Prototype Issue
The Juvenile Injustice System
By Dani Katz
(page 1 of 2)A Catholic chaplain lays bare the shameful, racist and counterproductive ways kids are treated in LA's courts, jails and probation system.
Javier Stauring is the co-director of the bureaucratic-sounding Office of Restorative Justice at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He is also a chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall. The title belies the extraordinary work he does. Throughout criminal and juvenile justice reform circles, Stauring has earned a reputation as one of the fiercest fighters and most cogent critics of the enforced plight of the youthful poor in LA.
Are you a priest? I’m a lay-chaplain. I’m married, with kids.
And what does your organization do? We do direct ministry with the incarcerated, so we refer to it as a ministry of presence. In my case, with the juveniles, we accompany the kids during the difficult times of incarceration. We also have a victims ministry that responds to the needs of victims of crime. We have a post-release office for people coming out of prison. We have Families of the Incarcerated. We try to respond to the needs of all of the different populations that are affected by crime. Our direct ministry with the incarcerated is threefold: It’s direct ministry, it’s education and it’s advocacy. We also try to get involved in systemic reform. We go out and give talks. Not only our ministry, but our system as a whole.
How did you get involved with this work? I started as a volunteer about 17 years ago. My mom started volunteering at Juvenile Hall before I did, through answering a call from her church. About a year after she started, I decided to check it out. My two brothers and three sisters all volunteered. Now I’m a chaplain there and I oversee the chaplains at all the other Juvenile Detention Centers.
How many are there? There’s three juvenile halls and somewhere around 17 probation camps, and there are state-run facilities as well. The juvenile halls and probation camps are county facilities, and then the California Youth Authority is the state-run juvenile system. I deal primarily with Los Angeles County.
Tell me about the LA County facilities. In LA County there are about 4,000 kids in the juvenile halls and camps, but that doesn’t count all the placements where a judge can also sentence a kid to a group home or to some privately run facilities. We can get kids as young as 8, up until 18. There are kids that come in for one night and are picked up the next day. There are kids that at 14 enter the system and will never come out. At 14 they can receive a sentence of life without parole, here in California. They come into the system, eventually transfer into the adult system, and they will never get out.
Why are more young women being incarcerated now? Well, I’m not quite sure. I’ve heard different things. Like there might be some kind of a paternalistic approach. I don’t know this to be a fact, but I’ve heard they do tend to keep girls over lesser offenses than boys, either to protect them from getting involved in something more serious or, “Oh, she’s a girl, I can teach you a lesson for her own good” type of thing. “I’ll keep her in Juvenile Hall.”
What I do know is that the justice system was created with males in mind. Just recently, in the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about how we need gender-specific programs to deal with the growing female population, but I don’t know that these programs really look at the unique root causes of why so many girls end up detained. It’s so very, very common to hear the stories of sexual abuse, to hear the stories of abuse by the boyfriend. To hear that the boyfriend committed the crime and the girlfriend was there along with them, so she ends up being arrested and facing a sentence as lengthy as the boyfriend gets.
I’ve read that California has more incarcerated youth than any other state. Is this accurate? I believe so. I know that we incarcerate more per capita, and I think in the world, not just the U.S.
To what do you attribute this? Are more kids in California committing crimes? Are the courts drunk with power? A lot of kids that end up being detained, shouldn’t be detained. The kids that should be are those that pose a threat in the community. One criterion they use at Juvenile Hall is if they don’t believe a kid is going to show up at court. There are a lot of other things you can do to make sure they show up instead of locking them up.
Like what? There’s a program in San Francisco that uses phone calls, visiting the home and other logical stuff to make sure a kid will show up when he’s supposed to. Also, the criteria that is used to determine whether or not a kid poses a threat to the community is very inconsistent. Kids down here would be detained a lot quicker than kids up north. Just because they think you’re a gang member doesn’t mean you’re out there hurting people.
Pretty bleak. What’s behind it? When you spend so much money at the end and not enough at the front, that’s what’s going to happen. In California right now we spend $6 billion on the prison industrial complex. We spend more on prisons than we do on higher education. That’s money that could have gone to after-school programs, could have gone to prevention programs. All of these things together just create the perfect storm. From the decision being made at the door of the Juvenile Hall as to who stays and who gets to fight their case from home to the more societal approaches to kids, all contribute to our high incarceration rates. The U.S., I believe, spends 4 cents per dollar on welfare programs. Compare it to other countries that spend maybe 12 cents—there’s a huge disparity. And people really get bent out of shape when you say, “We need to fund these welfare programs,” and they’re like, “Oh no—freebies? We’re giving them freebies?” But we’re willing to spend $1 million to lock up a kid for life. It’s illogical to me.
There’s one thing that I’m sure of. What we’re doing isn’t working and it will lead us to bankruptcy, but we continue to fund it. Right now it’s either you’re hard on crime, or you’re soft on crime and we just need to be smart on crime.
