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Dennis Grant, a church elder in Fort Lauderdale, thought he could help. He gained permission to have Percy placed in the custody of his grandmother, whom Grant arranged to have relocated from a neighborhood ruled by the crack trade. The boy stayed out of trouble until June, when he broke into a neighbor's home. So it now appears that his grandmother's home wasn't the best place to ! be. She was arrested on shoplifting charges last week. This week a Broward County judge decides whether to try Percy as an adult or to turn him back to Grant one more time. "These kids can be changed," Grant insists. "We need to break the cycle." The prosecutors demur. "This child is being glorified," grumbles assistant state attorney Susan Aramony. "Maybe it's time to spend the resources on someone else who may benefit from them."
Percy's case highlights a key dilemma: how to distinguish kids who may be beyond change from the ones who aren't. In an article in this month's Commentary, James Q. Wilson observes that numerous studies of young criminals tend toward a shared conclusion: in any given age group, only 6% of the boys will be responsible for at least half of the serious crimes committed by all boys of that age. What do those kids have in common? Criminal parents, many of them -- more than half of all kids in long-term juvenile institutions in the U.S. have immediate relatives who have been incarcerated. A low verbal- intelligence quotient and poor grades are also common. The boys tend to be both emotionally cold and impulsive. From an early age they drink and get high. By an early age too, they make their first noticeable trouble, sometimes around the third grade.
If every offender who fit that profile were beyond help, judges would know better which kids to consign to lockups. They aren't all beyond help, so authorities stumble around in the dark. Indeed, the records of young offenders are generally closed, so previous offenses aren't always disclosed to judges who rule on subsequent ones. When New York State passed its juvenile-offender law in 1978, the outcome was regarded as the toughest new arrangement in the nation. On the surface, it was: those from 13 through 15 accused of heinous felonies were moved from Family Court, where the maximum penalty was 18 months regardless of the crime, to the State Supreme Court. But the law allows only for lighter sentences than would be given to adults who are convicted of equivalent crimes -- meaning the kids are often back on the streets in a few years, jobless, with a felony conviction that makes employment more difficult to find. The inadequacies of the system led Justice Michael Corriero to push for the creation of the job he now holds. He takes on all juvenile-offender cases that come through Manhattan Supreme Court. In this capacity, he has the power to fashion a midway solution for some offenders, determining whether to send convicted kids to hard time or, if he believes them salvageable, to a community-based program that keeps close tabs while offering drug counseling, job training or schooling. Still, says Corriero, "even though the legislature gave us the bodies of these kids, they gave us no support services. We don't have a probation-department representative who tells me the Family Court history. We don't have any mental-health services to refer them to. We don't have any residential programs. We don't have any resources that the Family Court has."