Youth crime ... adult time: as more states make it easier to lock up teenagers in adult prisons, what's become of juvenile justice?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: National - Most states pemit the prosecution of juveniles as adults

SHAUN MILLER WAS 15 WHEN HE made the biggest mistake of his life. On an October night in 1998, he and three other teens robbed a convenience store in a small desert town in Nevada. The oldest member of the group, who was 19, planned the crime and held a gun to the cashier's head. Shaun, who was unarmed, took $726 from the cash register. The incident was caught on videotape, and Shaun's life changed forever.

Nevada, like most other states, joined a movement in the 1990s to crack down on juvenile crime, making it easier to punish teens as adults. Traditionally, in the juvenile system, the emphasis has been on treatment and education. Under the adult system, the emphasis is more on punishment than rehabilitation. Shaun was tried as an adult, sentenced to 15 years in prison, and placed among inmates 10 to 20 years older.

"I just don't get it," he says. "There's adults in here for the same kind of crime I committed, who got less time than me--and I was 15. They should have at least gave me a chance at some kind of decent rehabilitation before they put me here. I came straight to prison, like I was John Gotti or something."

In the past decade, 47 states--all but Nebraska, New York, and Vermont--have made it easier to prosecute teens in the adult justice system, reduced confidentiality protections for juveniles, or both. These changes were largely prompted by a surge in violent youth crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The specifics of who goes to the adult system, for which offenses, and at what age, vary widely from state to state. But in four states--Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada--youths of any age are sent automatically to the adult courts for certain serious crimes. The effect is that many young offenders who might once have stayed in the juvenile system are now in prisons alongside violent adults.

"In many respects, this represents a rejection of the principles on which the juvenile justice system was founded," says Marsha Levick, legal director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. "It's a turning toward the criminal justice system with some misguided notion that all we need to do is lock kids up, and that provides public safety."

While many dispute that notion, there is no question that more teens are being locked up. In 1985, according to federal statistics, 3,400 people under 18 entered adult prisons. By 1997, the number had more than doubled, to 7,400.

The numbers don't include teens who committed crimes as...