U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics National Conference on Juvenile Justice Records: Appropriate Criminal and Noncriminal Justice Uses April 1997, NCJ-164269 The full text of this report is available through: * the BJS Clearinghouse, 1-800-732-3277 * on the Internet at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ * on the BJS gopher: gopher://www.ojp.usdoj.gov:70/11/bjs/ * on the National Criminal Justice Reference Service Electronic Bulletin Board (set at 8-N-1, call 301-738-8895, select BJS). ******************************************************************** National Conference on Juvenile Justice Records: Appropriate Criminal and Noncriminal Justice Uses ******************************************************************** National Conference on Juvenile Justice Records: Appropriate Criminal and Noncriminal Justice Uses --------------------------------------- Proceedings of a BJS/SEARCH conference --------------------------------------- May 1997, NCJ-164269 Papers presented by Dr. Francis J. Carney Jr. Dr. Charles M. Friel Kent Markus Dr. Jan M. Chaiken Dr. Michael R. Gottfredson Shay Bilchik Demery R. Bishop David Gavin Dr. Alfred Blumstein Gordon A. Martin Jr. Michael R. Phillips Steve Galeria Ronald C. Laney Dr. Bernard James Neal Miller Robert R. Belair Jan Scully Donna M. Uzzell Michael L. Curtis Jo-Ann Wallace U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics Jan M. Chaiken, Ph.D. Director ------------------ Acknowledgments -------------------- This report was prepared by SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, Maj. James V. Martin, Chairman, and Gary R. Cooper, Executive Director. The project director was Sheila J. Barton, Deputy Director. Twyla R. Cunningham, Manager, Corporate Communications, edited the proceedings, with assistance from Jane L. Bassett, Publishing Assistant, who also provided layout and design assistance. The federal project monitor was Carol G. Kaplan, Chief, National Criminal History Improvement Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Report of work performed under BJS Cooperative Agreement No. 92-BJ-CX-K012, awarded to SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, 7311 Greenhaven Drive, Suite 145, Sacramento, California 95831. Contents of this document do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the U.S. Department of Justice. Copyright c SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, 1997. The U.S. Department of Justice authorizes any person to reproduce, publish, translate or otherwise use all or any part of the copyrighted material in this publication with the exception of those items indicating they are copyrighted or printed by any source other than SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. Contents Foreword Introduction I. Overview Welcoming remarks Dr. Francis J. Carney Jr. SEARCH welcome Dr. Charles M. Friel Conference moderator's welcome Kent Markus Keynote address II. Setting the stage: Current status of juvenile justice records Opening address Dr. Jan M. Chaiken Changing laws and policies governing juvenile justice records radically alter balance between confidentiality and public access, and increase importance of record accuracy, Background: Examining the foundation of juvenile justice record policies Dr. Michael R. Gottfredson An evaluation of the historical justifications for a distinct system of juvenile justice: The age, versatility and stability effects, Federal policies and perspectives: The relationship of juvenile justice information to national criminal justice goals Shay Bilchik The importance of improving and sharing information to furthering national juvenile justice reform, Demery R. Bishop Juvenile recordhandling policies and practices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation State laws on prosecutors' and judges' use of juvenile justice records Neal Miller National assessment of criminal court use of defendants' juvenile adjudication records III. Public policy perspectives: Privacy and confidentiality considerations of juvenile record issues Overview Robert R. Belair "The need to know" versus privacy Practitioners' perspectives: Using the juvenile record Jan Scully Juvenile justice issues and the role of juvenile records in decisionmaking: A prosecutor's viewpoint Donna M. Uzzell Florida's Serious Habitual Offender Comprehensive Action Program: Collecting and using juvenile offender information to target detention, intervention and prevention efforts Michael L. Curtis Juvenile justice records management in Washington State, Jo-Ann Wallace Striking a proper balance between legitimate uses of juvenile records and individual privacy: The District of Columbia experience Collection, maintenance and use of juvenile fingerprints David Gavin Implementing a statewide juvenile criminal history repository in Texas: Issues and practices IV. Operational and management perspectives Day two opening address Dr. Alfred Blumstein Using juvenile records to predict criminal behavior The role of the juvenile record in judicial decisionmaking Gordon A. Martin Jr. Judicial access to information critical to the juvenile court process and to preserving the juvenile justice system Statewide juvenile systems Michael R. Phillips Providing statewide access to juvenile court records and proceedings in Utah Juvenile records as a basis for firearm prohibitions Steve Galeria California's approach to using juvenile records in firearms checks Exchanging juvenile records between the juvenile justice system and schools Ronald C. Laney Information sharing critical to process of protecting children Dr. Bernard James Issues and implications of school-juvenile justice information sharing Contributors' biographies *************** Foreword *************** In response to several years of rapidly rising crime rates among juveniles, especially homicide rates, many States have been opening access to juvenile records and court proceedings, and blurring the line between how the criminal justice system treats juveniles and adults. The problem of juvenile crime, however, cannot be fully understood by knowing about rising graphs and nightly news headlines. Large numbers of adolescents who get in trouble with the law are our sons and daughters who may never go on to commit any serious crime, much less become chronic violent offenders. While opening access to the juvenile record is a policy based on legitimate public safety concerns, it threatens to reverse nearly 100 years of juvenile justice policy that stresses rehabilitation, treatment, and individual privacy. How to balance the use of juvenile justice records in today's climate presents unique challenges to juvenile justice administrators, public policymakers, and others in the criminal justice arena involved in aspects of collecting, maintaining, using, or disseminating juvenile justice record information. To provide a variety of perspectives and seek solutions on this issue, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, along with SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics, cosponsored the National Conference on Juvenile Justice Records: Appropriate Uses in Criminal and Noncriminal Justice Proceedings in Washington, D.C., on May 22-23, 1996. This publication presents the proceedings of that two-day conference. The conference focused on the appropriate uses of juvenile justice records in juvenile and adult/criminal court and other criminal justice proceedings, as well as for noncriminal justice purposes, such as background employment checks and licensing. For those who were not present at the conference, these proceedings provide a perspective for understanding the juvenile crime problem in this context, an appreciation for the variety of public policy issues involved in greater access to juvenile justice records and court proceedings, and new insights into the operational, management and technical implications of such recordkeeping changes.I hope that these proceedings serve as a basis for continuing debate and study on this topic. Juvenile justice recordkeeping policies are changing rapidly, and our knowledge of the impacts of these policy changes must be constantly brought up to date, not only the effects on juvenile offenders and juvenile crime but also the costs and other practical implications for justice agencies. Jan M. Chaiken, Ph.D. Director ************** Introduction ************** The purported increase in violent crime committed by juveniles has resulted in a public-driven backlash: more and more State and local jurisdictions are prosecuting juveniles as adults, and opening access to juvenile records and juvenile criminal proceedings that for decades have been protected by strict confidentiality laws compatible with the rehabilitative mission of juvenile justice. These rapid changes in the juvenile justice system and juvenile recordkeeping practices raise a multitude of highly sensitive legal, policy and implementation issues that confront criminal justice professionals. Justice officials warn that greater public access to juvenile justice records and proceedings in the United States is a fundamental shift that threatens to undermine the foundations of the juvenile justice system as it has existed for nearly 100 years. Others say that opening access and treating juvenile and adult records the same is the only effective means to stem the tide of juvenile crime, and that a balance can be struck between open access and protection of juveniles. As the millennium approaches, legislators, policymakers and justice practitioners at all levels of government continue to grapple with the important issues resulting from this nationwide shift. As part of its effort to spur debate and seek solutions on this issue, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, and SEARCH cosponsored the National Conference on Juvenile Justice Records: Appropriate Uses in Criminal and Noncriminal Justice Proceedings on May 22-23, 1996, in Washington, D.C. The focus of the conference was the appropriate uses of juvenile justice records in juvenile and adult/criminal court and other criminal justice proceedings, as well as for noncriminal justice purposes, such as background employment checks and licensing. The conference brought together Federal agency directors and officials; academics; members of the State and local judicial, legislative, court and criminal justice communities; directors of State criminal history repositories; officials from national criminal justice organizations; and juvenile justice administrators, all of whom are involved in some aspect of juvenile justice recordkeeping policy, collection, maintenance, use or dissemination. This document presents the proceedings of that conference. Day One of the conference provided background information on the current status of the juvenile justice system and a discussion of the public policy considerations regarding the use of the juvenile record. On Day Two, speakers examined the operational and management issues involved in accessing juvenile justice information. In Part I of the conference, "Overview," Dr. Francis J. Carney Jr., Executive Director, Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, who at the time of the conference was SEARCH Chairman, and Dr. Charles M. Friel, Professor, College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, provide "Welcoming remarks." Dr. Carney says the appropriate use of juvenile records is a timely topic for justice agencies nationwide, and mentions an example from his Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, which recently struggled with the question of whether to include the juvenile record as a factor for sentencing guidelines purposes. The Commission's juvenile record debate, he reports, went on at several levels-- philosophical, practical and policy-- and reflects the same emerging issues that he expects the conference speakers to address. Dr. Friel, who served as conference moderator, predicts that justice professionals nationwide will have to address many policy and legal issues as they band together to deal with the problem of violent youth crime through the use of juvenile justice information. The issue, he says, brings competing perspectives to the question of how to use, when to use, and who can use juvenile records. In his "Keynote Address," Mr. Kent Markus, Counselor to the Attorney General for Youth Violence, U.S. Department of Justice, reports that societal changes are forcing justice administrators, policymakers and legislators to rethink the underlying policy assumptions of the rehabilitative mission of the juvenile justice system; as a consequence, many State legislatures nationwide are amending their laws to permit greater access to juvenile records and criminal proceedings. He says the public hype about juvenile crime may overplay the magnitude of the problem, and so he sets a framework of the juvenile violence and crime problem--citing five specific causal links--that is useful to a discussion about the appropriate uses of juvenile records. He asserts the Federal government can play an important role in addressing juvenile violence by gathering, modeling and redistributing information, and in providing leadership to bring government entities together to fight the problem. Rethinking the underlying assumptions of juvenile justice and juvenile records is recognized as necessary, he says,adding that he hopes this rethinking can be done in the context of the causes of juvenile crime so that any decisions that are made can substantially impact the problem. He says we need to ask how we can better use and share information to effectively deal with each causal link to juvenile crime and violence. In Part II of the conference, "Setting the stage: Current status of juvenile justice records," the next five speakers bring a variety of perspectives to a discussion of the current status of juvenile justice records on a national level. In his "Opening address," Dr. Jan M. Chaiken, Director, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), U.S. Department of Justice, discusses how changing laws and policies governing juvenile justice records are altering the balance between confidentiality and public access, and thus are increasing the importance that the information contained in juvenile records is accurate. Dr. Chaiken say that in laws and policies which transfer juvenile offenders to the adult system, in sentencing guidelines which take into account an offender's previous activity, and in laws which require that background checks include consideration of juvenile records, the offender's record--and its immediate availability, accuracy and completeness--is the basis for the key decisions which impact treatment of the individual. Issues related to juvenile record accuracy and completeness present difficult challenges to justice practitioners and policymakers, he notes. Over 25 years of effort and millions of dollars have been expended to improve adult criminal history records, while work on improving juvenile records has only begun. Policies regarding the release and use of adult records have been resolved over the past two decades,while newly enacted juvenile record policies have yet to be evaluated, and represent a reversal of the underlying goals of the juvenile system. In "Background: Examining the foundation of juvenile justice record policies," Dr. Michael R. Gottfredson, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, University of Arizona, provides a criminological evaluation of the historical justifications for a distinct system of juvenile justice using three simplifying principles of age, stability and versatility that he says have many implications for the questions that confront the justice community. As he explains, the age effect shows that the offending rate for crime and delinquency peaks in late adolescence and then declines throughout life. The versatility effect shows that there is