ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 18, 1995 TAG: 9512180062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: Kids & crime
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
ON a bright October morning, Curtis Claxton celebrated his 21st birthday by walking out of the Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center and into the first day of his life as a free man.
Claxton had been locked up since he was a boy of 14. He and another teen-ager were convicted of beating an elderly Bedford man to death in 1989 and taking two loaves of bread from his home.
The case became fodder for critics of Virginia's juvenile justice system, which could treat Claxton only as a delinquent and release him from a reformatory no later than his 21st birthday.
On Oct. 25, Claxton's time was up.
Coincidentally, as Claxton headed back to Roanoke to start a new life, that day's newspaper carried a commentary written by Del. William Mims, R-Leesburg, who sits on Gov. George Allen's Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform.
Releasing violent offenders when they turn 21, Mims wrote, "is nothing more than a slap on the wrist."
In an effort to curb juvenile crime, Allen and his task force want the General Assembly to make adult trials mandatory for all juveniles 14 or older who are charged with violent offenses. Current law lets judges decide whether juveniles should be tried as adults.
The Allen commission also wants to make adult trials automatic for juvenile offenders 14 and older who have been convicted of three felonies. The panel is considering giving prosecutors the power to seek adult trials for other juveniles in some cases, including those under 14.
Claxton has no doubt that if he had been subjected to such laws in 1989, "I would have been incarcerated to this day."
He says he has been punished enough - not just at Natural Bridge, but by a disadvantaged life that put him there.
"I didn't go out and break the laws just to be breaking them," he said recently. "I didn't have no money and I didn't have no food.
"It's cold in the streets, and it's survival of the fittest. The weak don't survive; that's how I came up in life."
Looking back on his 21 years - a third of them spent in correctional centers - Claxton says: "People tell me that I've lost half my childhood. But I just laugh and tell them that I never had a childhood."
`A false bill of goods'
It sounds so simple: To stanch the bloodshed caused by an increasing number of violent young criminals, try them in adult courts earlier and keep them in prisons longer.
But other states that have already tried what Virginia is considering have found that it's not that easy.
"New York and Florida have for some time sent an inordinate number of young people to adult court, and it has had no favorable impact on their crime rates," said Hunter Hurst of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.
Critics say that sending young people to prison - instead of juvenile correctional centers that try to rehabilitate them - only turns them into more hardened criminals.
In a study for the U.S. Department of Justice, Rutgers University criminology Professor Jeffrey Fagan compared two similar groups of youngsters; one tried as adults in New York, the second as juveniles in New Jersey.
The study concluded that "little is gained" by trying kids as adults. Sanctions were no less severe in juvenile than adult court, Fagan found, and juveniles tried as adults went on to commit more crimes than those retained in the juvenile courts. Several other national studies have reached the same conclusion.
Politicians who tout adult trials as a way to make mean streets safer are "selling the public a false bill of goods," Fagan said.
Under the Allen plan, juveniles convicted as adults would be held in a special prison for under-age offenders until they turned 18, at which point they would be integrated into the regular prison population.
When they come out of prison as young adults, it will be as convicted felons with little of the treatment and counseling available in the juvenile system.
"It dashes a young person's life," said Onzlee Ware, a Roanoke lawyer who often represents clients in juvenile court. "If you get a felony on your record at 14 years old, you're knocked out of certain jobs for the rest of your life."
Of 52 juvenile court judges who responded to a survey by The Roanoke Times, 78 percent disagreed with the idea of making adult trials automatic for all violent offenders 14 or older. Slightly more than half of the juvenile court judges in the state responded to the survey.
"Nine times out of 10 any juvenile charged with murder, rape or robbery would be transferred or dealt with seriously under the available sanctions," one judge wrote in the anonymous mail survey.
"Sadly, many of the people who are now throwing stones have not meaningfully participated in our system," another judge wrote, referring to prosecutors and Department of Youth and Family Services Director Patricia West.
The judge said it was ironic that West has criticized the courts for being too lenient on juveniles, when it is her department that usually decides when to release them. Since West was appointed by Allen last year, the former prosecutor "has darkened few, if any, courthouse doors to learn what juvenile judges in this state are actually doing regarding these issues," the judge wrote.
When first approached about an interview in October for this story, West asked that questions be submitted to her in advance. One month after a list of questions was sent to her office, West did not return repeated telephone calls seeking the answers.
In the newspaper's survey, judges also questioned a proposal mandating adult trials for juveniles 14 and older convicted of three or more felonies, saying it could unnecessarily trap minor offenders such as shoplifters and check-forgers in adult courts.
Mandating adult trials "has been an abysmal failure in the states that have tried it," said Del. Jerrauld Jones, a Norfolk Democrat who heads a Commission on Youth task force that is offering a less drastic version of juvenile justice reform.
