Juvenile Justice, Georgia Style

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York, NY)

August 22, 2002 Thursday

Trouble With the Law;
Parents, groups, decry system treating juveniles as adults

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Last in a series

Atlanta - The phone shrilled through the two-story, suburban house at about 2 a.m., waking up parents who knew that when the phone rang at that hour, it was either a wrong number or bad news.

This wasn't a wrong number.

As Glenwood Ross, an economist and college professor, groggily held the receiver to his ear, a detective announced down the line that his 15-year-old son was under arrest for an armed robbery committed earlier that night.

"They said, 'We've got your boy here.' I said, 'No you don't, he's in bed!' I even went to the bedroom to check," said Ross, who recites the details as if they happened yesterday, not six years ago. But Ross' son, Glenwood Ross III, known to family and friends as Trey, wasn't in bed. As his parents would learn while the dark yielded to dawn, Trey had finished a baby-sitting job at a nearby house, come home and then sneaked out after midnight to go riding in a car with two 19-year-old friends. Somewhere outside the tranquility of the comfortable, tree-lined neighborhood where Trey lived with his parents and younger sister, one of the three hatched the idea of robbing someone, changing the family's lives forever.

According to Trey, it was his older companions' idea, a way to get money so they could rent an apartment together. Cruising the dimly lit streets, they spotted a lone woman in a motel parking lot and steered the car in. Trey says he remained in the back seat while the two men, one holding a gun, forced the woman to give up her purse.

By the time the case had gone to court, the men had both blamed their 15-year-old passenger for the holdup, saying that, even though he didn't have a driver's license, he had developed the robbery plan and had prodded them to carry it out. All they wanted to do was look for girls, one of the older defendants said when he testified against Trey in exchange for lenience.

As a juvenile charged with armed robbery, Trey was automatically treated as an adult under Georgia law, and he faced a mandatory 10-year prison term, with no chance of parole. But the case against Trey was shaky, Ross said. The victim couldn't identify him, he had no prior record and the prosecution's key witnesses were the two others accused. Both testified against Trey and received less jail time than he did.

"We wanted to go through with the trial process because we believed him. There was no evidence that said he did it," said Trey's mother, Billie Ross, the president of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice, which is lobbying to overturn laws requiring juveniles to be tried as adults. "There was nothing that made us think if we went to trial they'd be able to prove he did anything. He felt the same way."

They were wrong. After a four-day trial, Trey was convicted. Now 21, he is six years into his 10-year prison term, a situation his parents believe could have been averted if they were white. "I hesitate to say it, but a part of me says yes, that is the case," Billie Ross said. "If he had been white, I think they would not have automatically taken the word of those older boys. They'd have looked at his life, his family, looked at us, seen that he came from a stable home life with two parents in a decent neighborhood."

They also might have considered Trey's health problems: He had spent much of the previous school year at home with Crohn's disease, a serious intestinal ailment that ultimately required surgery. "If we'd have come from a prominent white family, they might have done that," Billie Ross said. "But I think part of it is there seems to be this conspiracy against young black males. People are afraid of them because so many of them have committed crimes. There's this assumption that, because he's black, he must have done it."

As studies show that more than 75 percent of the youths charged with felonies in Georgia are black, parents and human rights advocates are placing much of the blame on a legal system that they say views black teenage boys as throwaway kids without considering their backgrounds. Since the Georgia legislature passed Senate Bill 440 in May 1994, requiring that 13- to 16-year-olds be treated as adults for certain crimes, 76 percent of the more than 3,800 juveniles arrested for SB440 offenses have been black. Cases involving white teenagers were twice as likely to be transferred out of the adult system back into juvenile court, according to a random sample of cases studied by the Georgia Indigent Defense Council.

"I think the numbers indicate race is a factor," Trey's father said. "Who's the district attorney? Who are the judges? They're white men. They're not going to identify with some black kid."

Supporters of harsher treatment for juveniles, and some researchers who have studied the racial disparities, warn against attributing the numbers to racism. In deciding whether to try a case in juvenile or adult court, factors such as a juvenile's history of trouble with the law may come into play. In such instan- ces, black juveniles living in crime-ridden neighborhoods with more police patrols than white suburbs are more likely to have rap sheets, said Howard Snyder of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, who has directed several studies looking at racial disparities in the treatment of teenage offenders. Even if those rap sheets are for minor or nonviolent crimes, they can affect the decision on how to handle a more serious case.

"If a kid has been to juvenile court 15 times before, it's easier to argue he's not going to be amenable to treatment," said Snyder, who acknowledges that the heavier policing of mainly black urban areas starts the bias ball rolling against black children even before they reach court.

In New York State last year, for example, 654 black juveniles were arrested for felonies compared with 87 whites, a disparity critics attribute to differences in police patrols from neighborhood to neighborhood. "And if there is a bias, even with minor crimes, that's a way of developing a longer record and having your case transferred to adult court," Snyder said.

Wording of laws also can have an unintended racial bias. An Illinois state law mandates adult treatment for juveniles charged with weapon or drug offenses within 1,000 feet of public housing projects, resulting in some counties with 99 percent black conviction rates under the law. The law is guaranteed to nail blacks, say critics, because few whites are found around public housing projects.

After arrest, the bias continues into the courtroom. When faced with white and black teenagers accused of the same offenses, judges are more likely to show lenience toward those whose home lives are considered stable, said Melissa Sickmund of the National Center for Juvenile Justice. Again, she said, bias that does not necessarily constitute blatant racism comes into play. "You might have a kid standing in front of the judge and he's black and he's got a single mom who's raising him and she works three jobs and is hardly able to supervise that kid at home, and he lives in a terrible neighborhood," Sickmund said. "And then you have a kid who's white, and his family is standing behind him in court and the father has a good job and the mother promises she can be home for him in the afternoon and he's just been accepted to college. Which kid are you going to take a chance on? It may not be a race decision, but it is one compounded by race. It's not fair, but the juvenile justice system can't change that."

But parents such as the Rosses say that it all adds up to racism and that thousands of young, black men are paying outlandish prices for teenage misbehavior that might have been handled far differently were they white. "At first I was angry he'd sneaked off," Glenwood Ross said. "He had violated our rules. Then I said, 'Wait a minute! He's a kid, and kids do dumb stuff.' Then I got angry at the harshness of the system. It just doesn't seem fair to me."