enormous variability in the kinds of offending in the criminal population, with little specialization or sense of direction, as well as variability in the "problem behaviors" of youths, such as school misconduct and drug and alcohol abuse. The stability effect suggests that, once identified, individual differences in rates of offending or problem behaviors remain relatively stable over long periods of time. Prof. Gottfredson suggests that if we are interested in preventing crime among juveniles, we should focus on the supervision and socialization of children in the first 10 years of life. In terms of the many justifications for the separation of the two systems, he further suggests that the two justifications that are most relevant have to do with leniency and with separation of children from adults. He also states that of overwhelming importance in the juvenile record issue is not whether an individual has engaged in a misconduct that is recorded in the juvenile justice system but, rather, the frequency and the recency of such behavior.The next two speakers discuss "Federal policies and perspectives: The relationship of juvenile justice information to national criminal justice goals." The first speaker is Mr. Shay Bilchik, Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice. In his address, Mr. Bilchik focuses on what he terms the critical relationship between juvenile justice system recordkeeping and information sharing. He also outlines the attempts of the OJJDP to reach some of the nation's most urgent national juvenile justice goals. Mr. Bilchik asserts that we must put a system in place that will have the capacity to use an information system that serves as an interdisciplinary database so that we can make informed decisions about each child. He says such a system must act with full knowledge of each individual case and child-- and with full information about local and national trends that tell us what is really happening in juvenile justice in this country. In terms of addressing the need to prosecute violent and chronic juvenile offenders in criminal court, he advocates a system of transfer that retains the ability of prosecutors and judges to make case-by-case decisions. Such a system, he says, requires good recordkeeping and effective practices to reduce violent juvenile crime. Without an effective information sharing scheme, the various agencies in a jurisdiction each have only a small piece of the juvenile justice puzzle, he asserts. Practitioners and policymakers are beginning to realize this, which is helping the juvenile justice community to more fully reflect the multiple systems that interact with juveniles and to form a more complete picture of the needs of a particular juvenile and family. Mr. Demery R. Bishop, Section Chief, Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, provides an overview of the division's policies and procedures with regard to juvenile criminal history records. He reports that since March 1, 1993, the FBI accepts, maintains and disseminates all arrest fingerprint cards from States for juveniles who have been tried or adjudicated in juvenile proceedings or who were adjudicated as adults. The CJIS Division is also involved in collecting and maintaining juvenile records contained in the Missing Persons File of the National Crime Information Center, and in collecting and analyzing statistics on juvenile crime. He also discusses new initiatives that will help to create a system of information on juveniles for criminal justice and law enforcement agencies nationwide. Mr. Neal Miller, Principal Associate, Institute for Law and Justice (ILJ), in his presentation, "State laws on prosecutors' and judges' use of juvenile justice records," discusses a national review and assessment of criminal court use of defendants' juvenile adjudication records that ILJ undertook for the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. In the project, which covers laws and practices through 1995, ILJ surveyed prosecutors, criminal justice record centers and State sentencing guideline commissions; reviewed State laws that affect and specify prosecutorial and judicial use of the juvenile adjudication record; and performed field work in two jurisdictions. Mr. Miller reports that the study found that a significant proportion of all convicted persons have juvenile adjudication records, and that consideration of the juvenile record at sentencing can have a strong impact on incapacitation of offenders under a presumptive sentencing system. The study found, however, that numerous problems exist in most States having to do with poor record quality and differences in the substantive meaning of sentences handed down in juvenile and adult courts. Part III of the conference focused on "Public policy perspectives: Privacy and confidentiality considerations of juvenile record issues." The first speaker, Mr. Robert R. Belair, SEARCH General Counsel, Mullenholz, Brimsek & Belair, addresses the topic of" `The need to know' versus privacy." In his presentation, he reviews the contents of a draft report SEARCH completed with funding from BJS that was distributed at the conference. The report, Privacy and Juvenile Justice Records: A Mid-Decade Status Report,1(Now also published and available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (NCJ-161255).) discusses the nature and severity of juvenile crime; the history and development of the juvenile justice system; the relationship between adult and juvenile courts; disclosure and confidentiality of juvenile records, including sealing and purging practices, illustrative State laws, and recent legislative and judicial activity; and juvenile justice trends and the status of the juvenile justice recordkeeping system as of the mid-1990s. Mr. Belair says that the report finds that there has been a dramatic increase in the extent to which juvenile record information is available to criminal justice agencies, to noncriminal justice entities, and to the public. This challenge to juvenile record confidentiality and privacy is being accomplished by treating juveniles as adults, by relaxing confidentiality provisions in existing juvenile record laws, and by the advances in centralized State criminal history record systems and repositories. The report, however, offers cautionary notes against abandoning almost 100 years of confidentiality protections of juvenile records and proceedings. "Practitioners' perspectives: Using the juvenile record" is the subject of a panel discussion of the next four speakers, who represent local prosecutors, State law enforcement, State courts administrators and local public defenders. The first panelist, Ms. Jan Scully, District Attorney of Sacramento County, California, addresses "Juvenile justice issues and the role of juvenile records in decisionmaking: A prosecutor's viewpoint." In her remarks, she discusses California laws, such as "three strikes," which affect the prosecution of juveniles as adults. She says the trend in California, as well as the nation, is to change the focus of juvenile justice from strictly rehabilitation to include punishment and public safety, and that doing so has underscored the value of deterrence in the juvenile system, which she believes is important and proves that the message of "getting tough" on juvenile offenders is being heard. She says decisionmaking in her office is greatly influenced by the prior adjudications of a juvenile; this includes decisions as to whether to remand a juvenile to be tried as an adult and what dispositions and bail to seek. She asserts that how the juvenile justice system treats juvenile records impacts the public's and youthful offender's perception of the system. If the system offers protection and deterrence, if prosecutors act as the "hammer," then the public will have more confidence in the system, and juveniles will think more about the consequences of their actions, she says. However, she adds that those efforts should go hand-in-hand with intervention and prevention programs, and that in California and elsewhere, juvenile justice should focus on rehabilitation balanced with public safety interests. Ms. Donna M. Uzzell, Special Agent in Charge, Investigative Support Bureau, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, discusses "Florida's Serious Habitual Offender Comprehensive Action Program: Collecting and using juvenile offender information to target detention, intervention and prevention efforts." Ms. Uzzell explains that SHOCAP is an interagency case management system that enables the juvenile justice system and human services agencies to make more informed decisions regarding the small number of juveniles who commit a large percentage of serious crimes. The program objectives for SHOCAP are interagency cooperation, creation of an operational model, improved information collected on serious habitual offenders, and suppression and control of the criminal activity committed by these offenders. She reports that the benefits of the program have been more complete profiles of these habitual offenders, improved and more efficient information sharing, and a more efficient use of resources. She says it will be the responsibility of the justice system to be good stewards of juvenile justice information, to use it productively and efficiently, and to protect our citizens while protecting the rights of others. Mr. Michael L. Curtis, Juvenile and Family Court Specialist, Washington Office of the Administrator for the Courts, discusses "Juvenile justice records management in Washington State," in which he provides a two-decade chronology of events which impact the management of juvenile justice records in his State. He says he hopes this information helps inform other States which are struggling with the public policy issues involved in such activities as juvenile recordhandling procedures, juvenile court proceedings and statewide court automation. Providing another perspective, Ms. Jo-Ann Wallace, Director, Public Defender Service, District of Columbia, gave a presentation on "Striking a proper balance between legitimate uses of juvenile records and individual privacy: The District of Columbia experience." She believes that statutes such as the one in the District of Columbia which requires consent of an individual or a court order for juvenile record information to be released strikes a proper balance between appropriate law enforcement goals and privacy. She says many of the trends driving juvenile justice policy today" such as the drive to remand more juveniles to the adult system" are motivated by fear and misinformation, and are affecting the bedrock principles of the juvenile system: rehabilitation and treatment. She warns that increased sharing and openness of juvenile records or court proceedings will have devastating effects on juveniles but will not increase confidence in the system or deter juveniles from committing crimes. She advocates undertaking collaborative initiatives in which the different segments of the system figure out how to share information while promoting common and mutual crime reduction goals and protecting the confidentiality of juveniles, which is critical to their treatment. Wrapping up Day One of the conference was Mr. David Gavin, Assistant Chief of Administration, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), who discussed "Collection, maintenance and use of juvenile fingerprints," specifically focusing on the issues and practices involved in implementing the statewide juvenile criminal history repository in Texas that came on-line on January 1, 1996. In creating the repository, Texas officials decided to make it fingerprint-based; to make it a day-one forward system; to collect Class B misdemeanors and above; and to integrate it and make it compatible with the adult system. They grappled with such issues as sealing and purging procedures, dissemination criteria, the type of information to collect, and training. Mr. Gavin reports that some key factors to the success of the Texas juvenile repository were compatibility with the adult system; support provided to local agencies by field staff; and political support given the effort by local police chiefs and sheriffs. Finally, he says that DPS believes that electronic reporting is the only possible way to run a juvenile repository of this size, so State criminal justice agencies are working to help local agencies automate their arrest and disposition reporting. Part IV of the conference on Day Two addressed "Operational and management perspectives." Leading off was Dr. Alfred Blumstein, who provided the "Day two opening address." Dr. Blumstein, J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research, School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie Mellon University, addresses the topic of "Using juvenile records to predict criminal behavior." In his presentation, he discusses the tension between the usefulness of juvenile justice records To policymaking and practice, and the benefits we obtain from protecting those records. He also discusses and puts into context research findings on juvenile crime; says that it is difficult to identify and predict which juvenile offenders are going to persist in crime into adulthood and which are going to terminate, and that better predictive models need to be developed in order toprovide this information; discusses expected increases in the crime rate attributable to a large population group moving into the peak crime ages; the use of incarceration as the single dominant strategy of criminal justice policy in the past two decades; and the use of waiver procedures to send more children into adult court, where the presumption is that the punishment is tougher. Although he advocates a mixed strategy of prevention to deal with at-risk youngsters, he says that when people do come into contact with the juvenile and adult systems, we ought to be able to have the records available for identifying serious offenders when the time comes to respond to them. The next speaker was the Honorable Gordon A. Martin Jr., Associate Justice, Massachusetts Trial Court, District Court Department, who spoke on "The role of the juvenile record in judicial decisionmaking." In his presentation, he decries the wholesale dumping of children into adult court, saying the juvenile justice system, which is trained to deal with juveniles, ought to be able to do its job and continue to attempt to rehabilitate juveniles through such measures as intensive parole supervision. He supports opening up delinquency proceedings and records so that the public can see the work being done in the juvenile arena. He asserts that judicial access to all available information about a child is critical to the juvenile court process and to preserving the juvenile justice system, and that it is the responsibility of judges and legislators to help public agencies share all pertinent information about a child they are trying to help, even if it means waiving confidentiality rules that impede information sharing. He also defends the practice of judicial waiver, saying it should not become an automatic action based on age or offense. Crucial to judicial waiver, however, is the availability of records that track each youth's involvement in the juvenile justice and social welfare systems, he says. "Statewide juvenile systems" was the focus of a presentation by Mr. Michael R. Phillips, Deputy Administrator, Utah Juvenile Court, Administrative Office of the Courts, who discusses the automated index system that provides law enforcement agencies in Utah with statewide access to juvenile court records, and Utah's practice of open juvenile court proceedings. Mr. Phillips asserts that many juvenile courtrooms and records are now open to some level of public inspection, despite popular belief. For the past 15 years, he relates, Utah has authorized any law enforcement agency in the State to access the juvenile records