Children Are Not Too Old to Change
Rehabilitative approaches work better than punitive ones in reforming juvenile offenders. So why don't more states adopt them?
One day, treatment of young people who run afoul of the law may be guided by logic rather than politics, prejudice, and uninformed passion. That was the implicit message of a report delivered to New York Gov. David Paterson last month, just in time for Christmas. The report, from the governor's task force on reforming criminal justice, came on the heels of a U.S. Justice Department investigation that found New York's juvenile penal system to be tragically mismanaged.
Youngsters in custody were routinely assaulted by staffers. Beatings were so severe that teeth were knocked out, bones were broken, and some kids were rendered unconscious. The assaults were sometimes sparked by infractions no more serious than laughing or stealing a cookie. The incarceration and the primitive methods accompanying it came at a substantial cost: $210,000 a year per child. Wouldn't it make more sense, task-force members reasoned, to reserve incarceration for those who posed a threat to public safety? For youngsters who are not deemed dangerous, other methods seem more reasonable. "The state should treat and rehabilitate them, not hurt and harden them," wrote the task force.
It would be nice if New York, and its mistreatment of young offenders, were an isolated case. But it's not. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that some 13 percent of juveniles in confinement suffered sexual victimization, the vast majority (80 percent) from the people charged with their care. The BJS report (required by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003) is only one in a growing series of studies pointing out massive flaws in America's juvenile-justice system.
"Our country is plagued by the shameful disproportionate treatment of minority youth at all stages in the justice process, and stands alone in the world in our punitive approach to children," observed the National Juvenile Justice Network in December 2008. A blue-ribbon task force in Louisiana reached much the same conclusion in 2005: "Rather than receiving proper rehabilitative care, young people are incarcerated in violent, unsafe facilities that compound preexisting problems, such as child abuse, mental illness, learning disabilities, and school failure ... Incarcerated youth are being abused and neglected by the very persons entrusted with the responsibility for their safety and rehabilitation."
It does not have to be this way. And, indeed, there are some places where it is not. The most widely recognized exception is Missouri, which has spent decades constructing a juvenile system that puts other states' to shame. Its emphasis is not on punishing young people but on saving them. And it has yielded impressive results. Three years after leaving the system, only 8 percent are back in it (a statistic that has held up, within a percentage point or two, for years). There are no national juvenile-recidivism statistics, but the average is likely much higher; some states report that well over 50 percent of those released are locked down again within a few years.
Missouri was not always a model of enlightenment. During the 1960s its juvenile system was embroiled in lawsuits, violence, and sundry scandals. One judge indignantly declared he would no longer send kids there. So officials decided it was time to experiment with something different. That decision coincided with Matthew Steward's 1970 graduation from college. Steward was assigned as a counselor to a small pilot program that put kids in small housing units instead of cells. His task was to try to forge them into law-abiding citizens. So he endeavored to create "a kid-friendly environment where kids were engaged, not put in uniform," he says. And to the astonishment of many, the new program worked. Eventually it became the model for the entire system, which Steward ended up heading.
Steward, who retired from that job in 2005, now runs the Missouri Youth Institute. The institute works with juvenile authorities across America and spreads the word about Missouri's methods and its values, values that put a premium on treating kids as individuals, not simply criminals to be confined and controlled.
In criminal-justice circles, Missouri's accomplishments are well known. State policymakers routinely make pilgrimages to observe the miracle. But many treat it more as a "tourist attraction" than as an example of what they could be doing back home, says James Bell, founder and executive director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit working on juvenile-justice issues. "People see the physical plant, the homelike environment," says Bell, and they're deeply impressed but "rarely try to copy the culture."
Steward thinks that is changing. In the last several years, officials from the District of Columbia, Louisiana, New Mexico, and elsewhere have tried to re-create, in some fashion, the Missouri model.
Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and chair of the New York task force, thinks the moment may be ripe for the message to spread. In this age of tight budgets, legislators are more inclined to pay attention to methods that work—particularly when they cost less than what states are currently doing. Also, the "overheated rhetoric" that fueled the punitive measures of the 1980s, he notes, has died down. In that era, politicians confidently, if ignorantly, talked up a scourge of child predators, a new breed of youngsters so irremediably evil that society's only options were to execute them or imprison them for as long as possible. Now there is more willingness, Travis believes, to see young people as "developmentally different" and therefore more amenable to rehabilitation than adults.
Travis hopes this new attitude will usher in an era of reform in the juvenile system. In fact, his dream goes farther. As legislators question their largely discredited notions about young offenders, he hopes they will similarly question their handling of adults in the system. For that is also an area where new ideas are sorely needed. But that, alas, would require something many politicians seem constitutionally incapable of doing: to come to the matter with an open mind instead of with polarizing rhetoric that caters to voters' darkest fears.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Comments