Since Trey went to prison, his sister has turned 16. His mother has earned her master's degree in social work. His father has earned his doctorate in economics. He has missed family vacations, including a Christmas cruise to the Cayman Islands. He didn't graduate high school with his classmates, get a driver's license or attend his prom, and he marked his 21st birthday behind bars. For the rest of the family, living in a quiet neighborhood of winding, tree-lined roads and spacious homes with long driveways, it's as if a vital link of the chain binding them together has been broken. "There's just this opening, this gap, that he's not able to fill," says his mother, struggling to explain the ache that comes with each family milestone Trey misses. "Sometimes I look at it as, OK, maybe he needs this, maybe something needed to happen so he'll grow up and be successful. But then I get really, really angry and sad about the things he's missing out on."

If the system works against professional, relatively moneyed black families such as Trey's, it's far worse for those without such advantages.

From the moment of arrest to the sentencing, parents and researchers say, black minors are at a disadvantage. For some, the problem is in the defense. More black teens than whites come from families that cannot afford top-rate attorneys, leaving them to rely upon overworked public defenders or cut-rate private lawyers. Building Blocks for Youth, a Washington organization, studied 1998 arrest records of juveniles in 18 counties and found that whites were twice as likely as blacks to have private lawyers. The same study indicated that youths represented by private lawyers were less likely to be convicted and more likely to have their cases sent back to juvenile court.

A sample of SB440 cases surveyed by Georgia's Indigent Defense Council showed that about 40 percent of black minors pleaded guilty, compared with 29 percent of whites. That could be a result of more black juveniles having long rap sheets that prompted a plea deal to avoid a longer sentence, or it could be that more black teens have less-aggressive defenses than whites.

"When you don't have any experience in the justice system, you're clueless. I didn't know what we were dealing with until we were in court," said the mother of one 17-year-old prisoner, who was 14 when he was pulled out of his ninth-grade class and arrested for rape. The Department of Correction's mug shot shows a serious but baby-faced teenager carefully holding a card in front of his chest that reads in large, black letters: JUVENILE.

His mother, who requested anonymity to protect her son, remembers trying to navigate her way through a confusing legal system and trying to find a private investigator to help defend her son. "It was like playing eenie, meenie, mynie moe, she said. "You don't know who to ask. You don't know who's good and who's not. I went through the whole yellow pages looking for someone who specialized in juvenile crime. There wasn't anyone."

Janice McDaniel hired a private attorney for her son, Jonathan David Barnett, 16, who was arrested in 1998 and accused of helping rob a man delivering Chinese food to a friend's house. Also arrested was McDaniel's older son, Christopher. At 17, he was already an adult under Georgia's penal code, but Jonathan's age made him an SB440 case.

The lawyer she hired tried to persuade Jonathan to plead guilty to armed robbery. The alternative was a probable life sentence, because the charges included kidnapping and aggravated assault, the lawyer warned McDaniel. But Jonathan and Christopher insisted on a trial. Christopher was convicted of armed robbery and given 15 years. Jonathan was found guilty of armed robbery, criminal trespass and false imprisonment and is serving 20 years.

McDaniel believes that her being a black, single mother put her and her sons at a disadvantage from the start, leading everyone from police to prosecutors and the judge to railroad them through the system. She charges that a team of detectives burst into her house late one night after pounding on the door, ransacked the home and never read her sons their rights before handcuffing them and taking them away.

"From Day One I've been saying this. We were not treated right," McDaniel said. Nearly three years after the arrests, she is still confused about the laws that sent her sons to prison for so long. Neither of them wielded the gun used in the robbery, nor the frying pan used to hit the deliveryman. Court testimony shows that Jonathan was outside the house when the robbery took place and that Christopher suggested calling the whole thing off when the group of teenagers began getting cold feet.

Still, Jonathan got twice as many years as the friend who slammed the victim in the head with the pan, and Jonathan and Christopher both got more time than the co-defendant with the gun.

"We don't understand what happened. Why us?" McDaniel asked, shaking her head back and forth. "We don't understand what happened." What's worse, she said, is that her sons are jailed 100 miles apart from each other, and each prison is about a two-hour drive from Atlanta. Without a car, she's able to visit Jonathan only by catching a ride with another woman who visits the prison regularly. She hasn't seen Christopher in several months, McDaniel admits, breaking down in sobs that subside when bitterness takes hold. "I'm angry. I wanted to see my children go to college. I missed their graduation. I missed their prom. I missed their birthdays. I missed having something to brag about. I even miss them messing with their little brothers."

It's not just her sons who have been sentenced, she said. "It's like when they're sentencing the children, they're sentencing the whole family."

Robert Keller, the district attorney in Clayton County, where the crime occurred, rejects McDaniel's argument that her sons should have been either acquitted or convicted of lesser crimes.

Their participation on the fringes of the crime - by helping plan it and by sharing in the proceeds - makes them as culpable as the rest, Keller said. "The activity of one is the activity of all," he said, explaining the law that critics say leads to a disproportionate number of black arrests. That's because far more black children than white fall into gangs and under the spell of gang leaders - often older companions who lure them into crime.

"Is it fair for the kid who's riding with someone who commits an armed robbery to serve the same amount of time as the kid who pointed the gun?" asked Billie Ross, who watched Trey's adult co-defendants lay the blame on him and then walk away with lighter sentences. One of them pleaded guilty to robbery, got 7 years, and was paroled in February. The other served less time. Trey's earliest possible release date is January 2007.

The Rosses remember one juror coming to them in tears after the trial, saying she didn't know that the law required Trey to spend at least 10 years in prison if found guilty.

Now, as leaders in the struggle to repeal SB440, the Rosses live with the frustration of trying to convince other families who don't have children in prison that SB440 is a law that should be changed before it hits them, too. Even among blacks, whose children are most at risk of arrest, it's a battle. Glenwood Ross remembers trying to get a meeting of black clergymen to see SB440 from his point of view. "One guy stood up and said, 'You spare the rod, you spoil the child,'" Ross said, adding that he might have thought the same thing before Trey's problems began.