maintained at the State level as part of an arrest process or official investigation, and to create referral records in this system; probation and parole agencies may also access the records for purposes of presentence reports. Recent changes in the law have provided the media and public with greater access to certain juvenile records, he notes; the State purposefully formatted these released records in an easy-to-understand format so that the rap sheet is not misinterpreted. Mr. Phillips also addresses Utah laws that require the courts to notify schools when a student is convicted of certain felonies or placed on probations; create new categories of serious youthful offenders that require new court processing procedures; and sentencing guidelines for juveniles. Finally, he says that he does not believe that opening access to juvenile court records and hearings will destroy the juvenile justice system, since the economics of media coverage usually prohibit extensive involvement in juvenile courts.Mr. Steve Galeria's presentation, "Juvenile records as a basis for firearm prohibitions," discusses California's approach to using juvenile records in firearms checks. Mr. Galeria, Manager, Statistical Data Center, California Department of Justice, provides a rundown of California's gun regulation history, which dates back to 1909; discusses purchase procedures and categories of persons prohibited in the State from purchasing handguns, rifles, shotguns and ammunition; the impact of regulations and legislation on guns sales; and future activity in this area. The final two speakers address "Exchanging juvenile records between the juvenile justice system and schools." The presentation of Mr. Ronald C. Laney, Director, Missing and Exploited Children's Program, OJJDP, is on "Information sharing critical to process of protecting children," in which he says that all components of the juvenile justice system must share information about children at an early stage of their involvement in the system. This is because children typically come into contact in the system as a victim or an at-risk child before committing serious delinquency acts. The OJJDP, he says, has undertaken efforts to develop protocols for sharing information within the juvenile justice system, most recently an effort with the U.S. Department of Education to provide instruction to educators and juvenile justice administrators as to what information can be shared. In most cases, he says, OJJDP and the Department of Education found that laws do not necessary restrict agencies from sharing information; rather, it is an existing policy or procedure or tradition passed down from generation to generation in an office that prevents information sharing. Mr. Laney then introduces Dr. Bernard James, Professor, School of Law, Pepperdine University, who addresses "Issues and implications of school-juvenile justice information sharing." Dr. James suggests that interagency communication is the essential link for a successful reform movement in any local juvenile justice system because decisions being made are dependent on timely, accurate information, and information from schools will help provide a complete behavioral picture of a youth. Schools, meanwhile, need status information about juveniles who are constantly being placed on campus as conditions of probation. He says there is clear mutual reliance and interdependence between schools and juvenile justice that requires two-way communication. However, schools are often left in the dark in terms of justice information, and the juvenile justice system is usually shut out of the educational system. Fortunately, he notes, emerging models are expanding the concept of the juvenile justice system to include schools, and interagency information sharing agreements are being authorized or required in more and more States. He says that educators should examine their local policies to determine whether they can take advantage of new State and Federal laws which encourage a legitimate exchange of information among agencies. Finally, mention and thanks are given here to Dr. Charles M. Friel, who ably served as the conference moderator. Dr. Friel is Professor of the College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, and is a member of the SEARCH Board of Directors. **************** I. Overview **************** -------------------- Welcoming remarks ------------------- SEARCH welcome Dr. Francis J. Carney Jr. Conference moderator's welcome Dr. Charles M. Friel Keynote address Kent Markus ******************** SEARCH welcome ********************* ---------------------------- DR. FRANCIS J. CARNEY JR. Executive Director ---------------------------- --------------------------------- Massachusetts Sentencing Commission --------------------------------- On behalf of SEARCH, I would like to welcome all of you to this national conference on the appropriate uses of juvenile justice records in criminal and noncriminal justice proceedings, and to extend our appreciation to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and to BJS Director Dr. Jan Chaiken for their sponsorship of and participation in this conference. To me, this conference is very timely. I would like to give you a quick example of the types of issues we are dealing with, using my recent experience in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Sentencing Commission submitted a new approach to sentencing offenders in our State, an approach involving sentencing guidelines. One of the most important dimensions in the sentencing guidelines is the criminal history of the offender, and one of the hottest issues in the debate surrounding the criminal history or the formulation of the criminal history was whether or not to include the juvenile record as a factor in the criminal history for sentencing guidelines purposes. That debate went on at different levels. It went at the philosophical level, such as what is the role of the juvenile justice system? What is the meaning of adjudication of delinquency versus conviction of a crime? At the policy level, if you do include the juvenile record, should it be limited to certain crimes? Should it only be limited to serious crimes? Should there be constraints on the age of the juveniles? Some offenders are 12 years old versus 16 years old. Should the juvenile record lapse? That is, over time, is there a difference between the 18-year-old gang member who is appearing in an adult court for the first time versus the 30-year-old offender who is appearing in adult court for the first time and who has not been arrested since a 16-year-old arrest for stealing a car? The debate continued at the practical level as to whether the juvenile record is reliable enough to be used for sentencing purposes. Is it accurate enough? Is it uniform enough to be incorporated into a criminal history classification? Those are some of the issues that emerged in that context vis-a-vis the juvenile record. I will be interested to listen to the discussions at this conference to learn about the ramifications of these issues in general.Now, as SEARCH Chair,(At the time of the conference, Dr. Carney was Chair of the SEARCH Membership Group). I am called upon from time to time to introduce speakers at meetings and conferences. Rarely have I had the opportunity to introduce a criminal justice expert of the stature, of the knowledge, of the experience, of our moderator for this conference, Dr. Charles M. Friel. Dr. Friel is a professor and former dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He has lectured extensively, both nationally and internationally, on matters regarding criminal justice. He is an At-large Member and a Board Member of SEARCH, and is a recipient of SEARCH's highest award, the O. J. Hawkins Award for Innovative Leadership and Outstanding Contributions in Criminal Justice Information Systems, Policy and Statistics in the United States . Dr. Friel is also the 1992 recipient of the Justice Charles W. Barrow Award for distinguished service to the Texas judiciary. We are most fortunate to have Dr. Friel as our moderator. He has keen insights into the issues at hand. He has an uncanny ability to get to the heart of the matter, and he is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. ******************************* Conference moderator's welcome ******************************* -------------------------------- DR. CHARLES M. FRIEL, Professor -------------------------------- ------------------------------- College of Criminal Justice Sam Houston State University ------------------------------- Frank, I appreciate those kind words. My mother would have enjoyed hearing them, and my wife would not believe them. I would like to join SEARCH in welcoming you all to our nation's capital and to this conference sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and SEARCH concerned with the use of juvenile records and the development and use of juvenile justice systems. I hope you all arrived here in Washington at the same time as your luggage. If you have had a chance to look through the agenda for this conference, I think you will be impressed with the work that SEARCH staff has done in trying to identify a series of issues that should be very germane to those of you who work in the area of juvenile justice as we begin to initiate a very strong reaction, I suppose nationally, to the problem of violent youth crime. Critical to that is the use of information about juveniles. There are a lot of sensitive policy and legal issues that we are going to have to address over the next few years as we band together to deal with the problem of violent youth crime to determine how we are going to use juvenile justice information, and incorporate that into the broader panoply of the information systems we have for adults. The conference speakers that staff has brought together are truly excellent, experienced people who will be sharing with you a variety of perspectives about the use of juvenile records. Unfortunately, this is not an easy issue. If it were, you could have one person come up here and tell you what you need to do. The issue brings many competing perspectives to the question of how and when and who uses juvenile records. Through the course of this conference, we hope to bring to you the experience and knowledge of practitioners, theoreticians, lawyers, public policymakers and political experts so that when you leave here, you will have a sensitivity to the variety of perspectives raised by this issue. It is my hope that when y'all leave here, that every one of you goes away with at least one good idea. Maybe it is a new insight or maybe it is some creative new way to use an existing technology, or perhaps it is a new grasp of how to better use policy or administrative practice or change of law to effectively improve the quality of juvenile justice in your jurisdiction, your State or your community. I would also hope that each of you leave with at least one good contact. There are attendees here from all over the country who work in all aspects of the juvenile justice system or in fields of information science as applied to criminal justice. Be generous with each other. Do not be shy. Just reach out there and say, "I'm Charlie" or "I'm Mary." And find that somebody else here whose job responsibilities are comparable to yours, who is fighting the same kinds of problems and issues, but who may be a year or 6 months ahead of you. That person already has made the mistake you are about to make. Introduce yourselves and exchange business cards. So go away with two things: one good idea (which is worth a lot of money, when you think about it) and one good contact. My responsibilities today and tomorrow will be to present to you the speakers and panelists that we have brought together, and to keep my eye on the clock, which may be the hardest part of my task because we have some people up here who like to talk a lot. ******************* Keynote Address ******************* -------------- KENT MARKUS ---------------- ---------------------------------- Counselor to the Attorney General for Youth Violence U.S. Department of Justice ------------------------------------ I am starting to get used to introductions in which people deal with their confusion about the many different jobs I have held at the Justice Department by saying things like, "Well, he's a doer." I was in Massachusetts recently and Don Stern, the United States Attorney there, introduced me and said, "I've never really been able to figure out what Kent does, but he's the guy I call when I need to get something done." I take that as a compliment and I think in some ways that is a good approach to things: that no matter what the specific title or role we may have at any specific time, hopefully we can be helpful to others needing to penetrate the bureaucracy. I also think it helps me deal with the perspective that my wife has on the situation, which is that I simply cannot hold a job. In the range of capacities that I have had in the time I have been at the Justice Department dealing with Brady Law and Crime Bill implementation and with a number of other criminal justice initiatives that we have been involved in, there is one pervasive underlying theme that comes back again and again: the importance of information as it relates to our criminal justice efforts, particularly the importance of criminal history records and how they are used and deployed in the criminal justice context. Because of societal changes, we are being faced, in the world of juvenile records, with some rethinking that we all must undertake together. To some extent, we have lost our innocence with respect to juvenile crime, and it is forcing us to rethink some of the underlying assumptions that have been almost sacrosanct with respect to the juvenile justice system. Certainly, the fundamental underlying policy view of the juvenile justice system was that this system was exclusively oriented toward rehabilitative efforts, and that punishment had no role and should not be contemplated in the context of juvenile justice activity. We have to reconsider that policy view and question whether that is still the appropriate paradigm for what we are seeing in society today. Along with the expectation that the juvenile justice system was oriented exclusively toward rehabilitative efforts were some pretty strong assumptions that were built into the system through law and policy that dealt with information about juveniles. These assumptions insisted that, if in fact we had a rehabilitative-oriented system, notions of privacy and access to information about juveniles were at a premium, in terms of keeping that information confidential so that the rehabilitative mission could be maximized. Thus, the notions of allowing a child to be branded as a criminal was something we wanted to avoid because that interfered with the rehabilitative mission. What we are seeing, of course, is that as we are rethinking these assumptions, so are a lot of policymakers, and all kinds of changes are being made quite rapidly in these areas, both from a policy perspective and a legislative perspective. Right and left, State legislatures are amending their laws, not only to permit greater access to juvenile records, but also greater access to juvenile criminal proceedings overall. This is a fundamental shift: proceedings themselves were previously kept closed in order to maintain that privacy associated with the rehabilitative mission of juvenile justice. As we begin 2 days of discussion about the appropriate roles and uses of juvenile justice records, and when records should be shared and for what purpose, I thought it might be helpful if I set a somewhat broader context with respect to what we are seeing in this country with respect to youth violence. I want to do this so that we can think about some of these issues that we are having to face in the context of the problem we are trying