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A consensus is also developing about the juvenile-justice system. It takes forever to punish kids who seriously break the law, and it devotes far too much time and money to hardened young criminals while neglecting wayward kids who could still be turned around. "We can't look a kid in the eye and tell him that we can't spend a thousand dollars on him when he's 12 or 13 but that we'll be happy to reserve a jail cell for him and spend a hundred grand a year on him later," says North Carolina attorney general Mike Easley. "It's not just bad policy; it's bad arithmetic."
For some experienced offenders, the prospect of jail can make a real difference in their decisions about what crimes they are willing to commit. L.A.'s Garcetti recalls the calculating questions of a teen who raised his hand when the district attorney appeared at a detention center last April. "If I kill someone," the kid asked, "can I be executed?"
"Not at this age, no," said Garcetti.
"What if I kill more than one person?"
"Under current California law, you cannot be executed."
"Right now, I'm under 16. If I kill someone, I get out of prison when I'm 25, right?"
"Right," said Garcetti, who eventually cut off the unnerving questions by predicting, "People are so tired, so fearful and so disgusted that I think you're going to see some real changes in juvenile laws."
But few young offenders are so calculating. "These kids don't think before they do things," insists Dwayne of Atlanta, at 18 a seasoned criminal whose list of felony arrests includes armed robbery and assault. "It ain't like they stop to think, 'Now what they gonna do to me if I get caught?' " Nearby, 17-year-old DeMarcus (grand-theft auto, aggravated assault) sums up another problem: prison doesn't usually last forever, and life on the outside is an open invitation to go bad again. "They send you straight back into the same situation," he says. "The house is dirty when you left it, and it's dirty when you get back."
So the people who work with young offenders generally favor punishment for some and something like tough love for the rest. The larger problem, as always, is figuring which of the best-intended programs are better than jail cells. "Nobody has tracked the process carefully enough to find out who is good at it, in what states and by what means," says James Q. Wilson, the well-known authority on crime policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Knowing what works might help the Florida judge who has to decide this week on what to do about Percy Campbell. Eighteen months ago, Percy was a 12-year- old arrested for attempted burglary in northwest Fort Lauderdale. As it turned out, he already had more than 30 arrests for a total of 57 crimes on his rap sheet, some of them felonies. No surprise -- he also had a mother in jail for murder and an uncle who had taught him how to steal cars.