McDaniel acknowledges her sons did wrong and deserved punishment. So do the Rosses, and so does Kim Williams, whose son is serving 10 years for armed robbery. But they say they were cut down by laws and by people who assumed the worst of their sons because of skin color and didn't give them the same benefits white teens accused of the same things might have enjoyed.

"A lot of children get caught up in the system, but they don't take time to find out anything about what's going on in the child's home. There could be something in their school or home. He might be in depression. And one thing you're not going to do is tell me I didn't raise my kids the right way," McDaniel said, her voice rising in anger and her eyes filling with tears. "I know I did it right. You can't tell me that because I'm a single parent, my kids were automatically bad."

But that is often what happens to people such as McDaniel's son when they come before judges, the overwhelming majority of whom are white and have preconceived notions of what constitutes a solid family life, said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a former public defender and now a law professor at New York University's law school. Taylor-Thompson is also the academic director of the criminal justice program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice and has done research on racial differences in the handling of juvenile offenders in New York State. New York's laws regarding juveniles are considered among the toughest in the nation, with all teenagers considered adults once they reach 16 and those 14 to 16 automatically charged as adults for selected crimes that range from arson to murder.

Sometimes, even if a teenager has a working mother and no father at home, there might be other authority figures that could warrant a teenager being treated as a juvenile rather than sent into adult court, Taylor-Thompson said, but this is rarely considered by those making such decisions.

"I think we make presumptions based on what we think is ... a safe choice, and that is often based on our own cultural biases and experiences," she said. "The fact that a mother is present and may be available at home in the afternoon gives you some sense there's a structure in place. But if you took a kid of color, even if a mother is working a number of jobs, it doesn't mean there aren't other structures in place for that kid. It may not be the conventional structure - it may be there is an uncle, or grandparents, or other extended family members. But because it's not our idea of the conventional norm, it's not considered, and that's racism."

Keller, the Clayton County district attorney, bristles when he hears accusations of racial bias in the handling of Georgia's youngest offenders. If anything, Keller said, prosecutors try to find mitigating circumstances to warrant sending cases back into the juvenile system, something they are permitted to do with SB440 cases. He acknowledges that the cases most likely to be waived back to juvenile court - aggravated sodomy and aggravated child molestation offenses - are also the most likely to involve white defendants. That's because of the defendants' backgrounds, not their skin color, he said.

"In child molestation cases, we've found that a lot of the time the defendants have been victimized in the past, so what we end up doing is looking at the circumstances and trying to see if there is any way we can keep this in juvenile court," Keller said. "But quite candidly, when it is an armed robbery, we can't make the guns disappear. We don't care if you're black or white or whatever."

The cases least likely to be waived to juvenile court are those involving mainly black defendants, such as armed robbery.

Parents and opponents of SB440 say that the consideration given to alleged child molesters should be granted to all juvenile defendants and that not giving them all equal consideration is unfair. If anything, they say, children accused of violent crimes such as assault and armed robbery are the most in need of counseling and special consideration, rather than incarceration with hardened criminals.

"I was just a kid," said Glenn Sims, now 20 and serving 10 years for an armed robbery committed at age 16. In the years leading up to the crime, he lived with an abusive uncle, saw his father fall victim to drug addiction and witnessed his mother being beaten repeatedly by a stepfather.

It's the sort of background that opponents of SB440 say prosecutors should take into consideration. "You just don't have a child do something like this and not look at that child's environment. Something very messed up is going on in their lives," said Elaine Brown, a one-time leader of the Black Panther Party and a writer who helped found Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice. Her book, "The Condemnation of Little B," examines the case of Michael Lewis, who was charged with murder in Atlanta in 1997 when he was 13 and sentenced to life in prison. "We're not saying they shouldn't pay some price, but there's the question of equality in terms of race, and there's the question of humanity. How are we going to resolve street crime - by arresting a bunch of kids?"

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York, NY)

August 22, 2002 Thursday

Paying a High Price For the Crimes of Youth

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Savannah, Ga. - Most mothers convinced of a son's innocence would rejoice if 20 years were sliced off his prison sentence. Not Ilona Griffin. There's not much to celebrate when life plus 65 years becomes life plus 45 years.

"The only luck I've had so far is that he's kept his sanity," she says of her son, Melvin, now 26, who was a 16-year-old high school student when he was arrested in July 1992. Melvin was accused of taking part in the robbery and shooting death of a man on a Savannah street. This was two years before passage of Senate Bill 440, which requires 13- to 16-year-olds charged with such crimes to be charged as adults, so Melvin might have been expected to be treated as a juvenile and spared an adult prison sentence.

But the events that led to his case ending up in adult court are, critics say, evidence that even before SB440, black minors were far more likely than whites to have their cases treated as felonies.

Though Melvin was a juvenile at the time of the crime, he wasn't charged with the murder for several months, until he had turned 17 and become an adult in the eyes of the Georgia penal code. He was convicted in a jury trial.

Ilona Griffin, who met Melvin's American father when he was serving in the Army in her native Germany, still doesn't understand fully what happened. "They put him in juvenile for being in possession of a gun. When he turned 17, he was moved to county jail. Then he was tried as an adult. That's the part I can't comprehend," says Griffin, who estimates she has spent about $40,000 on attorneys and private investigators in her attempts to appeal the case's outcome. Not being familiar with the ways of the court system has led to missteps.

The first attorney was recommended by a colleague, but Griffin didn't realize he had no experience in criminal cases. She could afford him, though, so she hired him, only to learn he wanted Melvin to work out a plea bargain. He did not fight vigorously enough to have the case waived back to juvenile court, Griffin says, or explain to her why prosecutors waited until Melvin had reached adulthood before filing charges.

Martina Correia of Amnesty International in Georgia says a better attorney would have fought to have Melvin charged as a juvenile, before prosecutors had the time to build a bigger case against him. By the time he went to trial, Melvin faced at least four charges - murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery and possession of a firearm - virtually guaranteeing a stiff sentence even if he made a plea bargain. The best offer prosecutors had in exchange for a guilty plea was life in prison. "In this case, Melvin just got the short end of the stick," Correia says.