to deal with and solve. When I was asked by the Attorney General to take on this effort, to think about how the Justice Department might more effectively deal with the problem of youth violence, I did not have the awareness I do today of both the magnitude of the problem we are facing or the public hype surrounding it. I happily also did not know that it would not be long before the Richmond Times-Dispatch would characterize my job as "America's New Thug Czar." To give an example of the hype that we are facing in this area right now, I thought it would be interesting to outline a day I had recently. When I got up in the morning, I went to work and the first thing that I was faced with was final preparations for the Attorney General's weekly press availability. Every Thursday morning, she makes herself available to all credentialed press for any questions they wish to ask on any subject, and of course we try to make sure that she feels adequately prepared through efforts on Wednesday evening and then again on Thursday morning. The story had broken about a case in Richmond, California, the tragic incident involving the two 8-year-olds and the 6-year-old who had beaten the little baby. We knew that the Attorney General was going to be asked questions about that case and her views about it, and so the first thing we dealt with that morning was some discussion internally about what kind of responses she might give to that matter. When we left the press availability that morning, where they did, of course, raise that question, I went to a speech she was giving to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which was having a summit on the subject of-- youth violence. From the police chiefs meeting on youth violence, I headed over to the CNN studios, where I had been asked to appear on their television show, "Burden of Proof." It involves current legal issues, and they wanted to talk that day about-- youth violence. From the CNN studios, I headed over to Jefferson Junior High School in southwest Washington, where the Vice President was meeting with students, with members of the Washington Bullets basketball team and with the United States Attorney for the district, Eric Holder, on the subject of--youth violence. Upon leaving the school, I flew to Boston to give a speech at a statewide meeting of law enforcement officials where they had convened a summit about-- youth violence. The next morning, I got up, took a plane back to Washington, and landed just in time to get to a meeting at the White House convened by the First Lady on the subject of--youth violence. At the end of this crazy and exhaustive 24-hour period, I had to step back and ask, "What is going on here?" Why is there this degree of intense attention to this subject, where the Vice President and the First Lady and the entire Chiefs of Police Association and the television programs and the press and everybody are all focusing this much time and attention and energy on this subject? That, I think, is a question we have to think about because there is, perhaps, a risk that we can make too much of the problem we are facing. It is important to remember as we are talking about this issue that less than one-half of 1 percent of the juveniles in the United States are arrested for a violent offense each year. That gives you some sense of the magnitude of the problem. Juveniles are responsible for one in five violent crimes. That is a lot, but certainly nowhere near the majority of them. In fact, one of the interesting things we see is that most juveniles who appear once in juvenile court, never return. So the perception being created in part by some of these media commentators of an incredible, insurmountable, unstoppable tidal wave of violent criminal activity, I think, overplays the problem. *************************** Trends in juvenile crime *************************** At the same time, there is a serious problem, and the thing that causes us to recognize that problem is the trend data that we are seeing. I have learned a valuable lesson about trend data from Bureau of Justice Statistics Director Jan Chaiken, whom I now quote when I speak all over the country. He has taught me the lesson that the reason we gather statistical information and make projections is to try and figure out which things we want to prove to be untrue. And I think that is a very important concept to keep in mind: that gathering this information, studying it, and thinking about what is likely to happen in the future gives us the ability to make decisions about where we should focus our resources and attention to try to deal with problems and try to determine that those trends are not what they might be if we left them alone. Let me speak briefly about what those trends are. In the last 5 years, while the general crime rate in the United States has been down about two points, juvenile crime has been up 21 percent. And we see the same kind of divergence, and perhaps even more extremely, when we look at violent crime. Again over the last 5 years, while the murder rate in the United States is down about 9 percent, the juvenile murder rate during that same period is up 15 percent. Happily, in the last year, the data show a small downturn. But that set of trend lines-- which shows the country going one way with adults and completely the opposite direction with our young people--is certainly disturbing. It is even more disturbing when you combine that crime rate effect demographically with what is happening in the country. Current projections by demographers suggest that over the next 25 years, there will be a 31 percent increase in the number of juveniles in the United States. We not only expect to have a substantially slanting upward line with respect to the violent juvenile crime rate, but we also have a substantially slanting upward line with respect to the number of juveniles. Of course, if those two effects are combined, the suggestion is that we will have that same substantially slanting upward line with respect to the amount of crime, especially violent crime, that is being committed by our juveniles. It is that projection that we want to work to try to ensure does not come true. In trying to set a framework that I think is helpful and useful to all of us as we are thinking about the appropriate use of records, I thought it would be helpful to talk about what we see as some of the very clear causal links to the trend data. I do not intend to suggest that these are exhaustive or comprehensive; however, I think that the five points that I am going to make are a very substantial part of the explanation for this trend activity. ******************************** Causal links to juvenile crime ******************************** First, and one that will come as no surprise to anyone, is the problem of drug abuse. Some interesting data that I have seen suggest that one-third of all juveniles who are arrested were stoned at the time of their arrest, and that 43 percent of juvenile murderers were high at the time they took another person's life. An interesting number that I just learned from our drug czar, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, is that drug-addicted persons commit, on the average, 170 crimes per year to support their habits. That certainly tells us that there is--as there is in so many parts of criminal activity--a small group of people committing a majority of the crimes, and that a lot of violent crime stems from that drug abuse and drug-addicted behavior. Gen. McCaffrey says that if you do not like higher taxes to pay for even more prisons and you do not like your neighbors being victimized by crime, invest in drug treatment programs. Of course, that suggestion, all too often, is characterized as coddling criminals. I would suggest, instead, that drug treatment is about changing the behavior of those persons who are committing those hundreds of crimes a year to support their habit. It is about preventing violent crime. We have to keep kids away from drugs and we have to treat those who are addicted. Second, the easy access to guns by children. Recent statistics reveal that eight of 10 juveniles who killed, used a gun. That is up from 5 of 10 just 15 years ago. In the last 10 years, the number of juveniles who killed with a gun quadrupled. One study of high school students found, and I found this just fascinating, that 28 percent of those surveyed believed that it was"okay to shoot someone who hurts or insults you." Ten percent believed it was "okay to shoot a person if that is what it takes to get something you want." There is an attitude we have to deal with here, but if a gun is available, the attitude reveals that it is all too likely that the gun is going to be used. We have to reduce the easy flow and access of guns to our young people. Third, a phenomenon that I describe as "developmental neglect." The Carnegie Foundation has done a very nice job of demonstrating rather definitively that our children are spending less and less time, not only with their parents, but with adults overall. We are seeing higher rates of divorce, of course, increases in families with both parents working, growth in single-parent families, the erosion of extended families, neighborhood networks, and associated support systems. If a child is not going to get guidance from a parent, they have to get it from an older brother, a sister, a neighbor, a teacher, a clergyman, someone who is going to intervene in the life of that child to suggest what is right, what is wrong, what the lines are, what the barriers are, how far they can go, what they will be in trouble for and what they will not. Instead, the sources that are teaching those lessons right now -- with less time spent, again, not only with parents, but with adults overall-- are peers and television. These are not particularly effective sources to teach young people lessons about what is right and wrong, what the barriers and burdens are that people can undertake. Fourth, domestic violence, both observed and received. Studies clearly show that those who are abused learn that violence is normal. They are substantially more likely to be criminally violent than those who are not abused. The American Psychological Association released a study recently that shows that those who witness violence at home are substantially more likely to commit violent acts themselves later on. On the good side, we expect that home is the best classroom for our children to learn things, and that when we want to teach them values and ethics to take through their lives, parents are the best people to teach those things. Then why does it not make sense to us that home is also, unfortunately, the best classroom for violent behavior? Why wouldn't those who experience violence at home learn that violent behavior is appropriate and acceptable, and is behavior in which they should engage? The fact is, that those who witness violence, those who are subjected to violence, and indeed, interestingly enough, those who are subjected to physical neglect, are desensitized to violence, believe that violence is societally acceptable, and learn that it is okay to engage in violence themselves. We have to break the cycle of domestic violence. Fifth, media viol ence, as depicted, for example, on television and in movies. An interesting study paid for by the cable television industry, called the Media Scope Survey, showed that 73 percent of violent acts on television go unpunished. Eighty-six percent of violent acts failed to show any long-term damage, either physical or psychological, to the victim. Four percent of programs with violence emphasized nonviolent problem-solving alternatives. Four percent. Can we blame all of this on the media? Of course not. But what is happening through the media's depiction of violence without consequences, without punishment, is that violence is glamorous, and kids are being desensitized to the effects. **************** Federal role ****************** In thinking about these five causal links, my obligation at the Justice Department is to then consider "What is it that we as the Federal government are supposed to be doing about any of this?" I generally break our role down into four areas: One, we have the ability to seek and, through the legislative branch of the Federal government, attain legislative changes. That may be helpful a little bit. There may be some things here and there that tinkering with and changing and altering are productive; indeed, just about a week and a half ago, the President announced new proposed legislation to deal with violent crime among our young people. It has about a dozen provisions that I think are constructive and, if adopted, would help. But Federal legislation is not going solve this problem, which is fundamentally a State and local problem. Two, the Federal government has the authority to bring prosecutions. Again, while there may be some import to prosecuting the most violent juveniles-- those who are involved in gangs or drug-dealing--through the Federal system, and we will do so when it is appropriate, we are not going to solve the problem through Federal prosecutions. The number of juveniles who are incarcerated under Federal jurisdiction, either tried as juveniles or juveniles who were tried as adults, is 185. This is not a substantial level of activity within the Federal government, and I do not think that is likely to change in any serious way in the near future. The prosecution activity is going to have to take place primarily at the State and local level. Three, a very critical Federal role is information gathering, information modeling and information redistribution. This is what we do, through the various bureaus and offices in the Office of Justice Programs: we gather statistical and programmatic information. We provide funding to try modeling and then we evaluate those models and when they work, we redistribute information about what works and what does not. That, I think, is a critical Federal role, and one that is useful, productive and essential because I think it is highly unlikely that much of that modeling and information redistribution activity would ever take place if not done by the Federal government. Role number four is providing leadership, and that comes in a couple of forms. It comes in the forms of highlighting problems that need attention and encouraging attention to them. But sometimes it also comes in a more concrete form, and that is in being the entity that centralizes certain activity. An example that is useful in this context is something like the Interstate Identification Index, where the Federal government plays the leadership role in bringing about one national pointer system that essentially links all of the individual, decentralized State databases of criminal history information.(Editor's note: The Interstate Identification Index (III) is an "index-pointer" system for the interstate exchange of criminal history records. Under III, the FBI maintains an identification index to persons arrested for felonies or serious misdemeanors under State or Federal law. The index includes identification information, FBI Numbers and State Identification Numbers (SIDs) from each State holding information about an individual. Search inquiries from criminal justice agencies are transmitted automatically via State telecommunications networks and the FBI's National Crime Information Center telecommunications lines. If a hit is made against the Index, record requests are made using SIDs or FBI Numbers and data are automatically retrieved from each repository holding records on the individual and forwarded to the requesting agency. For more information, see U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Use and Management of Criminal History Record Information: A Comprehensive Report, Criminal Justice Information Policy series, by SEARCH Group, Inc. