Enough is enough.
D.C. has to start locking up its young thugs and baby stone-cold killers. No more getting arrested and gliding through the cracks in D.C.’s juvenile criminal justice system. The city has to change its laws — now. To keep turning kiddy killers back on the street to prey on us would be an affront to the four who would be alive today if our laws were sane.
Let’s count the fallen:
» Brishell Jones, 16; DaVaughn Boyd, 18, William Jones III, 19 — all shot dead in late March in the South Capital Street massacre by kid killers who should have been behind bars.
» Brian Betts, the D.C. school principal shot dead in his Silver Spring home a week ago; police have arrested two teens who had walked away from D.C.’s youth “rehabilitation” agency.
These slayings are just the latest tragedies brought to us by the D.C. government: from the mayor to the city council to the youth “rehab” agency. For decades, the city has been coddling kid killers.
When news broke that Betts’ alleged killers— Alante Saunders and Sharif “Reef” Lancaster — had absconded from his “rehab” agency, Mayor Adrian Fenty called a press conference. To demand change to his Department of Youth and Rehabilitation Services, perchance?
“The agency is in the midst of reform,” he said, “but its reform is by no means anywhere close to being finished.” Under his watch, the agency had improved “immensely.”
Really? The mayor who brought us “New Beginnings” says this with a straight face? Rather than punish kids for stealing cars or dealing drugs or using guns to rob and assault people, Fenty puts them in a semisecure “campus” from which they often escape.
The juvenile justice system in the nation’s capital is broken, badly. Just as Fenty took over the schools and installed a tough leader named Michelle Rhee, the city needs to blow up the alleged system for handling young criminals. Give us a law and order leader who will make these reforms:
» Anyone of any age charged with violent crimes — such as sexual assault, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery while armed or homicide — gets tried as an adult.
» Prosecutors have the discretion to try anyone over the age of 16 as an adult and seek jail time.
» Records of juveniles accused of violent crimes become public information.
» Juveniles charged and convicted of non-violent crimes — such as stealing cars or selling drugs — go into the juvenile criminal justice rehab system.
Change must come. Either the mayor proposes an overhaul, as he did for the schools, or the city council legislates a new way of handling young thugs.
What will it take? Will an escapee have to shoot up Wisconsin Avenue before Judiciary Committee Chairman Phil Mendelson wakes up? Will Capitol Hill citizens become even more terrorized before Tommy Wells, who oversees DYRS, stiffens the rules? Will Fenty be man enough to protect “people of the District of Columbia” he answers to?
Answers coming in Friday’s column.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