The Griffins hired a new attorney to handle an appeal, which was based, in part, on the recanting of the key prosecution witness' testimony. The witness, Melvin's co-defendant, wrote a statement in 1997 saying he had accused Melvin of being the gunman to avoid a harsh sentence for himself. But the new attorney ended up in jail himself, sentenced to 10 years in 1998 after admitting he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars of clients' fees.

"I retained an attorney. I paid the attorney. I paid the private detective. I even paid for my transcripts," says Griffin, whose files on the case are as thick as two large phone directories. "I've been paying and paying ever since I can remember. I really don't understand why this is going on, and there never, ever seems to be an end to it."

Melvin is scheduled to go before the parole board in 2007. In the meantime, Griffin says he has obtained a high school diploma, but spends most of his time cutting grass and making license plates. The most she has to show for her persistence has been the 20-year sentence reduction.

"Putting him in prison - I thought that was like telling me to just throw him out in the garbage," Griffin says, shaking her head in disgust. "You can't just take all the kids and put them in a prison and throw the key away. In the long run it's not going to work out. You're going to have too many of them in there."

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York, NY)

August 21, 2002 Wednesday

Doubting the System;
Laws on juveniles stir debate over punishment and racism

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Second in a series

Morrow, Ga. - Maybe if she had been stricter with him. Maybe if she hadn't married an abusive man. Or maybe if she hadn't let him live with a dad who was a drug addict and an uncle who she says beat him up. Maybe if, as a 16-year-old girl growing up in Roosevelt, Long Island, she had stayed in school and not dropped out to have a baby.

Kim Williams recites the "maybes" of her life like a wistful mantra as she discusses her son, Glenn Sims, who was 16 in November 1998 when he was arrested in an Atlanta suburb and charged with holding up a convenience store. Williams was stunned. Sims was no angel, but Williams said she'd never expected him to be accused of such a thing.

"He knew better, because we never raised him that way," said Williams, sitting in the small, one-bedroom apartment she was sharing with her 13-year-old daughter until money worries led them to move in with her parents in May. Williams assumed that Sims' young age would bring time in a juvenile facility, or perhaps house arrest and probation. She urged him to confess, thinking honesty would be rewarded with lighter treatment. "I thought there was some kind of a law for first-time offenders," she said.

What Williams didn't know, and what she and thousands of other parents have come to find out, is that under a law passed with little fanfare in 1994 under the benign name of the "School Safety and Juvenile Justice Reform Act" Sims was an adult in the eyes of Georgia's penal code. His guilty plea brought a mandatory 10-year prison term with no chance of parole.

"He was scared, and I'll tell you, when the judge said 10 years, the tears fell out of his eyes," Williams said. "I cried, I guess, for about two years," she added, only half-jokingly.

And like most youths caught up in the law, charged and convicted of one of the "seven deadly sins" - murder, voluntary manslaughter, rape, armed robbery, aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation and aggravated sexual battery - that automatically turn 13- to 16-year-olds into adults in Georgia's courts, Sims is black. Since Senate Bill 440 was passed in May 1994, , 76 percent of the more than 3,800 teenagers arrested for SB440 offenses have been black, although they comprise 34 percent of the state's teenage population, according to the Georgia Indigent Defense Council, a state agency that tracks SB440 cases.

Proponents of keeping juveniles in juvenile courts say the nationwide trend toward pushing them into the adult system is tainted by racism - sometimes blatant, sometimes unintentional - because the laws are passed by mainly white legislatures and enforced by judges and prosecutors, the overwhelming majority of whom are white.

"There really is in operation an unspoken sense that these are throwaway kids. If they didn't think they were throwaway kids, they wouldn't treat them that way," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies criminal justice issues.

Proponents of tougher treatment for juveniles deny institutional racism and say black teens simply commit more, and more serious, crimes. "If you took all the black males between the ages of 16 and 25 and put them on an island in the Pacific, crime would drop 80 percent overnight," said Brian Silverman, the former chief of the juvenile division at the Cook County, Ill., Public Defender's office, who acknowledges the racial disparities in prisons. "I'm not convinced it's caused by racism. If it is, that's bad and we should do something to change it. But if the cause is something other than racism, then it's a problem maybe society can't handle."

Researchers say that both sides are looking at it too simplistically, that factors such as policing methods and the prior records juveniles bring into court must be considered when weighing the level of racial bias.

Nobody denies the numbers, though, and even if blacks do account for a higher number of teens arrested for violent crime, figures from the nation's 75 largest counties in 1998 indicated a difference in the treatment of them. In the counties surveyed, whites were 48 percent of the youths charged as juveniles with violent crimes - exactly the same as the figure for blacks. They exceeded blacks charged with murder in juvenile court, 59 percent to 36 percent.

But in those same counties, whites accounted for 25 percent of juveniles charged as adults with violent crimes, compared with 73 percent for blacks.

For nonviolent drug and public order offenses, the disparities were greater. Building Blocks for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that studies juvenile justice issues, surveyed 18 counties in 1998, including Queens, Bronx, Kings and New York in New York State and found that while blacks were 64 percent of youths arrested for felony drug offenses, they represented 76 percent of the drug offenses handled in adult courts. They were 68 percent of those arrested for public order crimes such as gun possession and rioting, but accounted for 76 percent of youths charged as adults with such offenses.

In many states, the population of black youths in adult prisons is several times that of white youths. In Georgia, blacks account for 83 percent of the minors in adult prisons, and whites 17 percent. In Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, blacks account for about 75 percent of the minors in adult prisons, while whites are about 20 percent. Studies show that minors housed in adult prisons are several times more likely to be physically assaulted and to attempt suicide, and are more inclined to commit crimes again once they have been released.

Yet throughout the 1990s, state after state passed laws making it easier to try young offenders as adults, spurred in part by criminologists' thunderous warnings that social and demographic changes had combined to create a new breed of child and teenage "superpredator."