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, November 1993). Again, I think that is a useful and constructive role for the Federal government to play so that it can provide information and bring entities and governmental units together. I think that with respect to the problem of youth violence generally and juvenile records specifically, the areas in which I expect the Federal government will play some substantial role is in the latter two, information and leadership. We may legislate a little bit, and there is actually one provision in the President's bill that deals with gathering juvenile record information at the Federal level. And we may, in some of our prosecutions, use juvenile record information. However, I think that the likely place that the Federal government is going to play substantially with respect to juvenile record discussions is in this information gathering, modeling and information redistribution effort, and in the leadership effort. I think everybody who is involved in this area recognizes that we have to do this rethinking process and I hope we can do it while considering these issues in the context of some of these causal links that I have discussed. We need to think about how the effective use of criminal record information may assist us in dealing with drug abuse and drug-addicted young people, how that information can be strategically used to break up the flow of gun traffic, and how information can be used to break that cycle of violence. We need to take each one of the causal links to the problem, and ask how can we better use information and share information to deal with those causal links to try to destroy them. *********************** Importance of records *********************** We know that criminal records provide relevant information about the predictive nature of criminality that stems from earlier behavior. We know that the records are relevant to officer safety, we know that the records are relevant to adult sentencing, we know the records may be relevant to subsequent juvenile sentencing. So, as the discussion goes on over the course of the next day and a half, I hope that we will link into the conversations about how records should be used by judges and schools; how privacy and rehabilitative considerations weigh against law enforcement goals and how we reconcile those distinctions; whether records should be kept centrally or decentralized or some combination thereof; what information should be retained by law enforcement agencies and what should not; and what access there should be to information from social service agencies or schools, as well as information that is actually retained by courts and other law enforcement organizations. I encourage you to think about all of those questions we are facing in a manner that links with the causal issues so that we can really examine the question as to whether the record policy decisions that we are making are likely to substantially impact the problem we are trying to deal with. From my perspective, the most important message that I can leave you with is that, as you are thinking about those issues and as you are considering what role the Federal government ought to play, I hope that we will partner with you in that discussion; that you can assist us in any coordination efforts we are making by telling us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. I hope that you can help us in defining and seeing and then in disseminating effective strategies that are being adopted and that we can work cooperatively with you in order to be as effective as possible about this rethinking process in hopes of dealing with what is, I think we all agree, a tremendously important problem. Thanks very much. *********************************************************************** II. Setting the stage: Current status of juvenile justice records *********************************************************************** ---------------- Opening address ---------------- Changing laws and policies governing juvenile justice records radically alter balance between confidentiality and public access, and increase importance of record accuracy Dr. Jan M. Chaiken ------------------------------------------------------------------ Background: Examining the foundation of juvenile justice record policies ------------------------------------------------------------------- An evaluation of the historical justifications for a distinct system of juvenile justice: The age, versatility and stability effects Dr. Michael R. Gottfredson ----------------------------------------------------------------- Federal policies and perspectives: The relationship of juvenile justice information to national criminal justice goals ------------------------------------------------------------------ The importance of improving and sharing information to furthering national juvenile justice reform Shay Bilchik Juvenile recordhandling policies and practices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Demery R. Bishop ---------------------------------------------------------------- State laws on prosecutors' and judges' use of juvenile justice records ----------------------------------------------------------------- National assessment of criminal court use of defendants' juvenile adjudication records Neal Miller ************************************************************ Changing laws and policies governing juvenile justice records radically alter balance between confidentiality and public access, and increase importance of record accuracy *********************************************************** ---------------------- DR. JAN M. CHAIKEN Director -------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------- Bureau of Justice Statistics U.S. Department of Justice -------------------------------------------------------- My thanks to SEARCH staff for coming up with a conference on such a current, critical and complex issue: juvenile justice policies and, specifically, decisions concerning the establishment, compilation, exchange and use of juvenile records. The policies surrounding these decisions focus on some of the most basic concerns of most Americans: * Our children--and our desire to ensure that every child is given every opportunity to develop into a law-abiding and productive citizen; * The public safety--and our desire to protect all citizens against violence and other crimes in their home, at work, on public transportation, and in the streets of our cities and towns; * Financial constraints--measured not only in terms of criminal justice costs but also in terms of the financial and emotional costs to the victims of crime, their families, and those whose lives are changed by the fear of potential criminal attacks; and *The justice system--designed ideally to interface between these concerns and to protect society in a fair and just manner which is most likely to produce long-term safety. We all know that the juvenile justice system is undergoing major review and changes at this time. Almost every State has taken official steps designed to bring the treatment of juveniles closer to the criminal justice treatment accorded adults. The New York Times, which addressed this issue in a recent Page 1 lead article and an editorial, stated that "almost all 50 States have overhauled their laws in the past 2 years...and the thrust of the new laws is to get more juveniles into the adult criminal justice system where they will presumably serve longer sentences under more punitive conditions." Such trends include, for example: *laws which require that jurisdiction over juveniles who are over a set age or who have had three juvenile offense "strikes" be automatically transferred to the adult system; * laws and policies encouraging prosecutorial discretion and judicial waiver of juveniles to the adult criminal justice system; * sentencing guidelines which take into account an offender's previous activity even if not charged in the adult system; and * laws which require that background checks include consideration of juvenile records. In all of these areas, the offender's record--its immediate availability, its accuracy and its completeness--represent the fulcrum on which key decisions impacting the treatment of the individual are balanced. In a parallel move, as addressed in numerous publications, the laws and policies governing juvenile recordkeeping have also changed radically. Initially formulated to implement the mandate to provide confidentiality to juveniles in order to support the rehabilitation efforts on which the juvenile system was founded, current trends in legislative and court actions have increasingly: * opened juvenile proceedings and the records about them to the public, or at least to specific segments of the public with particular needs to know; * required that categories of juveniles (generally those convicted of an offense which in the adult system would be a felony) be fingerprinted; and *required that records of juvenile offenders be included in State criminal record systems in the same manner as would be followed for adult offenders convicted of the similar criminal acts. These laws, coupled with the rapid advances in technology which make automated access to records available at minimal cost, can be expected to radically alter the balance between juvenile confidentiality and public access and to increase the importance of ensuring record accuracy. These legislative changes reflect public concern over statistics which show that in a time of declining overall violent crime, according to both Uniform Crime Reports and victimization surveys, the number of adolescents being arrested for serious crimes continues to increase. Further, the size of the population in the crime-prone ages 14-17 reached a low point 2 years ago and is projected to continue to increase for the indefinite future. By the year 2005, the number of teens aged 14- 17 will be 20 percent above its 1994 level. These projections are not too tricky, since everybody who will be 14 to 17 in 2005 has already been born. A very rapid increase in the rates of homicide committed by teenagers began in 1985 and continued until 1994, when it leveled off. At least some of the legislative changes must reflect frustration over procedures which allowed record checks of adults to overlook these records of violent acts committed by young people whose records were not accessible through the adult system. As most of you know, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is charged with responsibility for implementing the grant provisions of the Brady Act, the Child Protection Act of 1993, and the domestic violence and stalker reduction provisions of the Violence Against Women Act, which is part of the Crime Control Act of 1994. The program to accomplish this is the National Criminal History Improvement Program, or NCHIP. About 18 months ago, at a conference to launch the start of that program, which is designed to improve the quality of criminal history records, I made a presentation addressing the importance of record quality. At that time, I stated that improving criminal records, and by this I meant adult records, was not about moving electrons or increasing numbers of bits and bytes. Rather, criminal record improvement was about helping the police to catch child abusers, and rapists, and other social predators; that it was about helping judges make decisions on sentencing and pretrial release; and, increasingly, that it was about helping people make decisions about employment, national security and, of course, purchasing firearms and holding positions of trust involving children, the elderly and the disabled. The issues we faced at that time were simple in comparison to the issues presented today with regard to juvenile records. By the start of the NCHIP program, over 25 years of effort at the Federal, State and local level involving millions of dollars had been expended to establish, network and develop adult record systems. Our studies showed that as of 1994, however, only about one-quarter of the nation's adult criminal records were both complete with dispositions and available in response to a national inquiry. In the juvenile justice community, the work has just begun. Under the NCHIP program, substantial funds are being used for Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS), and States are allowing juveniles to be fingerprinted. States are also using NCHIP funds to establish enhanced interfaces between police, courts and the repository. In the juvenile justice community, transfer of records between law enforcement components is a newly emerging goal, with extensive interagency negotiation and technical development to follow. Most importantly, the underlying policies regarding the release and use of adult records have been debated and largely resolved over the past 20 years. Newly enacted policies applicable to juvenile records have largely emerged within the past few years--with their full impact yet to be evaluated. As you partake of this conference, this factor is important to remember, since the newly emerging juvenile recordkeeping policies to a large extent reflect a reversal of the underlying goals of the juvenile system as it has existed since its inception. Over the next 2 days, a large number of speakers will address this conference who represent the academic, legislative, governmental and juvenile justice communities. Presentations will be made concerning legislative and policy trends and requirements, technical advances and operational procedures designed to implement State and local policies and laws. As you listen to the speakers, I would ask that you give continuing thought to several general points which impact on the issues that will be addressed here. First, focus on the huge impact which policies adopted to govern juvenile justice operations, particularly juvenile records, have on current society. The Philadelphia cohort studies by Wolfgang and his associates showed that among boys born in 1945, 35 percent had a police contact but only 6 percent were chronic delinquents. So, over one-third of all these boys would have had an arrest record. As I am sure you can imagine, some of these boys went on to occupations that require background checks, such as police officers and directors of statistics agencies. So the nation would have suffered quite a bit if ordinary background checks had prevented these boys from moving forward in their chosen careers. Well, you might say, that is just in major cities. But the National Youth Survey, which interviewed a nationally representative group of boys and girls who were age 11 to 17 in 1957, recently collected all of their arrest records and found that 15 percent of boys on a nationwide basis had an arrest record for other than a minor traffic offense. Of these, less than half could be considered as serious juvenile delinquents. So just remember that it is your nieces and nephews that we are talking about here. It is also important to recall that the prevalence of arrest is much higher for some racial and ethnic groups than for others, most studies showing that the percentage of black males who have a police contact by age 18 is at least twice as high as for white males. So apparently race-neutral policy changes can have disproportionate effects on minority groups. Taken together, these statistics suggest that although the high percent of teenagers who have violated the law justifies tighter policies on juvenile offenders, care should be taken to ensure that punitive policies, particularly those which may impact on future development of the child, do not have negative and potentially harmful effects on young people who will not become major recidivists. Policies such as record sealing and limiting disclosure to situations following a subsequent offense appear to follow this line of reasoning. Second, consider the weakness of our knowledge about the effects of policy changes even on the very targets of the policy