Juvenile justice: reform after one hundred years.

• Position: Panel Discussion

Congressman Bobby Scott, Congressman Bill McCollum, and Mr. Mark Soler Moderated by Professor Chai Feldblum October 14, 1999 Georgetown University Law Center

ADRIANA RODRIGUEZ: Our moderator for this panel is Chai Feldblum, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown, Professor Feldblum has established the Federal Legislation Clinic and has served as the Clinic's director since its inception. We are honored to have her join us today. Thank you.

CHAI FELDBLUM: This panel is about legislation. Policy decisions about juvenile justice are increasingly made at the federal level. Although, of course, narrowly crime is a state concern, it is something that the federal Congress has taken up. We have here, truly, probably the best people you could hear from on what the federal Congress is thinking about in terms of juvenile justice; getting a glimpse from two of the main people on the Hill responsible for this work and from a very active and engaged advocate working on these issues.

We have to my immediate left, Congressman Bobby Scott. Congressman Scott represents the Third District of Virginia, which includes counties from James River, Norfolk, down to Richmond. He graduated law school in 1973 and entered Congress in 1992. He is on the House Judiciary Committee, and he is the ranking minority member of the House Subcommittee on Crime. Ranking minority member meaning he is the most senior Democrat on that subcommittee and the one most responsible for working with the other Democrats on the Committee. His legislative interests include healthcare coverage, educational opportunities, and passing legislation as he put it, at least in the piece I got from his office, "to prevent crime before it occurs."

To the left of Congressman Scott, although not necessarily always in the way he votes, is Congressman Bill McCollum, who represents the Eighth Congressional District of Florida which includes Orlando. Congressman McCollum graduated law school in 1968, practiced law for about ten years, and was elected to Congress in 1980. He, too, is on the House Judiciary Committee, and he is the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime. As a Republican, with the Republicans controlling the House, Congressman McCollum is the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Crime and is, therefore, the foremost person within the Republican Congress on dealing with issues of crime, drugs, federal prisons, and criminal procedure.

To the left of Congressman McCollum is Mr. Mark Soler. Mark graduated law school in 1973, started working at the Youth Law Center just a few years after that in 1978 as a staff attorney. He clearly found his home because he has not left. He became the Executive Director of the Youth Law Center and, in 1994, became its President and started working in the Center's newly opened office in Washington D.C. That is, they figured he needed to come here to talk to people like Congressman McCollum and Congressman Scott. In fact, that is what Mark has been doing, working with Congress and federal agencies on national juvenile justice policy issues. I hope you can tell from this introduction that you have the best people you could hear from, and are incredibly lucky to be able to have this panel talk about issues of juvenile justice in the federal Congress. We will start as befits the situation with the Chair of the Subcommittee, Congressman McCollum.

CONGRESSMAN MCCOLLUM: Well, thank you very, very much Chai. I, first of all, want to say it is a great thrill to be over here. Georgetown's Law School has a fabulous reputation nationally, and to be here with you at Georgetown is a pleasure. And, it is especially a pleasure to talk about juvenile crime and juvenile justice because I think it is at the leading, cutting edge of all of the criminal law that we are dealing with today. It is the central, focal point of what all of us want to accomplish.

Well, why am I in Congress? Why do people serve in public office? Well, I think most of us are here because we want to see life better for our children and our grandchildren, at least to keep the quality of life and, hopefully, to improve it. One aspect of that is security and a concern over personal security. And, many people, kids as well as adults, today feel very threatened. While we see the crime rate statistics have slightly gone down for the past few years, I think all of us still realize that we have far too much violent crime, and far too much of it committed by juveniles, by teenagers in particular. I am sure you are aware without my telling you that the juvenile crime rate in this country has doubled over the last three decades. That is, twice as many juvenile crimes are being committed. And, when you look at the violent portion of that, you would see that the greatest proportion of violent crimes in this country are committed by teenagers, and the highest proportion of those by seventeen to nineteen-year-olds, with eighteen-year-olds being particularly the high end of that having the highest murder and robbery rate of any particular group. More than one-third of all murders are committed by offenders under the age of twenty-one in this country.

So, those are the kind of shocking statistics that are around here, regardless of the fact that we have some statistics that show the general crime rate in the country, the violent crime rate, statistically declining. One of the reasons why this is so much of a problem is because, demographically, we are in the beginning of a period where we are having a larger group of those who might be in that category, the age group which are more likely to commit these crimes. So, pressures will continue even if statistics may show a downward trend which is positive and which I am pleased to see. But, pressures are going to continue because we are no where near where we need to be in that regard.

One of the things that I think needs to be stated right up front is an opinion, and I think it is an opinion that is shared by most people who are experts in this field, who are judges, who are social workers, who are probation officers, who are people who deal with juveniles and juvenile crime every day. And, that is that the juvenile justice systems of the nation, and I put that as plural because I am talking about those of the fifty states principally, are broken. They are not working like they should be. And, we have a high violent crime rate in some measure, and I think considerably in some measure, because the systems are not working. But, even more fundamentally than the juvenile system not working properly nationally, is the fact that we don't have accountability or consequences early on for many kids before they ever even reach a position where they get into a confrontation with the law or the juvenile courts or the juvenile justice system. There is less discipline and accountability and consequences for misbehavior at home today then there was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. There is less discipline in the schools. You just have to go and have roundtable discussions with teachers or parents in any public school in the nation, and you will wind up with that coming up as almost the number one, if not the number one topic when you ask what is the problem in the school. I used to think it would be something with the basic education, the teachers, or the quality of this or that or the other. That is not the case with moms and it is not the case with most teachers. They worry about the lack of discipline. So, kids don't see consequences at home, they don't see consequences for misbehavior often in school, and then when they confront our juvenile justice systems, the studies all show and the experts all say, they are not seeing consequences there.

That is why I use the term broken when I talk about the juvenile justice system. There are not enough judges, there are not enough probation officers, not enough diversion programs, not enough resources by the states going into this end of the system. And, so, when a kid commits a misdemeanor crime right now in this nation, in much of the country, you will find that that child is not even taken before a court, let alone when they are taken that they actually see any meaningful punishment, be that community service or otherwise. I am talking about things as severe as ripping off a radio out of a car, even breaking and entering in a home or, perhaps, doing more than that, stealing the car itself. There are communities all over this country where kids are not punished for that, not even taken in when they are apprehended. Of course, frequently, they are not apprehended. And, this is not talking about the violent. This is talking about those who have begun the path of great misbehavior, to the point of what most people would consider to be vandalism and then some, vandalism plus, plus, plus.

So, what is the bottom line? The bottom line is that if kids don't see consequences to their criminal acts, they are far more likely to go on to more serious ones, and that is why much of the violent crime is out there. Not the sole reason, but a principle reason in my judgment and the judgment of many others.

What do we do about it? Well, we have the bill that has come out of our Subcommittee that Bobby Scott and I share leadership on. The Juvenile Crime Bill has gotten all cut up in the debate over guns and everything else. The fundamental, underlying thrust of this is bipartisanism. Something that Senator Leahy in the Senate, a fairly liberal Democrat supports, something all of us do--and that is a grant program to the states that would provide a sizable amount of money to spend pretty much as they see fit on judges or probation officers or detention facilities or whatever they feel they need to improve their juvenile justice systems with one principle caveat. And that is at the beginning of the process when a juvenile first commits a misdemeanor act, that they assure the United States...