In fact, juvenile crime has dropped since the theory swept the country, following an increase in the 1980s and early 1990s that was blamed on factors ranging from the crack cocaine epidemic to the economy. According to the FBI, violent crime arrest rates for youths ages 15 to 17 declined 44 percent from 1994 to 2000. Criminologists' ominous words, however, had struck a chord with legislators who had witnessed rising juvenile crime rates, including Georgia's then-Gov. Zell Miller. His state saw juvenile arrests for violent crime jump from about 1,900 in 1990 to 3,000 in 1993.

"Kids who commit adult crimes ought to be tried and sentenced as adults," Miller, now a U.S. senator, said after the bill passed in 1994. Among other things, he said the law would let teachers focus on teaching, rather than "worrying about whether little Johnny is packing a gun."

Critics of such laws say that they were thrown together haphazardly by politicians more concerned about public support than public safety, and that there was no thought of what sort of people the jails would turn loose on society once the young prisoners' sentences were fulfilled. But for legislators pressured by public fears of crime, repealing such laws, even those that have proved to be the most racially skewed, is out of the question, leaving thousands of young black men such as Sims to spend their developmental years behind bars.

"The unfortunate thing is that it's across-the-board mandatory. Some child who might benefit from counseling or treatment won't get it. Juvenile facilities offer schools, mental help, counseling, to a much greater degree than an adult would get," said Susan Teaster of the Georgia Indigent Defense Council, who was a public defender when SB440 passed. "They weren't thinking about the consequences 10 years down the road when they passed this law. You tell a 13- or 14-year-old he's getting 10 or 12 years in jail, and you're taking all hope away from him. We'll be looking at people who've been incarcerated all the years when they're supposed to learn to be productive members of society. They'll have been surrounded by other people convicted of crimes. They'll have no probation, no parole, and they'll have no idea how to function in society."

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, part of the Department of Justice, said a host of unforeseen problems had arisen as more states treated juvenile offenders as adults. These included the issue of how to obtain quick medical treatment in prison for minors needing parental consent for surgery or medication; the added workload on criminal courts forced to handle formerly "juvenile" offenders; and the addition of thousands of new and immature inmates to already crowded prison systems. It also noted the overrepresentation of minorities among juveniles charged as adults, and it questioned the deterrent effect of the laws, saying few states had taken steps to educate juveniles of the sanctions they might face from breaking the law.

Even get-tough advocates who favor trying some juveniles as adults, such as Silverman and Peter Reinharz, a former prosecutor in Manhattan who was chief of the city's Family Court, say that laws that treat all juveniles the same without considering an individual's circumstances and that impose minimum sentences without allowing judges to consider alternative punishments, are misguided.

"Automatically treating them as adults in every situation is ludicrous," said Reinharz, now the managing attorney for Nassau County. "If someone is 14 and doing an armed robbery, I certainly don't want to be in the community with him. Something has to be done. On the other hand, the idea of saddling this guy with a felony conviction for the rest of his life is really stupid. He's going to wind up not being able to get a job and having no other choices down the road than a life of crime. There has to be some common sense kind of plan, and unfortunately there isn't a lot of common sense type of planning with these laws."

Such arguments haven't convinced Miller, who said Georgia's drop in juvenile arrests since 1994 proves the law is deterring young offenders. "The juvenile justice system we had was not adequate to handle the violence of today's young criminals," Miller said in a written reply to questions. "These are not the Cleaver kids soaping up some windows. These are middle school kids conspiring to hurt their teachers, teenagers shooting people and committing rapes, young thugs running drug gangs and terrorizing neighborhoods."

As for the racial disparity in SB440 offenses, Miller said there will always be critics who oppose all punishment for young offenders, black or white. "I trust the prosecutors and judges in my state and believe they have exercised the proper discretion in enforcing this law."

Not everyone believes this, least of all parents of black teenagers jailed in Georgia. They share the belief that because of race, their sons were caught in a system that equates young black men with thuggery and assumes black teens arrested for serious crimes ended up in jail because they came from ghetto neighborhoods without adult supervision. And while they all acknowledge that their sons are not blameless, they agree with the experts who say putting them in prison for at least 10 years for a crime committed as a teenager will do more harm than good.

"When you're dealing with children, it's just so idiotic," said Billie Ross, the president of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice, a group of parents with children convicted under SB440. Ross is convinced that if her son were white, police and prosecutors would have considered his parents' professional backgrounds and their stable lifestyle when they arrested him in 1996 for armed robbery. Glenwood Ross III, better known as Trey, was a slightly built 15-year-old then. He was convicted and sentenced to the mandatory 10 years. His mother was spurred to get her master's degree in social work, in part, by Trey's arrest. His father, Glenwood Ross, is a professor of economics at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

"I think they just have this box that they put a lot of these black kids into, and he fell into it," Billie Ross said of Trey. "Let's face it, if you're a black person in America, particularly a young black man, you have to worry about this."

Few did, however, until they collided with laws such as SB440.

Williams never imagined she'd spend a decade of weekends and holidays crisscrossing Georgia's rolling, monotonous countryside to visit Sims in prison for a crime committed when he was 16. She never imagined he would be forced to fight off rapists in the first prison where he was held, the maximum-security Arrendale State Prison in Alto, Ga., where all boys convicted as adults are housed.

"He got cheated because I was young when I had him," said Williams, who was 16 when Sims was born. "All I knew was partying and running in the streets. I wasn't the best parent. I was too young to know what a parent was."

That's not to say Sims was trouble free or that Williams considers him without fault. The move from Long Island to Georgia when Sims was 10 didn't go well for the boy who preferred hanging out with his cousins and friends back in New York. He missed going out for Chinese food, ice skating, playing sports on his old school teams and the snowy winters. He also missed his father, who never married his mother but who lived around the corner from them in Roosevelt. Life in Atlanta seemed dull by comparison.

"He came down here with that New York mentality, that no one could tell him what to do. And he found out that Georgia doesn't play that way," said Williams, whose cheerful nature belies the difficulties of her life. Now 36, she works as a secretary by day and a security guard on weekend nights to support herself and her daughter, and to set aside money for both kids' futures. At least twice a month and on holidays, she makes the two-hour drive to Hancock State Prison in Sparta to spend a few hours with Sims, who was transferred there in October 2000 after nearly two years at Arrendale.