changes. What is the impact of transfer to the adult system and incarceration on juveniles who, by all indications, would become chronic violent recidivists? Will these policies change the amount of crime committed by these youngsters? And, if so, to more crime or to less crime? Such research as we have suggests that incarcerating juveniles in adult facilities may increase the amount and seriousness of crime they commit over their entire criminal career. Third, consider during these discussions the practical impact of these trends on the demand for, and use of, juvenile records--that is, the importance of ensuring that records which are used for greater purposes be accurate and include positive identification. Consider also the recordkeeping implications associated with the trend toward transfer of juveniles for adult prosecution--that is, the fact that increasing numbers of records formerly considered and protected as juvenile records will, in the future, be adult records and directly governed by the policies governing use and exchange of adult records. It is an unusual limelight to be in for those of us who work in computer rooms and concern ourselves with layouts, formats, codes, security of computer systems, communications networks and fingerprint technology. But this year, everybody is watching us. An evaluation of the historical justifications for a distinct system of juvenile justice: The age, versatility and stability effects ----------------------------- DR. MICHAEL R. GOTTFREDSON ----------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education University of Arizona ---------------------------------------------------------------- I would like to share some thoughts with you about the rationale for a distinct system of juvenile justice, a very problematic, important question that faces all of us. I would like to draw on some work and ideas from Travis Hirschi, a colleague with whom I have worked over the last 20 years or so, and credit him with many of these. It is a most perplexing problem, the creation of separate systems for juvenile and adult offenders. First, I would like to review briefly some of the historical justifications for that separation, which are common and well known. Second, I would like to raise the question of how we might put these justifications in the context of what we know about crime, criminality and juvenile delinquency. Finally, I would like to attempt to evaluate some of those justifications in light of those facts. ************************************ Justifications for separate systems ************************************** Many justifications have been offered for the historical separation of the two systems, of treating juveniles differently from adults. We do have a tendency to ebb and flow in our faithfulness to these justifications over time. Ours is not the only historical period in which we have questioned this distinction, this separation, and wondered what to do about it. In thinking and reading about the history and justifications for juvenile justice, I have come up with perhaps a half-dozen principles that we have used at one point or another in our history to justify this different treatment of adults from juveniles. Let me review those quickly, although there may be others you have in mind. I think that most of them, however, could be evaluated or tested against the facts that I am going to discuss. One of the principal justifications for keeping the adult and juvenile criminal justice processes separate certainly has to do with our notions of criminal intent and diminished responsibility, in which we believe that there is a fundamental difference in terms of the ability to be responsible for one's actions that distinguishes children from adults--or even children from adolescents from adults. Another justification is that we have believed from time to time (it is questionable whether we do now) that there is some differential treatment amenability, or rehabilitative potential, between young people and older people. There have been several different versions of that idea. Some believe, or have believed at one point or another, that young people are still somehow more malleable than older people, that there is still a possibility to change the direction or scope of their behavior or their life progress, and the earlier the better. Oftentimes, we refer to that malleability in terms of the "sequencing of acts" or the "life course progression," such that it seems to be desirable or perhaps efficient to intervene before there is some escalation in the conduct of the young person to the point where it becomes irreversible or more difficult to reverse. So there have been notions about escalation or progress through a career. A subcategory of treatment amenability has to do with the question of the potentially adverse consequences of the justice system itself on the subsequent life course of people as they move through the system, such that we are quite concerned about not unduly jeopardizing the subsequent life chances of individuals as a consequence of their interaction with the juvenile justice system. We have also believed from time to time that it is important to keep juveniles separate "physically separate" from adult offenders. This stems from the notion that if juveniles do become too closely associated with adults, particularly in correctional associations, that that will have an adverse effect on the juveniles, such that they will become more hardened criminals or more likely to offend subsequent to that association; therefore, we should do what we can to minimize that and keep kids away from adult offenders. Justification has also been offered for the separate systems that simply relies on a notion that better conditions should be associated with the treatment of juveniles than the treatment of adults, particularly since we are putting money, resources, time and effort into the conditions of the juvenile justice process and the conditions of confinement. That justification is related to, but I think somewhat distinct from, yet another justification, which simply offers the point of view that we should be more lenient toward children than we are toward adults. There are a lot of rationales that we might use to come to that attitude, but it surely characterizes much of our thinking historically about juvenile justice and juvenile corrections. Youth, perhaps, allows us to excuse more, to understand more, or to be more sympathetic to the idea of offending, and that should be translated then into an attitude that we have toward juvenile offenders of leniency; it is an attitude that we would not necessarily extend to the adult offender or the adult system. Finally, there is this conflation of problem behaviors or events that happen to children that we have used as a justification for the juvenile justice system. It is more of a social welfare attitude, rather than a criminal justice attitude, but it has to do with society's responsibility for taking care of children who are in some jeopardy, who are in some peril, because they come from an abusive home or they come from no home in the ordinary meaning of that term. Because their conduct is suggestive of a social welfare intervention, many so-called "status offenses" have historically fallen into this category. All of these and more, as I am sure you have other justifications that have arisen over time, are clearly questioned today. There is no doubt about it, they have been questioned since their invention, but never, perhaps, so much as today, when we are concerned with the very high crime rate and the problem of youth violence such that enormous changes are being suggested for nearly every facet of the juvenile justice system. Changes are being suggested in the age of adult and juvenile jurisdictions; enhancement of transfer provisions; mandatory transfer positions; shifting the discretion about who makes the transfer decision from the juvenile court to the prosecutor; and the lengthening of sentences. The very notion of the juvenile court, per se, and all of its manifestations are being questioned, such as an emphasis on the nature of behavior, rather than specific offenses; a concern about delinquency and conduct, rather than specific acts; an attitude and frame of mind that characterizes much of what goes on in juvenile court in terms of its lack of an adversarial character; and the kinds of information--and the very language-- used in the juvenile court system. Clearly, all of those issues are under a great deal of stress today. ************************************ Facts about crime and delinquency ************************************ The justifications for the separation of the adult and juvenile justice processes are very complex and invite different kinds of considerations. Faced with complexity of this order of magnitude, I am always eager to ignore the complexity --by pulling the academic stunt of ignoring all of this variability, all of this complexity--and seek some simplifying principles. I would like to take a look at all of these issues from the point of view of criminology, from the point of view of the causes of crime and delinquency, and seek some clarification. I would like to remind you of three facts about crime and delinquency that I think have enormous significance for all of these issues about the separation and treatment of juveniles from adults, and that even go directly to the question of what kinds of information we can collect on people that is useful for the juvenile criminal justice system. 1(Before launching into these three facts, I would add as a footnote that much of the separation in our treatment of juveniles from adults does rest on one very powerful set of assumptions about human conduct: Something about crime and delinquency changes with age. It seems to me an obvious underlying assumption; there is something about the meaning of crime or delinquency to the offender that changes with age, and we should therefore think about it differently as a function of age. Something about its purposefulness, something about the gain or the loss to be achieved to the individual, or something about the consequences to others, changes with age. One or the other, or both of those, seems to me to be fundamentally involved in much of these decisions. But it seems to me that those are seriously doubtful assumptions; there may be nothing about crime that meaningfully changes with age). I cannot spend a lot of time convincing you that these are facts, so I will stipulate it. Just agree with me, tentatively if you like, that these are facts, and then wander with me through the implications that these facts have for the historical foundations of the distinction between the juvenile and adult systems of justice. The three facts that I would like to remind you of are: First, the age effect on crime, the relationship between age and crime. Second, what criminologists are increasingly referring to as the "versatility effect." And, third, what is increasingly referred to as the "stability effect." Age, versatility and stability. ------------------------- Age effect on crime ------------------------ The first fact is the relationship between age and crime. It is in some ways a controversial topic, but the basic outlines of the fact about age and crime are really not in serious dispute. The relationship between age and crime is well characterized by the graph in Figure 1, which is the rate of arrests for robbery standardized to age. This general distribution fits the distribution for nearly all forms of crime and delinquency. It has several features that are of enormous significance to discussions such as those we are having here. It is easy to characterize, and it is nearly impossible to explain. It is nearly invariant, it is a ubiquitous relationship. The offending rate for crime and delinquency rises suddenly, very dramatically, in the preadolescent years. It peaks in late adolescence or early adulthood, around 17 or 18, for most forms of crime, and then, just as suddenly, not quite as dramatically, it begins to decline. It declines rapidly, and it declines consistently, monotonically throughout life. The rate of offending declines to about half its peak value by about age 22 or 25, and it then continues to decline throughout life. I like to use robbery as an example to show the underlying form of the age/crime relationship because it is a prototypical street crime: it is one we are all concerned about, and it has elements of potential violence and theft. I think it fairly well characterizes the age/crime relationship. There are many things that are instructive about the relationship between age and crime, but foremost among them is its stubbornness to vary. That is to say, this basic relationship characterizes many forms of crime and many forms of delinquency, and criminologists and researchers have looked long and hard for variability in this underlying relationship. In my opinion, they have been quite frustrated in finding it. Age and crime is a ubiquitous relationship; it has great implications for many of the questions that confront us. It suggests that for all offenders, for all individuals, the basic underlying relationship will be similar; that individuals will vary, in terms of the level of this basic underlying relationship, but it will have its effect no matter what we do. The fact is, the teenage years will be the years of maximum offending for everyone, and then the crime rate will decline as a person ages. It will decline inevitably and dramatically despite whatever we do to, for or with individuals. That is a lot to swallow, but let me ask you to stipulate that this relationship between age and crime does characterize all people; it characterizes all forms of offending that we are most concerned about; and it will happen virtually no matter what we do. ------------------------ Versatility effect ----------------------- The second fact that I want to impress upon you has to do with what we now refer to as the "versatility effect," which is the opposite of the notion of specialization. There is, in the records of juveniles and adults, whether they be official or self-report, and no matter how we collect or tabulate our information, enormous variability in terms of the kinds of offending in the offending population. Once again, we have looked hard and long for evidence of specialization; that is, specific forms of offending that are overwhelmingly preferred by specific individual offenders. We can discover some specialization in the records of offenders, I would not dispute that. But it is, I would argue, quite at the margin. What really characterizes crime and delinquency is versatility, not specialization. It is wrong, therefore, to think of offenders as solely burglars, drug abusers, robbers, rapists, auto thieves or the like. It is more correct to think of higher or lower rates of offending that are characterized by offending in a wide variety of acts, rather than in a limited scope. Specialization can be discovered in the records of offenders. However, it tends to be opportunity-driven; that is, not driven as much by the individual proclivities of the people involved but rather by the opportunities to offend. An individual who lives in a large housing unit has the opportunity to be a burglar that individuals who live in single-family dwellings do not have. Individuals who have access to cars have a greater opportunity to be auto thieves. Individuals who have great proximity to drugs, and those who are selling them, have a greater opportunity to be drug offenders. But holding apart those opportunistic notions, what characterizes the records, again whether they be self-reported or official, is versatility. The versatility of which I speak is not limited or constrained by violations of juvenile or criminal law. The versatility that is everywhere in evidence in youth or adult records goes well beyond violations of