A bag of chips and the law, The Charlotte Observer (10.24.2011)
There are lots of things about New York one wishes North Carolina would emulate.
For instance, wouldn’t it be great to be able to get some decent soul food or egg foo yung at 3 in the morning? How about catching a Fellini or, if your taste runs to slapstick, Three Stooges film festival in the middle of the day?
Around here, we can’t even get a hot Krispy Kreme doughnut after midnight – and we invented the suckers.
The one thing North Carolina does emulate about the Empire State, unfortunately, is its barbarically nonsensical treatment of young kids who get into minor trouble. Only New York and we automatically treat 16- and 17-year-old offenders as adults.
A bipartisan group of state politicians and child advocates is working on changing that cuckoo, counterproductive law. Republican Rep. Marilyn Avila, nobody’s idea of a Birkenstock-wearing, green-tea-sipping liberal, introduced a Raise the Age bill, but it never made it out of committee.
Do you reckon the legislators were too busy debating whether to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage to worry about the thousands of young people whose lives may be ruined if they are unnecessarily dumped into the adult court system?
Brandy Bynum, director of policy and outreach for Action for Children North Carolina, said her group and others have been working to change the law for six or seven years.
“We know, we have evidence, that these kids can be better served in the juvenile justice system than in the adult system. … North Carolina is out of line” in its treatment of juvenile delinquents, she says.
Amen, sisterwoman. October is National Juvenile Justice Awareness Month, and is there anybody – OK, anybody who doesn’t make his or her living off of filling up jails and prisons – who thinks society is better off locking up that 17-year-old boy in Gaston County who was recently arrested for stealing a bag of Doritos from the school cafeteria?
According to the Gaston Gazette newspaper, an assistant principal eyeballed the kid getting a five-finger discount on the 69-cent bag of Doritos and called the school cop, who made the arrest.
Can you imagine North Carolina’s wisest, most famous sheriff, Andy Taylor of Mayberry, sending a 17-year-old kid to the Rock for stealing a bag of Doritos?
No way. Andy would’ve sat him down, given him a good talking-to – and invited him over to the house for supper.
That’s not what the N.C. Sheriffs Association favors, though.
“The sheriffs are opposed to these bills because they will not work,” Eddie Caldwell, a lobbyist for the Sheriffs Association, told me. “We don’t have enough money to take care of the kids we’ve already got in the juvenile justice department, and now they want to add two more age groups. That doesn’t make sense.”
One of the increased costs, he said, is separating nonviolent youthful offenders from violent ones. When told that the bill’s proponents specify that it applies only to nonviolent offenders, he said: “Before you buy that line hook, line and sinker, I suggest you look at what’s in the bill. There are a whole lot of things in there that you, I and the general public would consider to be violent.
“Jim Hunt used to say all the time, ‘It’s about the chirren,’ ” Caldwell said, mimicking how the former governor spoke. “It’s not about the chirren. Some of these are career criminals who started terrorizing their neighborhoods when they were 12 and 13.”
Costs of callousness
He said the cost of implementing the bill would start at $39 million a year and escalate annually. A 2010 study by the N.C. Association of County Commissioners found that it costs, on average, $58.85 a day to keep an inmate in a county jail. That means the 69-cent bag of Doritos could end up costing Gaston County taxpayers around $10,593 if the Frito Bandit is convicted of the Class C larceny charge that carries a six-month or more sentence.
Oy. The Sheriff’s Association and you heartless types may think that’s a good return on investment, but anyone with a brain or heart or job would rather see the kid receive a more appropriate, less costly punishment. And treatment.
Bynum and Billy Warden, a spokesman for the Raise the Age campaign, both said young offenders are more likely to get treatment in the juvenile system than in adult court.
“The adult system is so crowded that youthful offenders fall through the cracks” and often receive neither punishment nor treatment, Warden said.
And, as Bynum said, an adult record will forever hinder people’s ability to get into college and get jobs.
“In this economy,” she said, “we need to be creating taxpayers, not tax burdens.”
It happened to me
For this story and over the years, I’ve talked to doctors, lawyers, preachers and business leaders who all almost lost their chance at a meaningful future because of juvenile trouble.
At 15, I was the biggest, dumbest member of our group of minor malefactors. So once, when the judge saw us standing before him for some minor indiscretion, his attention was focused directly on me.
In front of a packed Richmond County courtroom, the juvenile court judge singled me out and asked “What’s your (steatopygian posterior) doing in here?”
To the judge’s chagrin, my posterior was a month from turning 16 so I received probation.
Whew.