A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump and his confirmed nominee for D.C.'s top prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, have both called for minors as young as 14 to be charged as adults when they're accused of certain crimes in the nation's capital. But some in the juvenile justice field say that approach to youth crime has been tried before and just does not work. Vincent Schiraldi is among them. He's led correction agencies in D.C. and New York, and most recently resigned as secretary of juvenile services in Maryland amid criticism of his leadership at the department. Schiraldi spoke with our colleague, Michel Martin.
VINCENT SCHIRALDI: Washington, D.C.'s, juvenile incarceration rate is about three times the national average. So it's not like D.C. is coddling kids. And it's not like D.C. has an extraordinary amount of crime by juveniles.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
What about the rest of the country? Does the rest of the country have a youth crime problem?
SCHIRALDI: From the year 2000 to the year 2020, juvenile arrest declined by 80% in the country. This happened at the same time as there was a 75% decline in the number of kids being locked up. And they were probably synergistic, right? We locked fewer kids up, we put more kids in programs, so we locked fewer kids up again. So there's probably a virtuous cycle there. Some of that also occurred in Washington, D.C.
Then we have a pandemic. We have Black Lives Matter protests. Both of those things, criminologists believe, probably resulted in an uptick in crime. A lot of police retired. It was hard to hire cops. But also, schools went away. Mentors went away. All of us got emotional during that period of time, so crime went up amongst everybody. It went up amongst juveniles for a few years, and now we're starting to see it curve back down nationally in juvenile crime and in Washington, D.C.
MARTIN: Do you think there's something about when very young people are involved in crime that it just grabs the public's attention?
SCHIRALDI: The credo of your profession is that if a dog bites a man, that's not news, but if a man bites a dog, that's news. In Baltimore, it was a study done recently by the sentencing project. Five percent of the arrests in Baltimore are juveniles. But on the Fox affiliate in Baltimore, 53% of their coverage of crime involved juveniles. And so it is more unusual when a young person, and it should be, commits a violent crime. And so it does get more attention. And I think that unless you've personally been the victim of crime, you know a lot of what you know about crime from the media, often evening news or social media that hypes this stuff up. And that makes people afraid.
That matters. It really matters how people feel because the more people that are engaged in a community, the safer that community is going to be. And again, you have the opportunity to create a virtuous cycle. Part of the problem, the thing that worries me about what President Trump is doing is he's scaring the bejesus out of people in the Washington, D.C., area and anyone who might want to come here.
MARTIN: This notion of trying kids as adults, as I understand it, like, in the '90s, there was another renewed push to try kids as adults. How did that work out?
SCHIRALDI: The research on it finds it extremely negative. Several really high-quality studies were done, and the people who are tried as adults get arrested more frequently and for more violent crimes than the similar kids who are retained in the juvenile system.
MARTIN: Why do you think that is?
SCHIRALDI: I mean, the juvenile system is imperfect. But at least we're trying in the juvenile system to rehabilitate kids. Everybody, for example, in my facilities goes to school all the time. You really don't have to go to school when you're in an adult prison. We had programs, after-school programs, basketball leagues, aftercare. A lot of that stuff really doesn't exist for adults. What we do with young people during that period of time really can set them on the trajectory one way or the other. You put them in adult prisons and you're kind of writing a script for them.
MARTIN: What is a more effective approach to intervening in these negative cycles?
SCHIRALDI: One is most of the violent crime comes at the hands of very few people. And so if you can focus deterrence and services and supports on that 2%, that really can help. But then there are other parts of the system for young people particularly, summer jobs or after-school programs. Most youth crime occurs between 3 o'clock and 7 o'clock. That's when kids are off school and their parents aren't home yet. So couldn't we productively occupy kids during that period of time? What is happening nationally? The president cut hundreds of millions of dollars in crime prevention programs just like this for all around the country.
MARTIN: Vincent Schiraldi has headed juvenile services in Washington, D.C., and Maryland and probation and corrections in New York City. He starts as a visiting fellow with the Pinkerton Foundation in September. Thanks so much for talking with us.
SCHIRALDI: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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