the law, and encompasses most of what we think of as problem behaviors. So the versatility effect encompasses school misconduct, for example, such as truancy, disobedience and disorderly conduct, and all drug and alcohol use, including both licit and illicit drugs, or those which are illegal at some ages and not others, such as tobacco. Eight-year-olds who use tobacco are part of the versatility effect. The versatility effect also includes things such as accidents, self-injury and all forms of injury to others. A good example of these patterns is provided by the classic study by Sheldon and Eleanor Gluck in which they looked at delinquents and nondelinquents in a sample as they aged. One of the things they took measures of was whether or not the young people involved in their sample had been involved in accidents and, for example, whether they had been hit by a moving vehicle. They found that the rates are two to three times higher among the delinquents than the nondelinquents. This is just an example of the scope of conduct or behavior that I am including in the versatility effect. As mentioned, it includes school behaviors, all drug and alcohol use, and injury to self and others. It is very broadly construed: measures of visits to the emergency room of a hospital are included, as well as shoplifting. As a matter of fact, for my money, a visit to a hospital emergency room is as good a predictor of delinquency as is an incidence of shoplifting. Another example is provided by data recently published by Marianne Junger. She looked at all of the studies in Europe and the United States that included measures of accidents and delinquency. She looked at the correlates of the two and she discovered that, empirically, accidents could not be distinguished from delinquency. That is to say, in terms of its antecedents or correlates, they are virtually the same. The predictors that you would develop in any kind of predictive study of delinquency would do as well to predict accidents, given a base rate adjustment. So with predictors such as the mother's education or age, marital tensions, socialization, supervision or self-worth, the correlates of accidents and the correlates of delinquency are the same. Because there is such versatility in criminal behavior, there is in the records of juveniles and adults very little evidence of direction in any sense of progression or nature. For example, criminal activity does not seem to escalate in terms of seriousness or become more consistently directed toward particular offenses over time. It tends to be versatile throughout the record. Those are very important empirical findings. Again, if we roll up our sleeves, and we crank up the computers and we have a sufficiently large number of cases, we can discover statistically significant evidence of specialization. But for my money, we have not discovered much substantively interesting evidence of specialization, or of escalation, or of increasing or decreasing seriousness, or of patterning in any form. Thus, the age effect coupled with the versatility effect help call into question, in my opinion, some of the assumptions we have made about the partitioning of juveniles from adult offenders that are based on notions of developmental sequence, or some projection or trajectory that is a function of age. Again, the versatility effect characterizes all offending, not just juvenile offending. The versatility effect has been useful to me in helping to understand something about the nature of crime; that is, why is it that these things go together? Why is it that school difficulties, automobile accidents, shoplifting, assaultive behavior and smoking cigarettes at age eight tend to go together? Why do we find such a clustering of problem behaviors? Why do they seem to hang together, in sample after sample, in study after study? The conclusion that Travis Hirschi and I have come to is this: these behaviors mean very much the same thing to the individual involved with them. They do not mean a whole lot, that is one principle. They are not highly motivated behavior. They do not suggest forces beyond which individuals have no control. What they do seem to suggest, however, is a lack of foresight, a lack of attention to the long-term. While it is easier to get somewhere if you drive more rapidly than if you drive more slowly, you are more likely to get in an accident. It is easier to get what you want by putting it in your pocket and walking out of the store. It is easier to end an argument by hitting someone with a blunt object than not. All of these behaviors suggest, to me at least, that they are focused on short-term solutions and immediate gratification. And they all share the same phenomena of having negative or potentially negative long-term consequences. In other words, they characterize individuals who have less self control than others. In other parts of our work, we describe where self control comes from: it is the impact of parenting on the first 10 years of life. ----------------------- Stability effect --------------------- The third fact of crime and delinquency is the stability effect. Stability is readily described, easy to confuse. The stability finding suggests that, once identified, individual differences in rates of offending or problem behaviors remain relatively stable over long periods of time. Let me state it again: individual differences in problem behaviors remain relatively stable over long periods of time. That is to say, individuals who can be identified at age 10 or 12 or 15 as being relatively high in problem behaviors (such as frequent offenders or those involved in accidents or school difficulties) tend to be relatively high in problem behaviors at a later age as well. The stability effect does not say that "once a crook, always a crook" or "once a delinquent, always a delinquent." As a matter of fact, we know that is not true. We know that is not true by the first fact we talked about, the age effect, which suggests that for everyone, whether they are a relatively frequent or infrequent offender, the rate of offending declines with age, and declines dramatically with age over time. But what the stability effect does say is that there are identifiable, relatively reliable, individual differences in the rate of offending that, once identified, help characterize individual careers over time. My colleagues John Laub and Robert Sampson recently completed a reanalysis of the Glucks' work. They found a strong relationship between delinquency and antisocial behavior at a relatively young age, and its correlation to later involvement in the criminal justice system. They partitioned their sample into those who had an official record of delinquency before age 14, and those who had no record; they then followed up on these individuals to about age 35. They took a look at the relationship between those early characteristics, those early definitions, and subsequent ones. They found that official delinquency is very strongly related to later outcomes. It is related to the percent of the sample who were first arrested at age 17 to 25, and to the percent first arrested between 25 and 32. Official delinquency is also related to those who used drugs or alcohol excessively later in life. Interestingly enough, these associations do not depend on the method of measurement for early antisocial or problem behavior. The Glucks took another measure (which Laub and Sampson collapsed into a single measure) in which they asked teachers to identify the individuals who were most problematic. They asked the students themselves to identify those who were most problematic, and they asked parents to do the same. They then classified people in the sample by those ratings, and those ratings themselves are reasonably predictive of later adult misconduct. Another measurement made, which was extremely crude, psychometrically inappropriate and indefensible, was to ask each mother whether her child had a lot of tantrums when the child was young. What kind of question is that? It is a very poor question psychometrically. Yet that measure, as crude as it is, is a reasonably strong predictor of all kinds of difficulty throughout life. If the stability effect were graphically depicted, the distribution could show an underlying offending rate for two different groups of people: a high-rate group and a low-rate group. The stability effect would say that two things are going to happen. First, there will be differences over a long period of time between individuals who have a fairly high level of problem behaviors at one point versus those who have a low level. Those differences will characterize these samples throughout life. Second, both groups will decline in their offending as a function of age, pretty much despite whatever it is that we do. If you drew a hypothetical line through that graph, you would find an underlying offense rate. You could say this line might be something like the probability of coming to the attention of the authorities is .8 under the assumption that frequency alone drives that probability (which I think is not an unreasonable assumption). Then you could say that both groups will come to the attention of the authorities when they are adolescents, but some will come to the attention of the authorities at a much greater degree. The criminal activity of both groups, however, will decline as a function of age. ------------------------------ Evaluating the justifications ----------------------------- Let me apply these three facts to the questions that confront us now, and that is the justifications for a separate juvenile justice system. I think these justifications are loaded with implications; they are very difficult to wrestle with, and I certainly have not been able to wrestle with them to a sufficient degree to come to any firm conclusions. Together, the facts tell us that we should not forget that, over time, post-adolescence offending will decrease for all offenders. They tell us that early measures will predict later measures. That is to say, early measures of self-control will predict later measures. Early school difficulties and early drug and alcohol use will predict later crime, not because they are causally related, but because they are both manifestations of an underlying characteristic. Unruliness will predict crime. Excessive television watching will predict crime, not because of the content of the television, but simply as a measure of lack of supervision or a lack of involvement in other activities. Crime will predict employment instability. Delinquency will predict marital instability and difficulties in having and fashioning interpersonal relations of all sorts and vice versa. In my view, the genesis of these problem behaviors does take place in the first 10 years of life. These differences are profound and are developed by what goes on, or what does not go on, in the supervision and the socialization of very young children. The facts tell us that if we are interested in the prevention of crime, that the juvenile and criminal justice systems are at best at the margin in that interest, and what we should be fundamentally interested in is the raising of children and the inadequate circumstances that an increasingly large number of children find themselves in. In terms of the justifications for the separation of the two systems, let me suggest that, in my opinion, the two that survive have to do with leniency and with separation of children from adults. The idea that crime means something differently based on one's age is problematic to me. Crime means the same to older offenders as it does younger offenders: it means that they are not paying attention to the long-term consequences of their behavior, that they have relatively low self control. Neither one of them is acting particularly responsibly, if that is what we mean by adult conduct. Responsibility means to take ownership of your actions, think about its consequences to others and to yourself. The lack of responsibility characterizes adult offenders as well as juvenile offenders. Our tendency today is to treat juveniles as adults. My guess is, from the research, it is very much the other way around. We ought to think much more of adult offenders in the same way that we think of juvenile offenders: pay less attention to specific acts and more to an underlying delinquency kind of status. Let me just make one last point: I think it is very difficult to establish a 46 prejudicial effect on offending, either as a function of the juvenile justice system or the criminal justice system, over and above what the stability effect indicates to us. That is to say, I do not believe I need to make adjustments in that age distribution of crime, dependent on involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. I know that is a provocative thing to say and it is full of implications, but I do not believe I need to make that adjustment for the effect of juvenile and criminal justice on an individual crime rate. That means a lot of things, about the rehabilitative potential, the effect of incapacitation, the effect of deterrence and the like, most of which I believe are quite at the margin, as you can tell by now. But what it does also suggest is that it is difficult to establish a prejudicial effect for our use of records on individuals. Based on the literature I have read, it is apparent to me that of overwhelming importance in the juvenile record issue is not whether an individual has engaged in an antisocial misconduct that we have recorded in the juvenile justice system but, rather, the frequency and the recency of such behavior. The frequency and the recency, however, are as useful in the adult as in the juvenile arena. It seems to me that one policy we might want to contemplate is something of a tradeoff for a more liberal use of juvenile records to make dispositions and sentencing decisions, with an enhanced policy about the expungement of records. If records have a negative connotation for juveniles, they do so for adults as well. If there has been a period in which there is no involvement, or no recorded involvement, of that individual in the justice system, we can be greatly assured that the individual is on the lower curve of offending. After some relatively brief period of time, I might suggest 3 years, where there is no evidence of conduct in the history of either the juvenile or the adult, their record should be expunged. ********************************************************************** The importance of improving and sharing information to furthering national juvenile justice reform *********************************************************************** ---------------- SHAY BILCHIK ---------------- -------------- Administrator -------------- ---------------------------------------------------------- Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention U.S. Department of Justice ----------------------------------------------------------- I am thankful to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and SEARCH for providing me with an opportunity to be with you today. I will focus my comments on the critical relationship between juvenile justice system recordkeeping and information sharing and the attempts of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to reach some of our most urgent national juvenile justice goals. --------------------------- Information drives reform --------------------------- I am convinced that information sharing in the juvenile justice system--and I define that term broadly to include the formal system and related systems as well--is one of the most essential elements for furthering national juvenile justice reform. All of us know the statistics about the increases we are experiencing in violent juvenile delinquency--and many of us know first-hand the weaknesses we find in all too many of our juvenile justice systems. I am certain that improving