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Aside from the shaky assumptions on which it rests, the juvenile court is notoriously inefficient (see box following page). Judges consider assignment to it not a plum but the pits. "I would rather die than preside in Family Court," says New York Criminal Court Judge Eve Preminger. "It's completely unrewarding." Cases are backed up in the overburdened, understaffed system. Complainants and witnesses, who are nervous to begin with and sometimes threatened by the offenders, become exasperated with waiting and walk out. Case dismissed.
Even if the case proceeds, the deck is stacked in favor of the defendant. A juvenile may not be able to read or write, but he can recite his Miranda rights* without pausing for breath. When he is arrested, his main effort—and his lawyer's—is to get the case thrown out on some legal technicality, and he often succeeds. In a San Francisco police squad room, the cops toss darts at an unusual board. Its rings are labeled: Investigate further, Admonish, Cite, and the bull's-eye is Complaint withdrawn. Police Lieut. George Rosko sums up the whole juvenile process: "It fosters the kid's belief that he can beat the system. He goes through the court, comes back to the neighborhood, and he's a hero."
Most of the youths are routinely released into their parents' custody. They are supposed to be on probation, but overworked probation officers can hardly give them much attention. Sometimes parents call the court and cannot even find out the name of the officer assigned to their child. In Providence, young criminals are often given a rent allowance and sent out to make it on their own. One boy, 17, made it all the way to a flophouse alongside winos, junkies and prostitutes. He enjoyed the homelike atmosphere; if forced to move, he told social workers, he would return to prostituting himself at the train station.
When even juvenile authorities decide a youngster is just too dangerous to release, nobody is quite sure what to do with him. Should he be sent to a prison-like facility or a more open work camp or juvenile home? The costs of correctional programs can be astronomical.
New York State spends some $15,000 a year for every kid in an "open" facility; a small, experimental psychiatric program costs $50,000 a year for each youth.
The results have been mixed in states like Arizona, California and Connecticut, where authorities have been farming out the inmates of large juvenile prisons to smaller, barless camps and homes. Recidivism has not declined among the hard-core cases, although some of the halfway houses that deal mostly with nonviolent youngsters in a community setting have been effective.
When several large detention centers in New York were closed on the grounds that rehabilitation works better in smaller places, many youths were sent to a forestry camp outside Ithaca; soon they burned down the camp.
The toughest kids manage to resist the most earnest efforts at rehabilitation. Robert Watts, a youth officer in Boston, describes a typical failure with a