The visits aren't easy. "My mom works too hard to be coming up here every two weeks," said Sims, a tall, gregarious young man who wears the outfit issued to all inmates: white pants with a black stripe down the side and a short-sleeved white shirt with a stripe up the front. "She cries a lot. I tell her, 'look, I did what I did, and I'm gonna do my time for it.' "

For Williams, Sims' arrest was a crushing blow in a yearslong battle to establish a stable life. Her first husband, to whom she was married for seven years, beat her so badly, she said, that she fled with the children to a shelter. Sims said he remembers his first stepfather pummeling his mother until she was bruised and bleeding, even going to her workplace to drag her out and hit her.

Thus began a series of moves, which ended in 1990 when Williams decided to follow other family members who had gone to Georgia. As Sims struggled with the upheaval, she granted his wish to return to Long Island to live with his biological father for a while. When his father was jailed for drugs, Sims' uncle was in charge. His answer to Sims' behavior problems was violence.

"His uncle wasn't into 'let's whip you with a belt.' His uncle was into 'let's beat you up with the fists,'" Williams said.

By the time Williams brought Sims back to Georgia, his path to disaster was set. "I kept hate in my heart. Hatred, hatred, hatred," he says now. "I don't know if it just came out in my teens or what." He returned to Atlanta more troubled than when he had left.

"He [Sims] wanted to stay out all night. I'd go check on him and find a bunch of clothes under the sheets to make it look like someone was in bed," Williams said, laughing at the things that angered her then but that now bring back memories of a time when Sims was home, not sleeping on a prison cot.

When the police arrived at Williams' home that night in November 1998 to question her son, Sims admitted his involvement in the robbery. Williams and her husband thought it best to come clean. They hoped a judge would take Sims' youth, turbulent past and family ties into consideration. They didn't know about SB440.

"We really, really did not put up a fight," Williams said. "I don't know what I was thinking when I had him confess. Something in my mind told me they were not going to take that boy away. I knew he'd get time, but I didn't think it would be 10 years. Maybe five years tops."

Sims is scheduled for release in December 2008. He will be 26 years old. His grandmother has a room set aside for him in her house. His mother has been trying to gently nudge him to think about going to college when he gets out. "We're hoping to just shelter him with love," she said.

If studies of offenders are anything to go by, Sims will have a hard time avoiding trouble again. Research in New York, New Jersey and Florida comparing re-offense rates among juveniles treated in adult versus juvenile courts shows that those sent to criminal court are more likely than others to become repeat offenders. "It's scandalous. We're sowing the seeds of having these kids grow up to be violent criminals," said Herschella Conyers, a public defender in Cook County, Ill., where a law mandating adult trials for youths accused of certain drug and weapons offenses has been criticized for producing racially skewed results. One portion of the law requires adult court for juveniles charged with drug and weapon offenses within 1,000 feet of public housing projects, areas that are predominantly black. More than 90 percent of the teenagers convicted as adults under the law are black.

"It's really incredible," Conyers said. "We CAN do better things than that with kids, even if they're guilty. It's just crazy. The consequences are both inhumane and disastrous."

Even the Georgia Department of Corrections, whose prison system has absorbed at least 574 minor inmates since SB440 took effect, acknowledges it was passed without much consideration for the pasts and futures of the youngsters caught up by it. Whereas lawmakers saw 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds as street-smart and mean as adults, they didn't take into consideration other factors, said department spokesman Mike Light. "What we see is kids who've led very hard lives for the most part, and who've made bad decisions. What drives these individuals to commit crimes so early? What are we going to do with these kids?" asked Light, who worries that unless such issues are addressed, prison could become the "grad school" for the next level of crime.

With a growing inmate population and limited staffing and resources, the special needs of children behind bars, such as mentoring, counseling and education, simply cannot be adequately met, he said.

"I'm surprised he can read at all," Williams said of Sims shortly before his last birthday. "He's going to be 20 years old on Aug. 9, without an education and that really hurts me."

"I wouldn't feel so bad if they prepared the kids for when they get out," Glenwood Ross, Trey's father, said bitterly. "But these kids are just sitting around doing nothing, so what's society going to get when they come out? A bunch of dummies who've been sitting around doing nothing."

Still, there appears to be little chance laws such as SB440 will be overturned. Child advocates concede that they are fighting an uphill battle. Families of children in prison represent a tiny constituency, and they are trying to persuade people who have no interest in juvenile justice issues to rally on behalf of juveniles accused of serious crimes.

"We're not saying don't punish the kids. We're saying use discretion, use judgment. But people don't want to hear that," said Billie Ross, who admits that until Trey was arrested, she had no interest in juvenile justice issues. "It wasn't anything I felt like I needed to be concerned with. Then all of a sudden this hit me. I guess I'm like a lot of other people - dumb and blind to a lot of what's going on until it strikes you directly."

Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice is lobbying to introduce a parole possibility for juveniles convicted under SB440 but hasn't gotten far. The proposed amendment, House Bill 269, never made it out of the legislature's Judiciary Committee last year.

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York, NY)

August 20, 2002 Tuesday

INSIDE ALTO

Fighting to Survive Is The Way of Life at Alto

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Alto, Ga. - The day begins sometime after 4:30 a.m. with a flash and a bang. Prison guards snap on the bright, overhead lights and the steel cell doors clang open, signaling inmates at Lee Arrendale State Prison that it's time to get out of bed.

Lazing too long can bring a DR, or disciplinary report, and too many DRs can cost an inmate dearly when he tries to transfer to a lower-security prison or gain certain privileges.

For the next 20 hours, until lockdown is called and the lights go out, life is a monotonous pattern of mediocre meals, head counts, inspections, outdoor recreation, hours of TV and, according to some, simple survival. "There was fighting every day. You couldn't stay out of trouble there," says Glenn Sims, 20, who spent nearly two years at Arrendale State Prison, better known as Alto. "If you don't fight, though, you're going to be somebody's punk," meaning another inmate's sex toy.

At any given time, a couple of dozen of the 1,200 inmates at the maximum-security prison are juveniles convicted as adults. By law, they are supposed to be kept away from adult prisoners, but for all the close encounters they have, Sims says, "We might as well have been together."

