Screwing the youth
When the budget gets tight, young people become an easy target
By: BRIAN C. JONES
8/15/2007 5:25:25 PM
Wole Akinbi was 16 when someone phoned to say his best friend had been shot.
He turned on the TV, and sure enough, there was footage showing rescue workers sliding someone into an ambulance. He could tell who it was. The pictures showed Barry Ferrell’s favorite green sneakers.
Ferrell, 18, had been Akinbi’s mentor in a summer jobs program, and his murder has shaped Akinbi’s life in the two years since.
Akinbi, who lives near the State House, in Providence’s Smith Hill neighborhood, linked up with the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, conducting his high school’s mandatory internship there and working at the institute in the summer.
Now, newly 18 himself and counting down the weeks until he starts college this fall, Akinbi has as a unique vantage point on the debate about how Rhode Island treats teenagers, in particular whether 17-year-olds should be steered into adult or youth prisons.
"If you are ‘brave’ enough to do it — to carry out a murder — you should be tried as an adult,” he says somewhat bitterly. “If you are going to walk around with a knife in your back pocket, because you know that you are ready to stab somebody, by all means, go to the ACI.”
But Akinbi makes a big U-turn when he considers the suspect, 16 at the time, who allegedly killed Ferrell.
“Now, for the person who shot Barry — everyone said it was mistaken ID — the kid probably didn’t mean to kill Barry, so, in his case, I would send him to the Training School,” says Akinbi. In any case, he adds, 16 is just too young for the Adult Correctional Institutions.
Confused? No more than everyone else — psychiatrists, teachers, Supreme Court justices — who wrestles with the question of when someone is an adult.
The issue has become critical this year in Rhode Island, because of two cost-saving moves by Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri to change the way the state provides services to older teenagers.
One proposal was to stop delivering services to young people 18 to 21 who have been in state care after being taken from their families for abuse and similar reasons.
The other idea was raising the age at which juvenile criminal offenders are eligible for Family Court and the state Training School, sending 17-year-olds to adult courts and the ACI.
The Democratic General Assembly balked at cutting off 18-to-21-year-olds from continued care by the Department of Children, Youth and Families. But it did adopt the governor’s proposal to treat 17-year-olds as adult criminals.
The two issues underlie a larger debate about how children and teenagers are cared for in Rhode Island, which has one of the country’s highest rates of childhood poverty, but also nationally recognized programs that have made big improvements in their lives, including the RIte Care health insurance program for lower income families.
When it comes to teenagers, Rhode Island can seem ambivalent — impatient and restrictive one moment, but caring and innovative the next.
This shows up in the arbitrary age limits that sometimes protect young people from their own worst instincts, but at other times seem to fast-forward them into adulthood, as if doing so eliminates wider responsibility for expensive, often exasperating support and nurture.
Contradictions abound.
An 18-year-old can join the Army, but can’t buy a handgun until 21. An 18-year-old can vote, but not drink until 21. Girls can get married at 16 (with a note from their mothers and fathers); boys under 18 have to get permission from their parents and a Family Court judge.
Teenagers can drive at 16, but must navigate speed bumps built into the
licensing process until they reach 18. You can’t run for the U.S. House
of Representatives until age 25, the Senate until 30, and president
until 35.
So when are we grown up, really?
Are we really adults at 18?
Dr. Gregory K. Fritz knows part of the answer.
Fritz is director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Brown University medical school and secretary of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He’s also academic director at Emma Pendleton Bradley Hospital, the children’s psychiatric center in East Providence and director of child psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital.
Fritz says a person closes in on adulthood when he or she completes the transition from childhood: adolescence. But figuring that endpoint is harder than determining its beginning, which many experts put at the onset of puberty.
As adolescents’ bodies make their final, dramatic growth spurt and their sexual systems are maturing, they also undergo a social and psychological shift away from their parents, Fritz says, gravitating toward friends and charismatic adults outside the home.
“It’s one of the things that makes adolescents such great soldiers,” he says, saying older teenagers readily bond with each other, forming cohesive military units. They are influenced by mentors like commanding officers, teachers, and coaches. “At best, it’s a wonderful thing and it helps you develop and make the transition from childhood to adulthood,” Fritz says. “At worst, your mentor is a criminal in the ACI, who exploits your attachment so that you can get assaulted every night, and meanwhile, he’s teaching you how to become a criminal.”