those systems and reducing the level of violence will become a reality only if we at the same time create and improve our information systems. My first two most significant contacts with OJJDP before joining the Justice Department were with the Restitution project-- RESTTA--and with the Statistics and Systems Development (SSD) project, working with Howard Snyder, Melissa Sickmund and Barbara Allen-Hagen. The experience with the SSD project taught me a lot--about the frustrations of trying to develop that perfect information system and the difficulty of sharing and finding information within our juvenile justice systems. My first-hand experience as a prosecutor for 16 years in Miami, Florida, also taught me a lot about the imperfections of our recordkeeping and information sharing systems. I saw juveniles traveling from county to county, committing "first offense" after "first offense." I saw "high tech" identification systems in which intake workers asked other intake workers if they recognized a defendant who was adept at changing names and dates of birth. We were not concerned about national information--we simply longed for the basic information needed to run a credible system. We have come a long way, both in Miami and as a nation, toward improving those systems, but we still have a lot of work to do: work in recording and maintaining the information we need, in developing systems that provide easy access to the information, and in developing the protocols we agree to follow across disciplines to use the information appropriately in carrying out our responsibilities. So how does this relate to our national juvenile justice goals? Recently our attention was drawn to a horrible situation in California involving a 6-year-old who is alleged to have attacked and badly beaten a 1-month-old baby. Once again, the media focused on the crisis of increasing juvenile violence. Now, the truth of the matter is that while it is much too soon to be analyzing the facts of this case, tragic incidents such as this one--and the recent case in Chicago involving a 10- and 11- year-old who were charged with dropping a 5-year-old from a 14th-floor balcony--may indeed reflect the broader problems that we face related to rising juvenile crime. And those problems are our failure as a society to address the needs of our most troubled youth and to form a protective net around all of our children, while at the same time providing for the public safety. Addressing these problems will require the development in our communities of a continuum of interventions, from the earliest of prevention activities to a variety of juvenile justice system interventions, including the possible transfer of the most serious, violent and chronic offenders for criminal prosecution. The common denominator in this work is information. ----------------------------------------------------- Objectives for improving juvenile justice services ----------------------------------------------------- The recently released National Juvenile Justice Action Plan, a work product of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, defines the task that we face and recognizes that we will be successful only if we use a comprehensive approach, one that is grounded in research and that reflects the entire continuum of activity to which I just referred.(U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Combating Violence and Delinquency: The National Juvenile Justice Action Plan, Summary , by the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 1996).) In this regard, it uses the core principles of prevention, intervention and treatment as laid out in OJJDP's Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders and its Guide for Implementation. (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders , Program Summary, by J.J. Wilson and J.C. Howell (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), and Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders , J.C. Howell, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1995.) The Action Plan has eight objectives that we must work toward to reduce youth violence and save the lives of our children. I will discuss a couple of these objectives and illustrate how information sharing is essential to the objectives of the Action Plan and OJJDP's overall goals. ------------------------------------ Intervention, sanctions, treatment ------------------------------------ First, the Action Plan calls for us to provide immediate intervention and appropriate sanctions and treatment for delinquent juveniles. To do this we must advocate for a strengthened juvenile justice system, one that has adequate capacity and resources to get the job done. We have to be able to make risk and needs assessments of all children coming into the system in order to recommend appropriate, case-specific actions and placements that both provide for the public safety and meet the children's rehabilitative needs. We must develop a range of interventions and sanctions appropriate for the child, and we must provide adequate resources for staff to do their jobs. Children like those I mentioned earlier generally do not come to the system's or the community's attention for the first time when a tragic incident occurs. There are usually red flags: school failure, truancy, aggressive behavior, a record of minor delinquency, or family and parenting problems that may include domestic violence, and abuse or neglect. These are warning signs that we must have the capacity to address adequately, but in all too many jurisdictions we do not have that capacity and we do not have the information systems in place to retrieve the information we need. We do not have the ability to cut across systems so that the schools, courts, law enforcement, and social service and mental health agencies can appropriately share what they know about the children and families in their respective systems. That must change. ---------------- Collaboration ----------------- The Action Plan recognizes that we must work collaboratively on the issues of intervention, sanctions and treatment. OJJDP plays an important role in assisting State and local jurisdictions in coming to grips with the need to include a juvenile record-sharing scheme in the juvenile justice system. OJJDP's perspective on this issue is fairly simple: each State and local jurisdiction should be using an approach that reflects what I think many practitioners have realized for years: that we must work collaboratively, both from the top down and the bottom up. We must move forward together--judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation and parole officers;police; youth service workers and other juvenile justice practitioners; legislators and policymakers; Federal, State and county leaders; and school officials, mental health providers and community members, including youth--with our collective knowledge about what works and what does not, in attempting to turn the tide of youth violence. And in order to do this work most effectively, we must be able to share information with each other. When I think about all of these players working together, it reminds me of a chapter of Robert Fulghum's book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, in which he writes about his childhood recollections of playing hide-and-seek. He recalls the kid in the neighborhood who hid so well no one could find him. Fulghum writes about how, after a while, the other kids would stop yelling "olly-olly-outs-in-free" and would go off and leave the kid all by himself. The kid hiding too well would get mad and the other kids would get mad back. He would argue that they should have kept looking for him, and they would say that he was not playing the game the way it should be played and that he should have come out from his hiding place. The operation of the criminal, juvenile justice and human services systems is much the same. The multiple layers of government and various disciplines--all involved with our children and their families--have been hiding from each other for all too many years without being found, each side pointing fingers and blaming the other: a kind of "hide-and-seek," grown-up style. What Fulghum suggests next in this story parallels where we need to be going in our work on juvenile crime and violence. He describes the game of Sardines, in which the person who is "It" hides and everybody goes looking for him. When you find the person who is "It," you get in and hide with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding, but instead of apart from one another, the players are together and on common ground. That is how I view what we need to do in relation to all of these systems: come together to work as a team in our efforts, perhaps as a "virtual team," brought together by the linking of information systems. Right now, the juvenile justice system and juvenile violence in this game of Sardines is "It." -------------------------------- Adequately serving each child -------------------------------- The Action Plan recognizes that our juvenile delinquency system operates under the constraints of limited resources and is unable to provide full attention to every case, every child, every family. It argues that a delinquency system that works will be able to serve a child's and a community's needs adequately through an entire range of interventions. However, with the increases in caseloads and demands on the system caused by the increases in delinquency reports, we have been putting a disproportionate share of our resources into the back end of the system. As a result, too many jurisdictions are doing paper intake on their cases. They are not meeting the juveniles or their families before making case-handling recommendations, and they are not focused on communicating with other systems to find out more about the child who has surfaced in the juvenile justice system, perhaps for the first time, but who may have surfaced in another system at an earlier point in time. As a result, we may lose the best chance we might have for success in turning back a developing delinquent career. We must put a system in place that will have the capacity to use an information system that serves as an interdisciplinary database so that we can make informed decisions about each child. We need, in short, a system that provides its workers both the time and the information needed to successfully determine an appropriate course of action for each individual case at the point of entry into the system. We must build a system that provides complete and adequate disposition recommendations to the court, a product of reasonable caseloads for probation and other youth service workers who bear the responsibility for fully exploring the child's background. This includes the history of the family, the child's health, mental health, school records, prior arrests and treatment efforts, as well as current opportunities for effective intervention and appropriate aftercare. This strengthened juvenile justice system will also have programs and interventions that can be matched with the assessment of each child's needs so that we can truly help our troubled and delinquent youth. Warehoused, or kept in detention or at home waiting for placement, these children remain the product of the broken pieces in their lives. The system that works is not slot-driven. It is based instead on need and risk assessments that benefit the child and provide for the safety of the community, while at the same time not unnecessarily overcrowding facilities and straining the capacity of the system. This system has sufficient detention and residential facilities, as well as alternatives to detention and secure care, such as day treatment and electronic monitoring, and a full range of aftercare programming. But perhaps foremost, it is a system that will act with full knowledge of each individual case and child--and with full information about local and national trends that tell us what is happening, what is really happening in juvenile justice in this country. I think OJJDP made tremendous strides in this area with the release of our national report on juvenile offenders and victims in 1995 and an update to that report this year.(U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Juvenile Offenders and Victims: A National Report, by H. Snyder and M. Sickmund (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995); and Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1996 Update on Violence , by H. Snyder, M. Sickmund and E. Poe-Yamagata (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 1996). I assure you that OJJDP will continue to be there as a partner in these efforts, through the sharing of information and the provision of technical assistance and training, ongoing research and evaluation efforts, and formula and discretionary funding. --------------------------------- Dealing with chronic offenders --------------------------------- The second objective of the Action Plan that I will mention today addresses the need to prosecute certain serious, violent and chronic juvenile offenders in criminal court. We must recognize, however, that with the push toward prosecuting more and more youth in the criminal courts through lowering the age of criminal responsibility and automatic transfer, we are losing our ability to make case-by-case transfer decisions. To preserve that ability, we must instead advocate for a system of transfer that retains our sense of individualized justice. The Action Plan calls for criteria and guidelines to be used for both judicial and prosecutorial transfer decisions and points to the use of blended sentencing and extended jurisdiction as examples of creative ways of dealing with these serious, violent and chronic offenders. It also calls for further examination of the impact of transfer provisions to ensure that we are transferring the right juveniles and that they are indeed being incapacitated in the criminal justice system. Every part of this objective requires good recordkeeping and information sharing, both to make good initial case and sentencing decisions and to learn, on a national level, about the most effective practices we can implement to reduce violent juvenile crime both in the short- and long-term. -------------------------------- Combining efforts, leadership ---------------------------------- OJJDP is dedicated to strengthening this country's juvenile justice systems and its delinquency prevention efforts. But without an effective information sharing scheme, the various agencies in a jurisdiction each have only a small piece of the juvenile justice puzzle. Practitioners and policymakers are realizing this more and more often and, as a result, the very concept of "juvenile justice community" has begun to evolve to include agencies outside the court or law enforcement communities, to more fully reflect the multiple systems that interact with them and to form a more complete picture of the needs of a particular juvenile and family. I would be remiss if I did not also mention a project OJJDP has been working on over the past year with the U.S. Department of Education. We are developing an instruction guidebook and a fact sheet around the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to clarify the limitations on information sharing practices between schools and the juvenile justice system and other "need-to-know" organizations. When the brother of the 5-year-old saw him being dropped from the balcony in Chicago, he raced down 14 flights of stairs. He explained later that he did so in order to try to catch his brother. I got tears in my eyes when I first read those words, and it pains me to this very moment to think that in so many communities in this country we are not doing much more than racing hopelessly down a flight of stairs, too late to save a child, in our work on behalf of our children. I am convinced that together, by working throu