Monday, May 26, 1997

Juvenile Crime: More balanced plan needed

By Rep. MAX SANDLIN

For Scripps Howard News Service

Deciding what should be done about the problem of juvenile crime and whether it should be addressed by local communities or the federal government must be of paramount concern to legislators at all levels. The children of America are worth saving.

As a former judge in Texas, I have heard thousands of juvenile cases. As the father of four children, as a youth basketball, softball and baseball coach and as a Boy Scout of America volunteer, I can tell you we may have kids with problems, but we do not have problem kids.

We must deal seriously with juvenile offenders. We need to teach children and juveniles to be responsible and accountable for their actions. Some violent juvenile offenders absolutely must be incarcerated. But if we think by merely incarcerating more children we will solve these problems, we are wrong. If we think it will serve as a deterrent, we are fooling ourselves.

I learned as a judge that children are fearless. They make no connection between their actions and the consequences. We must have meaningful, increasingly severe sanctions for juvenile crimes as we do in Texas. But simply trying more juveniles as adults and imprisoning juveniles as adults while ignoring the factors leading children to crime in the first place will have no significant effect on the level of juvenile crime. A balanced approach, with communities both enforcing juvenile justice and preventing juvenile crime, would have the greatest impact.

We need to be tough on crime, but we also need to provide juveniles with alternatives and address the underlying factors contributing to juvenile delinquency. We need to provide education, intervention, support for families and after-school programs. When countless studies and 9 out of 10 police chiefs assert prevention efforts are cost-effective and reduce crime, we should take heed.

The juvenile justice legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives attempts to reform our juvenile system to make it more like our adult justice system. Why should we model our juvenile system on our adult one? Has our adult system proven successful? All this will do is turn more children into suicide victims and career criminals.

In 1995, with bipartisan support, the Texas Legislature passed one of the toughest juvenile justice laws in the country. Unfortunately, Texas would not qualify for any of the $1.5 billion of funding from the federal legislation. In fact, only six states would qualify for funding under the strict provisions of the bill. The bill mandates that to receive funding, states have to change their laws to meet federal standards for trying juveniles as adults and opening access to juvenile records.

This money is crucial for community crime fighting effort, and communities should not have to satisfy federal mandates to receive it. Communities should not be forced to ignore initiatives that have reduced crime in order to receive federal money intended for that purpose. Instead, we should be giving grants to local communities. Communities know best how to handle their own problems. Local parents, teachers, religious leaders, community leaders and friends should be our first line of defense.

Both the National League of Cities and the National Conference of State Legislators oppose this bill, testimony to the bill's defiance of local communities' desires to handle their own problems.

Juvenile crime is a pressing concern, and reducing juvenile crime should be a top priority. Many of my colleagues advocate building prisons and trying juveniles as adults. I believe in a more balanced approach, cracking down on crime while giving communities the opportunity to implement their own proven, cost-effective crime prevention initiatives. These are local problems and should have local, not federal, solutions.

Rep. Sandlin, D-Texas, is a former judge.