By Tim McGlone
Three years after ordering a widespread study of juvenile justice, state legislators had hoped to make improvements and repairs to a system that appears unfair to minorities and inconsistent from court to court.
But other legislators say now is not the time to make changes.
The Virginia State Crime Commission has been studying the juvenile justice system since 2006. It's the first look at the system since major changes were made 12 years ago by the General Assembly, at a time when juvenile crime was at its peak.
Since then, juvenile crime has dropped in Virginia about 34 percent, but there were significant spikes in robberies and homicides between 2006 and 2007, and experts project youth crime to begin increasing again in the coming years.
A final report is scheduled to be delivered to General Assembly members by the first day of the session, Jan. 14.
Preliminary findings were presented to the Crime Commission at its recent meetings, last month and in October. Some commission members indicated that another year of study might be needed. Others, though, said the findings showed that the changes made last decade have succeeded.
State Sen. Ken Stolle, R-Virginia Beach and the commission vice chairman, said the data in the study show "policies that apparently are working."
The commission's study, conducted by its staff, revealed that black children are twice as likely as whites to be committed to juvenile correctional centers.
This disproportion "may result from school policies, targeting of crime-ridden neighborhoods, inability of the indigent to retain paid counsel, and lack of available prevention opportunities and alternatives to detention," the study said, citing a 2005 state juvenile justice report.
The study also found that recidivism rates, or the number of juvenile offenders who commit new crimes, increase significantly when juveniles are tried in Circuit Court. The study cited a national report that contained the same conclusion.
Among the significant changes to emerge from the 1996 reforms was a lowering to 14 the age a youth can be tried as an adult for certain crimes. For violent crimes, prosecutors have sole discretion whether to transfer a juvenile from Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to Circuit Court, where the penalties are more severe and opportunities for reform are fewer.
Most of Virginia's public defenders - 93 percent - who responded to a Crime Commission survey recommended that the General Assembly remove certain violent crimes, including rape, robbery and felony homicide, from a list of those eligible to be transferred to Circuit Court. First- and second-degree murder would remain on the list.
Most also believe Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court judges should decide whether a juvenile should be transferred to adult court, not prosecutors.
The commission report recommends to the General Assembly that the transfer issue be re-examined, but it stops short of recommending the wholesale changes that the public defenders would prefer. Nearly all commonwealth's attorneys who responded to the survey opposed any transfer changes.
National research, including that just conducted by the Bush administration's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, suggests that treating children as adults increases the odds of recidivism.
"The practice of transferring juveniles for trial and sentencing in adult criminal court has, however, produced the unintended effect of increasing recidivism, particularly in violent offenders, and thereby promoting life-course criminality," a 2008 report by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention said.
Andrew K. Block Jr., legal director of the JustChildren Program at the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center, said in an interview Friday that the bottom line is to balance fairness with public safety.
"More checks and balances on the decision to try children as adults in Virginia will make sure that only those young people who truly require adult convictions and adult confinement receive these consequences," he said. "It's a really hard problem to address."
Block and other advocates for juveniles, some of whom testified at the commission's last meeting, pushed for more prevention and treatment programs, but the legislators said there will be no new funding.
"I don't think there's going to be any substantive legislation this session," Block said.
As of Friday, (1/2/09) no juvenile justice legislation had been pre-filed.
