they are less culpable for their crimes – even violent ones – than adults. It is cause to rethink how we punish children. Furthermore, research suggests that when this adolescent age is compounded by risk factors such as abuse, neglect or poverty, the stage is set, psychologically, for violent behavior.

“The child savers who invented juvenile justice did not include all children in their conception of modern ‘protected’ childhood,” says William Bush, a professor at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and author of the forthcoming “Who Gets a Childhood?: Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas.”

“Notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability tended to envision white, middle-class children, while poor and working-class kids of various ethnic and racial groups tended to be viewed as more adult-like, more innately criminal, and less likely to benefit from treatment. The most blatant forms of exclusion from protected childhood were directed at African-American kids.”

DeAngelo Starnes, a Denver attorney and writer, says the stereotype of the black male as a criminal carries over to the young child.

“The judicial system takes a very hard line with black males. There is no step back to appreciate…he is still a child,” said Starnes.

“There was a period when white kids were rolling up to schools and shooting at classmates and teachers, especially after Columbine. You had commissions, studies, the President – everybody – to look at this problem. How come they don’t do that with black teenage crime? Why don’t they want to know the reason? Are they saying we have more inherent criminal activity in our community?”

Over the past two decades, there has been a re-examination of juvenile justice by experts and policy makers and some new models of treatment have sprung from the belief that children should not be on lockdown or in large institutions.

“We had a dysfunctional system and we had to change our mindset on how to best work with these kids,” said Mark Steward, who helped pilot the Missouri model in the 1970s. Steward heads the Missouri Youth Services Institute, a consulting agency that helps other states implement the Missouri model. Missouri state officials say the model has saved billions of dollars and reduced the number of repeat offenders.

The Missouri model focuses on therapy, education and job training and places young offenders in small group settings in cottages. Yet in spite of its success, Steward said many states are reluctant to make such dramatic changes.

“In the last 10 years half of the states have visited,” said Steward. “In all honesty I think they come in and see some of our places – no bars, no kids locked up, the staff called by first names, kids wearing their own clothes – and they just don’t believe it works.”

Steward said some 10 states are following the model and 10 others are trying.

“If you don’t have the right staff it won’t work,” Steward said. “The staff is the foundation to this kind of approach. They have to be involved and care.”

Steward offers visitors his data as proof of success.

 “Long story short, the program has been successful with about 90 percent of kids, keeping them from returning to the juvenile system or prison,” he said.