Defining the age of adulthood is difficult, Fritz says, because of wide
variations among individuals. He also notes: “Because you are
physically mature doesn’t mean you are psychologically mature.”
Moreover, it’s not all that clear when the brain fully develops.
Lately, scientists have been using advanced scanning techniques to peer into the brain, including the frontal region, which governs critical functions such as decision-making. They’re finding this part of the brain may take longer to fully develop than once thought.
Dr. Daniel P. Dickstein is the newly hired director of pediatric mood, imaging and neurodevelopment at Bradley Hospital. A graduate of Brown medical school’s pediatric and psychiatric programs, Dickstein worked for five years at the National Institute of Mental Health.
At the NIMH, Dickstein’s colleagues made a unique study of 13 children, taking magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) readings from the time they were young children and periodically after that into their 20s. The researchers gained new insights into brain development. People are born with 100 billion neurons, or nerve cells. Over time, the number of neurons decrease, but vital connections between them increase, Dickstein says.
“It matters which part of the brain is developing,” he says. “And what [these images show] is that the older parts of the brain, that are associated with more basic function, vision, moving your body, mature earlier. And then, with time, the parts of the brain that are involved with attention, decision-making — you could even say risk-taking and some aspects of emotion-regulation — mature later.”
How long does it take?
“People think that up to age 25 is when the optimum neural changes are occurring,” Dickstein says.
Losing sight of the big picture
It was money, not biology, which inspired state leaders to change the
age for trying adult criminals. The governor and the legislature
wrestled to control a budget that is millions of dollars out of balance
every year, because spending continues to outstrip tax revenue.
No one, Carcieri included, argues that the ACI and adult courts are better for 17-year-olds.
“This was one of those very difficult proposals the governor put forward as one piece of a larger effort to solve the state’s budget problem,” says Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal. “It’s not clear to me he would have put forward this proposal if the circumstances were different.”
The General Assembly brushed off an 11th-hour attempt by Rhode Island Kids Count, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others to keep 17-year-olds within the Family Court and the Training School systems. The groups are still pushing for a reversal, should the legislature reconvene before January to deal with a series of Carcieri vetoes.
Many experts say the change will hurt 17-year-olds, and cost taxpayers more money in the long run.
Donna Bishop, a professor at Northeast¬ern University’s College of Criminal Justice, says seven major studies show that juveniles generally fare worse after going through adult-oriented systems than those in systems geared for young people. Young persons in adult systems are more likely to “re-offend,” or commit new crimes, to do so more quickly, and more often, Bishop says.
One drawback faced by young offenders, she says, is how they earn adult criminal records. That means they will have a harder time finding jobs and getting married.
In adult prison, the young offenders are offered fewer rehabilitative programs, says Bishop, whiling time away in an atmosphere that is far less positive and encouraging than might be the case in a juvenile program.
These are themes echoed by other experts.
“Adolescents are not young adults, and once a juvenile goes into the adult system, and has a felony record, that can really affect their lives,” says Dr. Joseph Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Rhode Island Training School and a Brown professor.
Penn says the majority of those treated by the juvenile system are able to get their lives in order: staying out of trouble, and earning a living. “A lot of kids just make bad decisions, and don’t really think about the consequences of their actions,” he says. “And it takes a while, until you get older, to begin to develop the kind of moral insight and judgment into what you are doing.”
Another critic is Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who in his first term used his discretionary power to seek Family Court permission to treat juveniles as adults 46 times, out of a total of 12,753 cases.
“Just like in the adult world, there are some people on this planet that are so evil and commit such heinous acts” they should be treated with adult-level sanctions, Lynch says. In those instances, he says, “I don’t lose a wink of sleep.”
Yet the AG is opposed to a wholesale sweep of 17-year-olds into the adult system. He, too, worries about the possible damage that a public, adult-style criminal record can have on a young person’s chances of moving forward in his or her life.
“It will ultimately prove more costly, literally from an economic, budgetary perspective,” Lynch says. “But I would argue even further that the untold impact — and perhaps, unmeasurable from a budgetary perspective — on the quality of life of Rhode Islanders is going to cost us dearly as well.”
No magic line for adulthood
Most experts acknowledge there is no magic dividing line for adulthood,
meaning that some people are more mature at 17 than others. Still, they
say that the 18-year mark is useful.
That’s the conclusion reached by the US Supreme Court in a 2005 decision, in which it banned the death penalty for felons younger than 18, although it did so in a narrow five-to-four vote, taken when the high court lineup was less conservative.
