The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [49]
But why would the public care about such matters when for every news story about private prisons many more relay tale upon melodramatic tale of killer kids getting off lightly? In a piece typical of the genre, ABC correspondent Jackie Judd, reporting from Warwick, Rhode Island, on “ABC World News Tonight,” informed viewers: “The horror of the community turned to anger when they saw a killer, someone who had taken four lives, committed to only five years in this juvenile detention center.” Once released, Judd said, the fifteen-year-old offender “could buy a gun or apply for a job as a day care worker without anyone knowing his history as a murderer. All of this, because legally Craig Price was a child when he killed.” Judd’s report illustrates how our fear of children has made us unwilling to grant that violently disturbed kids are still kids. “He’s not a child,” a captain with the Warwick police department declares on camera. “When you kill somebody when you’re fifteen years old and you wipe out an entire family and kill in the manner in which he killed, you’re not a child anymore.”55
The commander in chief concurred. Although studies find that young people incarcerated with adults are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and fifty times more likely to be attacked by a weapon than youth in juvenile facilities, Bill Clinton, in his State of the Union address in 1996, vowed “to seek authority to prosecute, as adults, teenagers who maim and kill like adults.”
Surely the flaw in this line of reasoning is obvious: acting like an adult doesn’t make someone an adult. Otherwise, teens eager to grow up would be well advised to smoke cigarettes and have babies. Yet the zeal with which politicians and those who vote for them go after the criminal young seems to know no bounds. In nearly half of the states ten-year-olds can be tried as adults, and in a Gallup poll in 1994 60 percent of people said they favor the death penalty for teenage killers—more than five times as many as in the 1960s.56
On the same “World News Tonight” broadcast with Jackie Judd’s story about Rhode Island was a report about the Colorado legislature having passed ten new laws in five days in response to media hoopla over a series of shootings. The legislation included provisions to send violent kids to boot camps and adult prisons. “It’s an iron fist,” the Denver district attorney said proudly, apparently unaware or unconcerned about a preponderance of evidence that such harsh penalties fail to deter other kids from committing crimes. In states such as New York, Illinois, Florida, and California, which enacted similar legislation earlier, juvenile crime rates increased. Nor do longer or more severe sentences appear to deter those kids who receive them. On the contrary, attorneys, criminologists, and the youths themselves point out that in adult prisons kids learn to survive by intimidating others. They tend to lose whatever respect they had for authorities and for themselves. Once released, they engage in more or worse crimes.57
As for boot camps, thirty states built them between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, for a total of about 7,000 beds. Money that would have been better spent on education, housing, job development, or nutrition for young people at risk got diverted into hiring former drill sergeants, busing in convicts, shaving their heads, subjecting them to predawn marches and endless rounds of push-ups, and teaching them to say “Sir” and “Ma’am” to everybody. The result? Great photo opportunities for tough-on-crime politicians. Studies show