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Punishment or Prevention?
With Proposition 21, this is our choice on juvenile crime
by Terry Bailey
published in Glendale News Press
January 13, 2000
We have a choice to make as a society: build more schools for our kids, or more prisons for them?
Should we continue to spend our tax dollars on educational improvements and violence prevention programs, or shift our social policy and tax dollars to prosecuting and incarcerating more children who commit crimes?
We’ll have the opportunity to make this choice on the March 7 ballot. A yes note , the Juvenile Crime Initiative, ensures that our tax dollars go to build more prisons, increase sentences terms for juveniles, dilute confidentiality rights in juvenile proceedings, expand the definition of gang membership, require gang offenders to register with police like sex offenders, and try more children as adults.
A no vote on Proposition 21 allows our taxes to support crime prevention and rehabilitation programs for children – rather than more prisons. A no vote allows us to signify a public policy preference for a balanced approach to youth crime – with adequate resources for incarceration and for crime prevention . And a no vote on Proposition 21 sends a message that we prefer our taxes to be spent on education and other positive civic priorities.
The California Legislative Analyst estimates that Proposition 21 will impose state costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and local costs in the tens of millions of dollars each year. The measure creates no revenue sources, so local governments will have to reallocate funds to pay for new trial court and incarceration costs.
Lock bad kids up and throw away the key, or make a societal commitment to do what it takes to prevent kids going bad in the first place?
Treat children as children, or as adults? Punish bad kids, or search for ways to rehabilitate them? Spend our tax dollars improving education and programs for kids and parents, or enforcing stiffer sentences and building more prisons for juvenile offenders?
The public has already spoken out about this public policy issue. Polls show that 78% of California voters favor violence prevention as a state policy over building more youth prisons. And the public has already expressed its preferences through our elected legislative representatives.
Former Governor Pete Wilson created this initiative while in office after our Legislature rejected his entire juvenile crime package.
He drafted the bill with the help of prosecutors whose interests this bill was intended to serve. Then Wilson spend about $1 million dollars on professional signature gatherers to qualify this initiative for the ballot.
The fact is that juvenile crime has declined dramatically in California since 1990. In that time, arrests for juvenile felonies have dropped 50%. This certainly raises serious questions as to why we would need this initiative.
Prosecutors feel a strong sense of responsibility to protect the public from harm. That is clearly why some of them authored this initiative.
If I were a prosecutor, I am sure I would have days when I’d like to lock up forever some kid who had committed a terrible crime, to prevent that kid from ever getting out and committing another crime. I can sympathize with prosecutors frustrations.
Until we really do get a handle on juvenile crime prevention, until we figure out how to rehabilitate these kids, prosecutors have a very tough job. But prosecutors are not social disease surgeons. It is not their job to simply cut out errant and harmful citizens from society.
Juvenile crime is a subject we all must continue to tackle together. We cannot afford the myopic view of juvenile crime that Proposition 21 supports.
Juvenile crime does not happen in a societal vacuum. Juvenile criminals are not simply bad seeds.
Juvenile crime happens because juveniles grow up in negligent or violent families, in violent neighborhoods, in a society rife with drug and alcohol addiction, in poverty, in family or societal niches that lack the loving. Moral and ethical fabrics enjoyed by other more privileged children.
As a society we can focus our future civic efforts in a positive direction.
We can continue the efforts we’ve begun to improve our schools and educations system,. We can find ways to help parents be better parents.
We can work to abolish the drug and alcohol abuse and violence, which so often lead to juvenile crime.
We can continue to establish after school programs for kids.
We can search for ways to treat medical problems in kids whole violence is physiologically based, and provide much needed support for their families. We can choose to nurture every single child’s potential.
Or, we can shift our civic focus and tax dollars from the prevention of juvenile crime and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders to accelerated punishment and incarceration of kids gone bad.
Are we ready to assume responsibility for all children, rather than hide behind some mythical “bad seed” concept of children who take wrong turns? Are we willing to commit ourselves to continue the hard work of juvenile crime prevention rather than to take the easier punishment route?
Then we must all go to the polls on March 7 and vote no on this expensive, regressive, negative, narrow-minded, and short-sighted ballot measure.
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