Adult prisons: no place for kids.

• Author: Smith, J. Steven
• Position: Law & Justice - Juvenile criminals

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, one of the news feature shows on television had an interviewer talking with a freckle-faced, redheaded 12-year-old boy. The interview was taking place in a maximum-security prison yard.

When asked what he had done to warrant being in the prison, the youngster related how he had been spotted by local police as he drove a stolen car. After a high-speed chase, he crashed into an interstate highway roadblock. Several state and local law enforcement agencies and dozens of police cars were involved.

The interviewer asked if the child was sorry for what he had done because it had resulted in a sentence to an adult maximum-security prison. The boy responded that he would do it again because it was the "greatest day" of his life!

"It was just like `Smokey and the Bandit' [a popular chase film]!" the boy effused. Clearly, he continued after a period of months to be caught up in the childish excitement of his criminal act. A mature sorrow for his actions and the resulting punishment were absent. Children are immature by definition.

This practice of locking up young people with adult criminals harkens back to the policies of the 1700s, when offenders, regardless of age, were thrown together in poorhouses and workhouses. The results were predictable. The young people got worse as a result of exposure to the more-hardened criminals. It is hard to believe that, with the amount of scientific evidence we have generated over the last 100 years, political leaders still believe it is a good idea to lock misbehaving children up with adult criminals.

Today, there are thousands of young people living desperate lives locked away in adult prisons. Across the nation, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates there were about 5,500 juveniles being held in adult prisons in the late 1990s. There is little doubt that there are more than that now. Additionally, there are over 9,000 youths being held in the nation's adult jails.

While most of us would expect that youths in adult prisons were the most-violent and dangerous juvenile offenders, the Department of Justice reported that 39% of the juveniles in adult prisons were sentenced for a nonviolent offense. The most-serious charge for almost 40% of these young Americans was most likely a drug or nonviolent property offense. It is reasonable to propose that seriously violent youths should be held in adult facilities only if they are incapable of being effectively managed in a juvenile facility.

In 1980, Congress passed amendments to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. Chief among these amendments was a requirement to separate juveniles from adults in the nation's jails. This required local jails absolutely to prevent juveniles from seeing or hearing...