Constable: Juveniles need exit ramp on highway to prison

The banner on the brick wall outside the Cook County juvenile criminal courtroom where my son is about to testify preaches, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.”

My son, a college student home on spring break, says he worries that his testimony today might not help prepare a brighter future for the 14-year-old boy who robbed him. In a report about juvenile justice released the same day, experts share that fear.

“We need justice reinvestment from punitive systems to restorative, community-based systems,” says one of the lead researchers, Nancy Michaels, associate director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation at Roosevelt University, which has campuses in Schaumburg and Chicago.

Having long ago recognized that a kid who commits a crime isn't the same as an adult criminal, Illinois has been wrestling with this issue since the 19th Century, when reformers such as Jane Addams and other women championed the cause and persuaded the Illinois General Assembly to create the world's first juvenile court system in 1899.

Subpoenaed to appear in juvenile court, my 19-year-old son says the boy facing felony robbery charges looks younger in the courtroom than he did when they first came face to face. On that August night, shortly before midnight, the boy was in a group of teenagers riding bicycles through our suburban neighborhood, robbing folks enjoying block parties or saying goodbye to friends heading off to college. Using the language and threats you see in violent crime movies, the boys assured my son and a female friend that they were packing guns and would blow off heads if the victims didn't hand over their valuables. The cellphones they stole led to their undoing.

As soon as the robbers rode off into the night, my son and his friend ran to our house and called 911. Using a common app, our son and the responding officer tracked the stolen phone to a location several blocks away. Other police officers soon rounded up some of the young offenders.

After hearing testimony from the arresting officer and my son, a judge finds the boy guilty of felony robbery and related charges. No one — not my son, not me, not even the prosecutor or his staff — wants to send this boy to a detention center. The judge sentences the boy to 30 hours of public service and five years of probation, meaning that the kid needs to stay in school, do some work in the community and stay out of trouble until he's 19.

That seems just, even if some people consider anything short of a jail-like setting to be a slap on the wrist. But it's not that simple.

“Some folks think it's being soft on crime, but kids who are being detained aren't necessarily being rehabilitated,” Michaels says. She and the research team convened by Cook County Justice for Children, which included students and staff at Roosevelt as well as the Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice at Adler University, found that young offenders sent to juvenile correctional institutions were 38 times more likely than peers in the general population to compile criminal records as adults.

But any penalty handed out by the system came with a price. Kids put on probation were 14 time more likely to amass adult criminal records. Even youth who received “mild sentences,” such as community service, were still 2.3 times more likely to incur criminal records as adults.

“What would be more powerful and more effective would be to connect this kid with a community organization,” says Michaels, who says fulfilling a state requirement might not foster the empathy that can come by building relationships in a community. “We used to look out for each other and felt accountable to each other, and now we're accountable to the state.”

The report praises the work done by charity groups such as Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, a program started by priests and nuns that works with young offenders and their families in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood; the Urban Life Skills Mentoring Program in the Little Village neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side; and other programs that provide mentors, help support families, build relationships in communities and keep kids from entering the justice system in the first place.

It's not only more economical to spend money on those community programs than pay for incarceration, it's better for humanity, Michaels says.

“There's no perfect answer, but there are alternatives,” Michaels says. “It's less about accountability and more about responsibility.”