That decision moved up the age limit for capital punishment from a 1989 ruling that had allowed executions of 16 and 17 year olds. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the new decision, which noted expert opinion was finding that young people lack maturity and a sense of responsibility.
Kennedy conceded that juveniles don’t instantly turn into adults, at 18, but wrote: “The age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood. It is, we conclude, the age at which the line for death eligibility ought to rest.”
Rhode Island doesn’t have the death penalty, but the move to treat 17-year-olds lawbreakers as adults touches the same issues that divided the Supreme Court.
It also has generated a bitter counterattack by child advocates, alarmed not only that the change will be counterproductive, spawning a new group of older criminals, but also because it reverses an often-creative approach to problem-solving.
The just-released edition of the National Kids Count Data Book, which measures the well-being of the nation’s children, ranked Rhode Island 20th from the top among the states — a better position than last year, when it came in 31st.
Rhode Island has the nation’s best record for low numbers of deaths among children ages 1 to 14, and RIte Care helps the state insure all but seven percent of children, compared to the 11 percent of children nationally who lack health coverage.
But childhood poverty has increased in the last five years, to 19 percent in Rhode Island, and eight percent of older teenagers aren’t in school and aren’t working.
One young man’s path
Wole Akinbi is no expert on brain scans, Supreme Court case law or the
details of the Kids Count Data Book. But having turned 18 in May, he
has first-hand experience with the transition to adulthood.
“There’s still kid left in me. I don’t think I’m 100 percent independent. I’m scared to go off to college, but I want to,” he says. “It’s time to move on and see what post-high school life is like and being an adult, and to wake up on my own without my Mom telling me, ‘Oh, yeah, aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ ”
P.J. Fox III, operations director at the South Providence-based Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, who oversaw Akinbi’s internship when he was a student at the Met School, says Akinbi is mature for his age and one of the most committed persons he’s seen to the principles of non-violence.
But Fox agrees with Akinbi’s self-assessment — that in some ways that “he’s still a kid, he’s still being molded, still creating his identity.”
When Akinbi’s friend, Barry Ferrell, was killed in 2005, there was talk within his wide circle of friends of retaliation — an idea quashed sternly by Ferrell’s mother, Trixy Ferrell, who has become a street worker for the institute.
Akinbi says violence wasn’t an option he considered. He’d been raised in a home where his mother was determined to shield him and his younger brother from city street dangers. And he took advantage of programs like Groundwork Providence, which hired young people, including Ferrell and him.
Now, Akinbi remains steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence, but exasperated that not everyone his age agrees. And he’s often of two minds about how those on the threshold of adulthood should be treated.
“There’s a lot of good kids in Providence, like a thousand good kids in Providence,” Akinbi says. “But they get tainted by all these bootlegged leaders that do nothing. They aren’t going anywhere. It’s cool to get jumped. It’s cool to fight every other week.”
You can’t treat teenagers like children; they need to held accountable for what they do, he says. That’s when he’s in his lock-em-up mood, saying that 17-year-olds who make “stupid” choices deserve the ACI.
But the next moment, he’s musing on what it takes to make a difference in a young person’s life: a place to turn to, people to look up to, a chance for a job: “Just a little push and a little support, that’s all it takes for a kid to get off the street.”
Akinbi remains disturbed by the idea of a 16-year-old in the ACI, including Jeffrey Santos, sentenced last year to serve 20 years for second-degree murder in Barry Ferrell’s death.
“In my heart right now, like, I miss Barry to death,” Akinbi says. But he doesn’t think the ACI is the place for his killer, at least until he’s older. “I wouldn’t want to do that to him at 16. I’d at least want him to get like counseling to deal with like what he’d done, like: ‘Okay, you know, you’ve killed this person.’ ”
In September, Akinbi will be out of Providence, at Dean College in Massachusetts, with possible plans to transfer to Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, or the University of Maryland. Maybe he’ll get into marketing.
Along the way, he knows that he still has ties to his boyhood in Providence. He’s already figured out what he can do if he runs into rough sledding this fall. He’s got everyone’s phone numbers, cell numbers, e-mails. His mom’s, P.J.’s and others at the institute.
“I’m going to call them on a daily basis, if I get caught up in a class or something at school,” Akinbi declares. “It’s not over for them. They are not done with me. That’s the whole point.”
Email the author
Brian C. Jones: brijudy@cox.net
Copyright © 2007 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group
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