Juvenile Injustice: The Jacen Pearson Case

Amid the tragedy of Todd Peek’s death in Iowa, allegedly at the hands of his stepson, Jacen Pearson, Peek’s family members seem to believe that the justice system that traditionally aims to serve the broader interests of society is also available at their personal beck and call to pounce on a pre-adolescent who needs more treatment than condemnation.

I am loath to criticize victims, but Peek’s relatives’ bloodthirstiness will not achieve the satisfaction they seek. Worse yet, the detriment their crusade may wreak on Jacen could add him to the list of victims.

Two weeks ago, the Peek family, seemingly blinded by a kneejerk desire for vengeance, wrote an emotionally-charged letter to the Des Moines Register. That diatribe read like a victim impact statement laced with inflammatory rhetoric.

However, reasonable people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

When the Peek family excludes Jacen from the list of victims of that heartbreaking incident, they misunderstand the whole point of juvenile court. Fact.

One family, blinded by the prejudice of its own pain, however justifiably so, still does not have the right to deny this child the rehabilitative approach that decades of research developed and a more than a century of practice has validated. Fact.

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 rearrested after their release, and 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.

Ensuring the quality of juvenile facilities, and juvenile offenders’ access to resources and court time within them, achieves more and costs less.

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.

Accused teens, and even pre-teens such as Jacen Pearson, 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?

The juvenile justice system’s dual responsibilities are to protect the entire community and treat the individual offender. Neither is accomplished by indulging one family’s grief-tinged spite at the expense of a misguided 12-year-old who needs help more than the Peeks need revenge.