This is the story of a courthouse, a group of kids who passed through it one week and the people whose task it is to rescue them.
Clarence Mitchell Courthouse, a brooding Beaux Arts monolith in the heart of Baltimore, contains the Baltimore City Juvenile Court. Like the 2,500 similar juvenile courts across the nation, this is where the battles are being fought against some of America's toughest problems: drugs, disintegrating families, household violence. As these problems have grown worse over the past two decades, the judicial system designed to deal with them has crumbled. These courts are an indicator of the country's compassion for families and its commitment to justice, but increasingly they have neither the money nor the personnel to save most of the desperate young souls who pass through their doors. Almost no one seems to care.
To protect the children from the stigma of being branded as criminals, the proceedings of juvenile courts are hidden behind a veil of confidentiality. In an effort to show the strains on the system, a group of TIME correspondents was given unprecedented access to the Baltimore court. The identities of the children and their parents have been changed, but the stories are true, and they are typical.
Antwan
Ringed by Baltimore narcotics cops and sniffling into a tissue, Antwan Davey looks like a kid caught in a bureaucratic land of giants. Just three hours earlier, the cops nailed the skinny 10-year-old boy in a playground drug bust. Now, in a cinder-block squad room in east Baltimore, he slouches in a green office chair, unlaced Etonic tennis shoes just touching the floor.
Two teenage drug dealers, sullen and silent, sit nearby. Moments before their arrest, they had forced Antwan to hide their wares in his socks. "That's usually what they do now -- give the stuff to a little kid," says arresting officer Ed Bochniak, who watched the deal go down. "We were lucky to see it."
Crime and drugs are everywhere in America's inner cities. For Antwan, they were only a few yards away as the youngster floated high above his steamy ghetto playground on a turquoise-and-orange swing set. At the playground's edge two teenagers were selling vials of cocaine from a curbside stash. One dealer cut a score with a passing woman; looking over at Antwan, his partner spotted an opportunity.
Sauntering up to the youngster, the pusher demanded that Antwan serve as a hiding place for the stash or else face a beating. At first the child refused, then gave in. Business continued -- until the "Zone Rangers," an undercover Baltimore vice-and-narcotics squad that had the dealers under surveillance, suddenly sprinted into action. One team of Rangers nabbed the dealers; another pulled Antwan off the swing and confiscated the vials. By the time they reached the station house, the little boy had dissolved in tears.
Then Antwan got his first break. A juvenile-services worker sat down beside him. "Are you sorry for what you've done this evening?" he asked the boy. "Yes," mumbled Antwan. "Have you learned a lesson?" he asked. Another soft yes. Alongside the boy stood his mother Syrita, 30, an attractive woman whose soft face belies the rugged ghetto life she has led. The worker decided to let Antwan go home -- he had no prior arrests -- so long as she brought him to court the next day.