As five young men stand trial in D.C. Superior Court for a March 2010 shooting spree on South Capitol Street that left five people dead and more than a dozen wounded, District residents are once again reminded of the city’s failure to keep violent juvenile delinquents off the streets.
Just days after the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services declined to put a hold on the imminent release of a 19-year-old ward with a long juvenile record, Sanquan “Bootsie” Carter allegedly killed his boyhood friend in the first crime of a daisy chain of violence.
Police say the bloody rampage was triggered when Carter could not find a cheap rhinestone-encrusted bracelet that disappeared at a party.
This senseless bloodletting should never have happened. Carter had already done jail time for several adult-level convictions and was at high risk for future criminal activity.
University of Pennsylvania statistician Richard Berk, whose crime prediction software is currently in use in Baltimore and Philadelphia and is finally being implemented in D.C., found that the earlier the age at which a crime is first committed, the greater the risk of nonsexual violent recidivism. Most DYRS wards fall into this category.
Using a massive database of more than 60,000 criminal histories going back five decades, Berk’s software has a better record of predicting repeat offenses than the “experts” who decide whether it’s safe to release criminals back into the community.
Neither a prisoner’s “emotional health” nor the “clinical judgment” of criminal justice experts’ are as accurate a predictor of future criminal behavior as the age at which a person started committing crimes. So Carter’s juvenile incarcerations placed him squarely in the small subset of criminals most likely to re-offend.
An internal attorney general’s report released last year harshly criticized DYRS for “favor[ing] release to the community without regard to the youth’s needs, prior criminal acts or potential for re-offending.”
This explains why DYRS wards were either perpetrators or victims in 20 percent of all D.C. homicides, according to a 2010 investigation by The Washington Times.
In January, the Times reported that 19 DYRS wards categorized as having a “medium” to “high” risk of re-offending had been found guilty of homicide during the past five years, and 34 wards were murder victims.
Yet hundreds of juvenile delinquents with similar high-risk profiles remain on the streets. DYRS’ excuse: not enough secure facilities to hold them, and fear that confinement will further jeopardize their chances of rehabilitation.
But confinement doesn’t have to mean incarceration. Other cities successfully use electronic GPS monitoring devices to restrict prisoners to pre-defined areas, such as home, work or school.
Police are immediately alerted if they stray out of bounds. Since every juvenile in DYRS custody has already broken the law at an early age, public safety demands 24/7 adult supervision.
A bill submitted by Councilman David Catania, D-at large, would identify troubled kids at an earlier age and focus on truancy as a way to trigger intervention. That’s a start, but doesn’t get to the root of the problem: single-parent homes and academic failure.
Statistics on juveniles sentenced to life without parole collected by the District-based Sentencing Project found that 84 percent had been suspended or expelled from school; 60 percent came from single-parent homes, where they were twice as likely to be physically or sexually abused as children living with both natural parents.
Policies to prevent juvenile delinquency should therefore focus on supporting two-parent families and keeping troubled children in school.
Unfortunately, neither is a top priority in a city where more than half of all children live in single-parent households and nearly half attend failing public schools, creating the perfect conditions for juvenile delinquency to flourish.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