The fact is that our youth of color have been demonized. When you hear the phrase “young, black male,” what do you think the story is about? What goes after that? It’s almost become automatic. That’s how we think. And once a group has been demonized, it doesn’t matter what we do to them. We can pass the tough legislation that makes absolutely no sense, because we believe these monsters are out there.
The argument is it makes it safer for the rest of us even if there are injustices. The approach we have right now that we’re tough on crime does not make our communities safer. It does the opposite, because it’s using all of our resources after the crime has already happened. Yes, you might be able to get that particular person off the streets for a long time at great expense. But if you go into Juvenile Hall right now, into the unit where kids are being held as adults, all these kids more than likely are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. And you ask them, “How many of you have children?” A third of them are gonna raise their hands. So now we have this next generation in that same environment, never knowing their dad, being raised by moms that are maybe 14, 15, 16, that don’t have what a mom needs to raise a kid. Their dad is someone that’s spending his life in prison, so it’s a cycle that just continues. So we don’t help the kids who are struggling.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Father Gregg Boyle. He’s a Jesuit priest who works with a lot of gang members. He was telling me that a 15-year-old girl he’s known for a long time comes into his office and she’s just so happy, she’s ecstatic. “Oh, Father G., Father G., I’m so happy. I’m pregnant.” And Greg asks her, “What are you going to do about your school? How are you going to support the baby?” And she says, “You don’t understand. I wanna have a baby before I die”’ And it’s not because she had a terminal illness; it’s because her reality is that so many kids do not make it. They either end up in prison or dead or hooked on drugs.
You’re saying that the way to go is not to try to fix the prisons, it’s to try to keep the kids out of prison in the first place? I think both. The big issue I feel passionate about, as far as advocacy work goes, is kids being tried as adults. Kids who like I mentioned, at 14, can get life without parole. Those are kids who at 14, 15, 16 are getting sentences of 75 years plus life. I know a few kids who are doing 35 years plus life that never had a gun in their hand; they never hurt anybody.
It’s the California Felony Murder Law. Let’s say that we’re youngsters and I tell you: “Let’s go steal some beers at the 7-Eleven.” So you’re coming with me to commit a felony. You don’t know that I have a gun. We walk in and I end up shooting and killing somebody. You will get the exact same sentence that I get for being there. That is the law. There are five countries in the world that allow for life without parole: the U.S. and four other countries. The other countries have sentenced a handful of kids to life without parole. The U.S. has sentenced 2,200 kids to life without parole.
It’s just three years ago that 19 states were allowed to execute juveniles. We look at other countries and we say, “Man, they cut an arm off for stealing. That is so barbaric.” But I really believe that other countries and other generations are gonna look back at us and say, “What were people thinking? What were they thinking?”
Three years ago I was in Germany. I gave a talk there to people who work in their juvenile justice system. And when I mentioned that in California we give 14-year-olds life without parole, they’re like, “Wait … wait,” and they looked at their interpreter like she had made a mistake. They asked me to repeat it and I said it again and they were like: ‘What does that mean?’ And I said: ‘Well, at the age of 14 you go to prison and you will die in prison. You will never get out. There is never a chance. There is never an opportunity to get out.”’ And they said: “Javier, you need to let the community and let people know what these prisons are doing.” They figured that the prisons were doing it and nobody knew about it. And I said: “No. Actually, society voted for these laws. That’s how we have them in place.” And they said: “Javier, you need to organize the churches.”
Their thought is that no logical, moral society will allow this to happen. At the end of the conference, this lady stood up and she said, “You know we’re in the country that has committed the worst crimes against people. And in a way the United States taught us that you can have a second chance. You can change this around. But you’re not willing to let your children have a second chance.”
How is race affecting this? There’s a lot of research to back this up—at every single step of the justice system there’s overrepresentation of youth of color [African-American and Latino]. From the racial profiling—like, who is a cop gonna stop to begin with? If there’s a bald-headed kid with baggy pants walking down a street in East LA, it’s very, very possible that a patrol car that rolls by is going to pull him over and check his pockets and maybe find something. A kid in Pacific Palisades might be walking with that same little bit of weed in his pocket as the kid in East LA, the cop goes by and he’ll wave at him as he goes by. Who’s kept in juvenile court [of those arrested]? Who goes to adult court and the sentencing for the exact same crime, same scenario? A Latino youth compared to an Anglo youth under the exact same circumstances is eight times more likely to be found guilty for the crime. Central Juvenile Hall is 80% Latino, 15% African American, 5% Anglo/Asian/and other. The most common factor is poverty. It is people that are of low income that end up getting the shaft.
They’re called “correctional” facilities. You mentioned that the intent is to punish. What is the intention of these juvenile facilities? It is in their vision and their mission statement to rehabilitate. My opinion is that there is an [administrative] culture that has too much focus on just controlling them, so there’s not enough focus on rehabilitation.
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