He remembers the constant fear of being a minor among hundreds of adult convicts, most accused of violent crimes, felons and his need to always be on guard. During mealtimes, when the juveniles would be herded into the cafeteria as adults were finishing up, the older men would talk about which youngsters they hoped to rape. Shower time brought the occasional peeping adult inmate, who would masturbate while watching the minors.

"You've got a lot of people with life sentences and no possibility of parole, and they're never going to see the streets again," Sims says. "Inmates really run that camp, and they're not going to take anything lying down."

Sims considers himself fortunate. After nearly a year without wracking up a DR, he won a transfer to Hancock State Prison in October 2000, a lesser-security facility where inmates can sleep later and where he says fighting is not a prerequisite to staying alive. Still, it doesn't change the fact that he's in prison and will remain there until December 2008, when his 10-year term for armed robbery is up. He's reminded of it every second of the day, from the "horrible" prison food he eats to the views of walls, fences and guard towers that he faces from daylight to dark. On this particular morning, breakfast was sausages, eggs and "some kind of muffins," he says with a wry grin. He spends much of his day keeping his dormitory clean and poring through books by his favorite authors, John Grisham and Dean Koontz.

Each evening he tries to watch the 6 o'clock news on one of the two television sets shared by his dorm-mates. One is used for watching movies, and the other is usually tuned to a sports station.

Like most inmates, Sims, who grew up in Roosevelt on Long Island, says he didn't know about the Georgia law passed in 1994 that required juveniles to be charged as adults for certain crimes. If he had, he says he would not have done what he did. But he admits he had gone wild as a young teen, skipping school to sell drugs and using the money to buy fancy clothes, more drugs and hotel rooms for sex. He admits he was a hothead who got into fights, including with his strict stepfather. He has a tattoo on the inside of his left arm attesting to his involvement with gangs. Etched into his skin by a fellow prisoner, it reads in large Gothic print, "Little BG," for Little Baby Gangster, his nickname on the street.

When the police came calling shortly before Christmas in 1998, he figured the worst he was facing was a charge of violating curfew. By law, though, his participation in the armed robbery of a convenience store required him to be charged as an adult, and his guilty plea brought him a mandatory 10-year term.

"I thought they couldn't do it," he said, arguing, as prisoners often do, that he doesn't deserve this punishment. In his case, though, and in the cases of other juveniles charged as adults, many human rights groups and legal experts agree. Rather than putting juveniles in prison for long periods, Sims says it would make more sense to jail teens until age 21. Under the current system, he argues that problem kids, forced to use aggression to survive in prison, only become worse.

So while Sims says he knows how to fight, and how to present a tough image to protect himself from predatory inmates, he admits he doesn't know how to balance a checkbook, write a resume or obtain a driver's license. He also admits he still can fly off the handle when provoked, as he did during an altercation in the cafeteria not long ago, a sign that prison life has not tamed his hot temper.

Nevertheless, Sims is resigned to his fate and says he has learned one important thing from prison life: that he never wants to live it again.

"I miss the freedom," he says. "Every time I look around I see a wall. Every time I look around I see a fence. It's hard to look at that and to know I'm not getting out until 2008."

Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York, NY)

August 20, 2002 Tuesday

Growing Up in Jail;
Law requires juveniles to face adult penalties and prisons

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

First of three parts

Alto, Ga. - Shakedowns and body searches were nothing new to the inmates at Lee Arrendale State Prison, home to hundreds of murderers, rapists, molesters and robbers. They were used to being patted down and to having their cells swept for weapons, liquor, needles and other smuggled goods. They'd all experienced the indignity of having prison guards scrutinize their naked bodies for possible contraband hidden in their mouths or between their legs.

Even by their hard-bitten standards, though, the search that took place on a hot, sticky summer afternoon one year ago was particularly degrading.

About 3 p.m., dozens were herded from their cells at Arrendale, a sprawling, grim-looking complex of concrete slabs, razor wire and watch towers, and led to an outdoor recreation yard. They were split into two groups: minors on one side, adults on the other.

As other inmates ogled them from their cell windows, some masturbating and others hollering obscene comments, and as cars passed along a road near the yard, visible to the outside world through chain-link fencing, the prisoners were ordered to strip under the blazing sun, face the fence and grab on to it.

Then, "One by one, we were told to open our mouths, lift our scrota, and spread our butt cheeks and cough, during which time cars were driving by with people yelling, other inmates in another building yelling, and female officers in the tower observing," an inmate wrote in a letter to the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. It was one of several received from inmates after the public strip search, which a Department of Corrections spokesman confirms took place last Aug. 2.

Most of the letters said 15 to 20 minors sentenced as adults and at least 20 adults were stripped. Some put the total closer to 50. Most of the prisoners were black and most of the guards overseeing the event were white, a reflection of the prison's racial makeup. A Corrections Department spokesman, Mike Light, said "a few" juveniles were among those marched into the sun and subjected to the search. "It wasn't a good decision," he said, adding that the captain in charge was suspended without pay for one month. Few dispute the details described in the hand-written letters - some in scrawling manuscript, some in careful print - that were mailed to human rights groups afterward.

"These other inmates were actually looking out their windows yelling, jeering and masturbating as they watched. Cars were going by. There were women officers on duty," said Charlene Morriseau, a lawyer who interviewed several prisoners after the incident as part of an investigation into conditions at the facility, where all boys convicted as adults in Georgia are housed. "I think the most pernicious part of this is that you had juveniles being stripped naked in front of adult inmates. It was particularly traumatizing to them, because they fear sexual assault the most."

For good reason. According to studies of juveniles in adult prisons, they are several times more likely to be raped or otherwise assaulted. That's why Georgia, like other states, has laws requiring that juveniles be separated from adult inmates. But according to Morriseau and others familiar with prison culture, including inmates, the rules are enforced haphazardly at best. Arrendale Prison, they say, is a prime example.

