As a family law mediator and as a citizen, I wear many hats: teen advocate, legal scholar, frugal taxpayer, and, above all, safety seeker. Trying Willie Bernstine as a juvenile for the Jan. 27 shooting that wounded a two-year-old girl will respect all those values.
At the risk of being excoriated by those who decry juvenile court as soft on crime, my training and experience compels me to advocate for teens like Bernstine, not only for his personal interests. Tremendous public good comes from the vastly safer and more cost-effective juvenile justice system that actually achieves results rather than mere illusions.
Adult trials, and the decades-long sentences that follow, betray any regard for public funds, legal history, and societal safety.
Have Contra Costa County (California) prosecutors shortsightedly discounted or failed to familiarize themselves with widely-accepted research and history? Helping youth also helps adults, as citizens and taxpayers. While authorities may purport to share my goals of protecting teens, history, society, and public funds, trying Bernstine as an adult scorns every single one of those objectives.
My years in the legal field make the Bernstine case intrigue and disturb me. Bernstine and the public are poised to join the wounded toddler as additional victims of this tragedy.
As 500,000 youths in the United States enter detention annually, trying juveniles as adults should not exist as a concept. Not for Willie Bernstine. Not for any juvenile.
How many more like Bernstine will be pitted against prosecutors who flout the founding principles of juvenile court? Observers of Bernstine’ case, whether motivated by compassion, concern for public safety, or fiscal responsibility, will find those priorities achieved by treating this juvenile as a juvenile.
Communities benefit from results, not vengeance masquerading as justice. Society is not more secure just because a shackled juvenile is photographed en route to prison. Those who oppose crime should want it to diminish. Rehabilitating juveniles supports that ideal.
Louisiana’s juvenile recidivism rate, for example, was five times lower upon implementing alternatives to confinement. Nationally, two-thirds of inmates incarcerated in adult systems are later rearrested. Half are imprisoned again.
The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a public-private partnership, advocates detention only as a last resort. In jurisdictions adopting its protocol, detention center populations declined 52%, and juvenile arrests dropped 45%.
The juvenile system’s financial advantages should impress even those requiring more proof than the vastly reduced recidivism rates. Every dollar spent on rehabilitative alternatives reduces taxpayers’ costs by $8, compared with only $2 saved per dollar spent on incarceration.
Those who would try teens as adults seek results that come only from rehabilitation, not the incarceration they are championing. My experiences with rehabilitating wayward adolescents validate that future-focused approach.
When I mentored juveniles as a law student at the University of Idaho, I witnessed sparks of hope in them. Those youths’ rap sheets ran the gamut from truancy to attempted murder, yet a caring adult’s individual attention redirected them, no matter how entrenched they once were.
At that courthouse, I met a boy whose writing skills I soon discovered. Once I praised his talent, he would bring me new pieces weekly, buoyed that his life had a purpose.
At no taxpayer expense, he developed confidence that he could never have cultivated in confinement, compared to the hundreds of dollars his incarceration would have sapped the public purse daily.
Teens like Willie Bernstine are at a similar crossroads. With expensive adult incarceration that research conclusively deems ineffective, will they burden society and reoffend? Or will they receive cost-effective rehabilitation that produces positive results even 111 years after Chicago founded the nation’s first juvenile court?
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