Jones' commission wants to increase the age from 21 to 25 at which juvenile offenders can be incarcerated.
While the Allen commission calls for an overhaul of state's juvenile justice laws, Jones argues that more time is needed to first gauge the results of recent significant changes.
Two years ago, Jones headed an earlier Commission on Youth study that led to several major changes in the law, including lowering from 15 to 14 the age at which a juvenile can be tried as an adult, and giving juvenile court judges the power to set specific sentences of up to seven years for serious offenders.
Before then, all juveniles were sent to correctional centers operated by the Department of Youth and Family Services for indefinite times, with the staff deciding when they were suitable for release.
Since those laws took effect in 1994, Jones said, "we haven't had enough time to generate some data-based statistics about whether that is working or not."
Early figures show the new statutes have been used sparingly. Only five 14-year-olds had been sent to Circuit Court as adults by April, and 110 youths had received set sentences.
In Roanoke, a juvenile court judge has yet to use the determinate sentencing law. And just one 14-year-old, Davon A. Anderson, has been convicted as an adult in Roanoke: He was charged with maiming two Old Southwest men, beating one unconscious with a baseball bat and stomping the other into a coma.
But sending a juvenile to adult court does not always guarantee a harsher sentence. In Circuit Court, the offender's age suddenly becomes a mitigating factor for a judge accustomed to seeing more mature killers and robbers.
Of the 412 juveniles sent to Circuit Court statewide in 1992, 25 percent received no incarceration, according to the Commission on Youth's study.
"The myth is that if you send them to adult court they will get walloped," Jones said. "That just does not happen."
Mixing killers with shoplifters
Juliana Hudson's troubles started small, with skipping school.
"I got used to not going to school as a way of not handling my problems," said the 17-year-old, who recently left the Discovery House, a halfway house for troubled youths in Roanoke.
After she was convicted of shoplifting and forgery, a judge sent her to Bon Air, the state's juvenile correctional facility for girls. There, Hudson was lumped into a more violent and hardened population that ruled the cottages on the campus-like grounds of the Richmond facility.
"You all get put in the same category and sent to the same place, no matter what your charge is," she said. "I was a check-forger and a shoplifter, and they put me in the killer cottage."
Hudson and others who have spent time in juvenile correctional centers say the experience can manufacture young criminals instead of rehabilitating them.
``Some of the kids come out with the mind-set `I'm a super criminal now, I've learned from the best,''' said a 20-year-old being held at Natural Bridge on a sexual battery conviction.
Supporters of the Allen plan say their proposal would solve that problem by weeding out the most ruthless youths, trying them in Circuit Court and locking them in a special prison.
"The violent and chronic offenders should be housed in separate facilities designed to deal with them, rather than mixing all juveniles in the same facility," said Attorney General James Gilmore, who heads Allen's commission.
"Today's shoplifters and egg-throwers cannot learn to change their ways when they're bunking with a murderer."
Under the Gilmore commission's plan, about 2,500 serious offenders would be removed from the juvenile correctional centers within five years and placed in a special prison. The cost of that facility is estimated at $64 million.
But critics say spending money for correctional centers imperils funding for education and treatment programs that might prevent crime.
"Why are we going to build more prisons when we really need to be building more classrooms?'' asked Penelope Rood, who resigned from the Department of Youth and Family Service's board of directors in protest of Allen's agenda.
A double failure?
On Oct. 24, the night before Curtis Claxton walked free, his case came up at a public hearing of the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform.
David Mays, a former Roanoke police officer and executive director of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association, warned that "sources within the system have voiced deep concerns because this person is very anti-social."
Claxton was awaiting sentencing on a rape conviction at the time he killed Morris Newmark in 1989, and he has since been convicted of a sexual offense involving another juvenile within the correctional system.
"You, your mother or your friend could be his next victim," Mays said.
So far, Claxton has stayed out of trouble. Shortly after his release, he said he was looking for a job. He also was planning to enroll in community college. He could not be reached for a follow-up interview this month.
Claxton's release in October was news to Marcie Newmark, the daughter of his victim.
"I don't think he should be allowed to go merrily along his way after watching TV for six years in some juvenile institution," said Newmark, who runs a construction company in Miami.
"The kid was definitely bad news, and he was still allowed to run around and do whatever he wanted," she said. "So the system failed both him and my father."
LENGTH: Long : 207 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. File/1990. Curtis Claxton has stayed out of troubleby CNBsince he was released. He said he planned to enroll in community
college. color. 2. DON PETERSEN/Staff. ``I was a check-forger and a
shoplifter, and they put me in the killer cottage,'' says Juliana
Hudson, 17, who recently left Discovery House, a halfway house for
troubled youths. Graphic: Chart by staff: Time served.