Better known as Alto for the northeastern Georgia town of 870 in which it is located, the prison houses about 1,200 young men and boys, among them some of Georgia's most dangerous criminals. Of those, 506 are between 13 and 23, the oldest of inmates who could have been convicted while teens. Of those, 384 are black. Most were convicted of crimes covered by Georgia's Senate Bill 440, which passed in May 1994 after a nationwide upsurge in juvenile violent crime and took effect the following year. SB440 requires that 13- to 16-year-olds accused of certain crimes - dubbed the "seven deadly sins" - be charged as adults. If convicted, they must spend at least 10 years behind bars. The average SB440 sentence is 16 years, and the law does not allow early release on parole, an option available to some adults. That means adults convicted of violent crimes may serve less time than teens charged under SB440 with the same offenses.

Since it took effect, more than 75 percent of the more than 3,800 teenagers charged under SB440 have been black, although they comprise 34 percent of the state's teenage population. According to a random sample of black juveniles' cases studied by the Georgia Indigent Defense Council, a state agency that tracks SB440 cases, 19 percent were waived back to juvenile court, an option open to prosecutors. A random sample of white juveniles' cases showed 38 percent were sent back to juvenile court.

The statistics are not unique to Georgia. By the end of the past decade, 29 states had laws such as SB440 requiring juveniles be charged as adults for selected crimes ranging from arson to murder. Even without such laws, in many states defendants younger than 18 are considered adults for the purpose of prosecution and trial. Thirteen states, including Georgia, begin adult prosecution for all crimes at 17. Three states, including New York, start adult prosecution at 16. While there are variations in state laws governing juvenile defendants, the states share one characteristic: black teenagers have a far greater risk of ending up jailed as adults than white teenagers

Though the net may be wider in Georgia because of the seven crimes requiring adult treatment of juvenile offenders - murder, voluntary manslaughter, rape, armed robbery, aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation and aggravated sexual battery - the situation is not unique. Across the country, where all states now allow juveniles to be tried as adults under certain circumstances, an overwhelming majority of those convicted as adults are black and are saddled with consequences that will follow them for life: felony records; no voting rights; ineligibility for certain federal assistance programs; interrupted schooling; the trauma of being put through a procedure designed for grown-ups, just to name a few.

A 1999 report based on U.S. Department of Justice statistics found that blacks younger than 18 accounted for 26 percent of the minors arrested nationwide from 1996 to 1998. They represented 46 percent of the cases, however, sent to adult court and 58 percent of the minors in adult prisons.

In an April 2000 report, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, part of the Department of Justice, noted that minorities made up a "disproportionate" share of juveniles treated as adults, and it called the trend toward jailing minors in adult prisons "one of the most significant and potentially worrisome consequences" of changes in juvenile justice.

Supporters of laws such as SB440, notably prosecutors and Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who was governor when the law passed, deny blacks are treated with more severity, as critics allege. Simply put, they say, black teenagers commit more of the serious crimes, such as armed robbery, rape and murder, that warrant adult treatment, though FBI arrest statistics do not show that blacks younger than 18 are arrested at a substantially higher rate than whites for violent crimes. Detractors argue that the racial disparities in resulting convictions show that SB440 and other comparable measures across the country are being enforced with a heavy dose of bias, and that prison abuse is yet another consequence being suffered by the mainly black youths caught up by such laws.

Both sides agree that come 2005, when the first batch of SB440 convicts - about 157 armed robbers, rapists, child molesters and others - walks free, they will face huge odds trying to lead law-abiding lives after coming of age behind bars.

"I can't help but feel these are forgotten children, that they've been thrown away," Morriseau said. "To me, that's shocking about what it says of our society, of our courts and of our prison system. I'm not going to make it seem as if there's no issue of guilt, but I think the whole reason behind distinguishing between juveniles and adults in criminal cases is the recognition that there's a difference, that there are issues of maturity to be considered, and that some things can be corrected. I think these kids deserve that chance."

Parents of SB440 offenders say the only thing worse than having a kid in prison is having a kid in Alto, a collection of low-rise, sharp-edged, salmon-colored buildings linked by concrete walkways and lawns, and ringed by layers of steel fences topped with concertina wire. Tucked incongruously into a placid-looking neighborhood of modest homes, cow pastures and rolling, grassy hills, its name conjures up feelings of dread.

In interviews and letters, Alto inmates describe being viewed as "fresh meat" by older prisoners who "lust off our bodies." "If someone wasn't stealing your stuff, they were trying to rape you," said Glenn Sims, 20, who spent about two years in Alto after being convicted at 16 of armed robbery.

Most of the adult inmates at Alto are in their 20s, an age group that has brought a heavy gang presence and volatile atmosphere to the prison.

"If you're not a fighter, you're not gonna make it in here. If you don't have money to pay someone to protect you, or if you're not a sissy or a homosexual, you're not gonna make it in here," said one 17-year-old, who spent three years in Alto after being convicted of rape under SB440. "This is not rehabilitation. You learn more bad stuff than you learn good stuff in here. You learn how to steal. You learn how to be more aggressive." The inmate, who feared repercussions if his name was used, spent nine months in protective custody, in a cell by himself away from other prisoners, after being attacked. "I've fought since I've been here," he said.

According to the Department of Corrections, since the first SB440 defendants began arriving at Alto in 1995, there have been at least 41 sexual assault cases at the prison. The reality, according to lawyers and inmates' parents, is that most assaults are never reported out of embarrassment and fear of repercussions. In some cases, inmates who have been assaulted might be blocked by officials from filing reports, alleges Elizabeth Dede of the Prison and Jail Project, a watchdog group based in Americus, Ga. Since November, Dede said the project had received about 30 letters from Alto inmates claiming, among other things, that prison officials sometimes refused to hand over the grievance forms required to file official complaints about rapes or other assaults.

"There's a culture where the staff really hates the inmates," said William J. Richwine, a retired schoolteacher who spent nearly 20 years teaching prison inmates, four of those years at Alto. He left in 1997 when the prison commissioner at the time, Wayne Garner, fired all 235 full-time academic and vocational teachers in the state system to save money. "It's not that we're supposed to love the inmates, but at Alto, I felt it was kind of a vicious thing. At the other prisons we treated one another with a degree of compassion and dignity," Richwine said of guard-inmate relations. "That did not exist at Alto."

Morriseau agreed. "This is part of the culture of the institution. Part of the way they [guards] regulate the kids is to inci

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