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For eleven years, Ned O'Gorman, a poet, has run a nursery school in Harlem where no kid is considered too far gone to be accepted. But O'Gorman claims few permanent successes: early parental influence is hard to shake. "The rate of failure," he says, "the return to the cycle that has been their lot and their families' lot forever, is enormous." By the time some youngsters reach O'Gorman at age three or four, their lives have been blighted by what can only euphemistically be called child abuse. Not only is the child cuffed around, but because of neglect, he risks being burned up in his bed, drowning in the bathtub, falling out the window. "In his eyes," says O'Gorman, "is the fixed stare of the blasted spirit."
Charles King, the black director of the Phoenix School, which provides therapy and schooling for 30 problem kids on Manhattan's Upper West Side, thinks that inconsistency of family treatment is more damaging to children than unrelieved harshness. First the parent strikes the kid, then lavishes gifts on him. The bewildered child has no way of telling right from wrong. He remains largely illiterate because no one talks to him. "His language," says King, "is not made to communicate, to establish relationships. It's rejection and rejection, it's the hell with it. The child learns that the only way to be heard is to kick somebody in the teeth. With violence, he suddenly becomes a being."
The Failed System
The juvenile-justice system, a sieve through which most of these kids come and go with neither punishment nor rehabilitation, has become a big part of the problem. The system evolved over the past several decades on the theory that there is no such thing as a bad boy, or at least none beyond salvage. However horrendous his crime, he is still fit for rehabilitation, given time and patience. If he is underage, he is usually not photographed and rarely fingerprinted. Records of his crimes are kept confidential and then destroyed after he becomes a legal adult. He is thus reborn with a tabula rasa—no evidence whatsoever of his misconduct. James Higgins, a juvenile judge in New Haven, reflects the attitude of many apologists for the system "We treat delinquency," he says, "as a civil inquiry into the doings of a child. The court does not consider the child a criminal—irresponsible, perhaps, but not a criminal."
When a cherubic lad of nine was brought into a Washington, D.C., court for crippling an old woman by pushing her down a flight of stairs, the judge told the prosecutor: "I'm sorry, but nothing you can say will convince me that child is guilty."' Complains Robert M. Ross, a former assistant corporation counsel in Washington: "Some judges and prosecutors have told me they thought a third to half of all juvenile cases could be solved simply by sitting the kid down and giving him a stern lecture." That