Campaign Fights to Treat Children Committing Crimes as Children
(Raise the Age Forum at West Harlem Polo Grounds Community Center by Yuval Sheer)
Hernan Carvente will never forget May 18, 2008.
Under orders from his South Side 13 gang in Queens, he shot a rival gang member three times. It was two days before Carvente’s 16th birthday.
A bullet punctured the victim’s right lung and Carvente was charged and convicted of second-degree attempted murder.
If Carvente had committed his crime in any of 48 other states, he would not now need to contend with an adult criminal record. He would not have a class B felony conviction limiting his prospects of getting a job, receiving financial aid or qualifying for public housing.
“Because of the severity of my crime I ended up being charged as a juvenile offender which carries the adult stigma of that felony conviction,” said Carvente, who at 14 was already sporting the blue and black colors of South Side 13. The son of an alcoholic and often abusive father, Carvente said he took to the gang because they “treated him like family.”
New York regards 13-, 14- and 15- year-olds who commit violent crimes as “juvenile offenders.” Juvenile offenders, along with 16- and 17-year-olds, fall outside the jurisdiction of family courts and are subject to lifelong criminal records. But teenagers who commit less serious crimes are tried through family courts; they don’t acquire permanent records.
Hernan Carvente (Photo by Hernan Carvente)
Two days shy of turning 16, Carvente narrowly missed being among the 3,854 teenagers convicted in New York State that year who would serve their sentences in adult prisons, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. New York and North Carolina are the only states that set the age of criminal responsibility at 16.
A growing campaign to change the law, called “Raise the Age,” is pushing to set criminal responsibility in New York at 18. The campaign — involving parents, former inmates, civil rights leaders and legal experts — argues that research shows these teenagers have more in common with those designated juveniles than with adults, because their brains are not fully formed and they fail to grasp the consequences of their actions.
“New York is an outlier,” said Elizabeth Powers of the Children’s Defense Fund. “Putting youth in the adult system doesn’t benefit public safety.” Powers said New York needs to get “in line with the rest of the country.”
The growing consensus, built around data, is that “children are different. As every parent knows, they are bad at estimating risk and worse at controlling impulse,” says the 2010 report of the New York State Juvenile Justice Advisory Group. “This is not an excuse but an opportunity to shape and change behavior in an enduring way that ensures these same children do not graduate to the adult system.”
Among the groups pushing for juvenile justice reform in the state is the New York Center for Juvenile Justice, headed by a retired judge, Michael Corriero, and urging that “children are judged as children.”
The center has toured the city, organizing a series of Raise the Age community forums in schools and neighborhoods, including East Harlem last year. This year’s Harlem Raise the Age Community Forum, organized with The Children’s Village, took place at West Harlem’s Polo Grounds Community Center.
“By treating children as adults we are missing opportunities to intervene,” says Yuval Sheer, deputy director of the New York Center for Juvenile Justice. The rehabilitative services provided at juvenile centers “prevent children from going back to prison; in the long run we will be able to save money.”
In January 2010, Connecticut added 16-year-olds to the juvenile system. The Connecticut Judicial Branch said raising the age of criminal responsibility to 17 increased juvenile caseloads far less than expected, from a 40 percent projected rise to an actual increase of 22 percent. As a result, the state spent nearly $12 million less in fiscal 2010 and 2011 than it had budgeted, statistics from the Connecticut General Assembly’s Office of Fiscal Analysis show.
The recidivism rate for teenagers who serve time in adult prisons in New York is significantly higher than those who remain in the juvenile system, says research from the Vera Institute of Justice, an independent nonprofit organization. According to its analysis of programs for court-involved youth in New York State, the recidivism rate drops even more when juveniles are placed in community-based centers. Yet New York spends $210,000 a year to incarcerate a youth, and less than $50,000 on community-based alternatives.
New York’s Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman has proposed a bill establishing special courts so that 16 and 17 year olds arrested for non-violent crimes can enter a probation adjustment program.
“It is the first time that someone of that stature” has enlisted in the effort to change how New York treats children who commit crime, said Sheer. “It really created a platform for people to discuss the issue.” The bill, A03668, however, faces opposition from Republicans in the state senate.
Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, president of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, believes cases should be judged case-by-case. The organization’s members are families of murder victims killed by offenders under 18.
“Every so often there might be a serial killer or psychopath,” she said. In 1990, a 16-year-old shot and killed Bishop-Jenkins’s pregnant 25-year-old sister and her brother-in-law in their home in Winnetka, Illinois. Investigations showed that the teenager had been planning the crime for weeks.
A one-drug-fits-all approach may fail to consider teens who demonstrate serious psychopathic tendencies, Bishop-Jenkins said. She admits they represent a small percentage of young criminals, but adds, “every so often you get this really dangerous serial killer in the making.”
But Columbia Law Prof. Jeffrey Fagan, an extensive researcher on juvenile justice and crime, says the low age of criminal responsibility in New York “compromises public safety instead of ensuring it.” The Raise the Age campaign has become more serious over the last three years, he said.
Carvente, currently a criminal justice major at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is unhappy that Lippman’s bill completely excludes violent offenders.
One of the speakers at The Children’s Village forum in Harlem, he is 21 now but seems older. Abandoning the shaved heads of South Side 13, he has slicked-back hair and wears glasses. A tiny dent on his left earlobe indicates a one-time piercing – a vestige of a life he struggles to leave behind.
“It was hard to get a job,” says Carvente, now on parole after four years at the Brookwood Secure Center in Claverack, Columbia County. He has a four-year old daughter to care for. “How are you supposed to get integrated back into society? Really?”
For now he’s an intern at the Vera Institute of Justice, which works on juvenile justice reform. Organizations like these have fewer prejudices against former offenders, he said.
The college program in Brookwood, Carvente added, helped him escape “the revolving door of the criminal justice system.”
Carvente says people like him try to persist. “We tell ourselves the conviction is not going to stop us from our dreams. It is not going to stop us from what we want to do with our lives.” But in truth, he said, his record creates, “roadblock after roadblock.”
(This article was first published in The Uptowner)
