Cover Story: Lost boys

Eight years ago, Georgia lawmakers decided that children of a certain age who commit one of seven crimes are no longer children. Instead, they would be handed to the adult court system; a juvenile judge would have no say. If convicted, they would have to serve at least 10 years alongside adult murderers, rapists and molesters. Unlike the adults, they would never become eligible for parole. All has gone according to plan. That’s exactly what many feared.

When police arrested 13-year-old Yuvain Watson for murder, he stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed close to 100 pounds. He had been born to a cocaine-addled mother who gave him away to his aunt. He was yanked from that home when police discovered baggies upon baggies of crack in the basement. Yet Yuvain never made much trouble. The extent of his rap sheet, covering the nine years he subsequently spent in state care, was a single fight in the first grade. Psychologist Lanni Pryor-Brown, who had been meeting with Yuvain on and off since he was 9, determined that despite his hard luck childhood, he bore few scars of abandonment.

Pearl Robinson, Yuvain’s foster mother of eight years, offered her Lithonia home to at least 21 foster children up until 2001. Yuvain was her favorite. The babyish trombone player with espresso-shaded skin managed “to get some of the early nurturing he needed, despite his chaotic environment,” Robinson said in documents later filed in DeKalb County Superior Court. She wanted to adopt the boy.

On the afternoon of May 19, 2001, at the house on Woodyhill Drive, Robinson told the oldest of her four foster children to keep an eye on things for a minute. She ran out to Kroger — violating a state rule never to leave the children unattended. Police and state social workers would place the time she left the house at around 4:15 p.m.

Fifteen minutes later, the 15-year-old foster girl called Robinson’s cell phone; what she said prompted Robinson to turn her Lincoln Navigator around and race home.

She found the children in the kitchen. The baby, 20-month-old Kentoya, was lying unconscious on the floor. The 15-year-old had called 911 and was trying to give CPR. An ambulance took Kentoya to Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital in Atlanta. She died a few hours later, from blunt force trauma to the head.

A DeKalb police detective showed up at Robinson’s a few hours later. He wanted to question the children — especially Yuvain, who was the last one to be alone with Kentoya.

It’s unclear what Yuvain told the detective, but according to court documents his story changed in subsequent interviews.

He later said he didn’t explain everything at first because he was afraid, according to a pre-sentencing report filed with the court. “People started asking questions,” he said, “hard questions, with big words I didn’t understand.”

He said that after Robinson left for Kroger, Kentoya started crying. It was her naptime. He said he was going to put her to sleep in his room but that the crying wouldn’t stop. So he held the baby by the waist and started spinning in circles to “make Kentoya smile.” He said she started to laugh. Then her head struck the side of the bunk bed. It hit “pretty hard,” was how he told it.

Four days after Kentoya died, police charged Yuvain with her murder.

What might Yuvain have been thinking when he started swinging the little girl around his room — or worse, pushed her, hit her or intentionally slammed her head into the bedpost? Was he out to hurt her? To kill? This seventh-grader for whom there is no record of serious violence — was he, with his child’s mind, intending to take another child’s life?

And for that, did he grow in a single day into an adult?

In Georgia, the answer to the last question is a firm yes.

State legislators voted in 1994 to require that children between the ages of 13 and 16 be sent to adult court if they commit what legislators dubbed “the seven deadly sins” — murder, voluntary manslaughter, rape, aggravated sodomy, aggravated child molestation or armed robbery. If convicted, they must serve a minimum of 10 years in adult prison.

Since the law’s inception, 3,700 teens have been charged as adults. Some of them were sent down to juvenile court due to “extraordinary cause.” Others pleaded guilty to lesser charges or await trial. About a tenth sit in adult prison, where, unlike juvenile detention centers, there’s not even a token attempt at rehabilitation.

Trey Ross is among them. When he was 15, Ross and his two 19-year-old friends were arrested for snatching a woman’s purse at gunpoint. Ross, who claimed he did not wield the gun, received a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery. Immanuel Williams is also in prison for a crime he committed at 15. He shot a 39-year-old man in what he claimed was self-defense. He’s serving 12 years for voluntary manslaughter. Then there’s 15-year-old Jonathan Miller, who punched a 13-year-old in the back of the head after the two boys agreed to an after-school duel. The punch proved fatal. Miller’s serving life.

When similar laws were passed nationwide in the 1990s, critics worried that sending children to adult prisons would train them to be career criminals. Studies now show those concerns have merit. In New York and Florida — the two states that lead the pack for sentencing juveniles as adults — researchers have shown that child convicts emerging from prison are more likely to commit another violent crime than children similarly charged but housed in a juvenile facility.

“These laws usually have no impact,” says Bob Schwartz, director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. “They don’t really capture the serious repeat offender who is likely to be responsible for large numbers of crimes. They capture people who are charged with high-profile crimes, who are not always going to be repeat offenders and whom the juvenile system could deal with quite easily.”

Miller, who threw the fateful punch that killed 13-year-old Josh Belluardo, had his conviction upheld in October by the state Supreme Court. But Justice Robert Benham, who voted with the majority, echoed the concern of the draconian law’s critics.

“I cannot help but believe that as we treat more and more children as adults and impose harsher and harsher punishment,” Benham wrote in the court’s decision, “the day will soon come when we look back on these cases as representing a regrettable era in our criminal justice system.”


br>?Bad apples and Superpredators
In 1989, a woman went for a jog in New York’s Central Park and woke up weeks later, unaware that she had been raped and beaten nearly to death. She could not recall who attacked her. New York City police, however, had already arrested half a dozen suspects, all of them under 18.

The highly publicized case of the Central Park jogger raised the issue of juvenile crime to new heights. It also spawned a catchphrase, popularized by John DiIulio Jr., who at the time taught at Princeton. DiIulio theorized that society was breeding a new rank of children, a “rising wave of superpredators.” These superpredators, DiIulio reasoned, had no moral conscience. In a 1995 commentary printed in the Chicago Tribune, he blamed the rising wave on “moral poverty” — a condition specific to inner-city children who live in homes “where unconditional love is nowhere but unmerciful abuse is common.”

In the years following the Central Park attack, Americans saw a sudden spike in the number of children who killed and maimed. State legislatures across the country rushed to pass bills with the aim to punish children with sentences formerly reserved for adults. In Georgia, where juvenile crimes jumped from 1,900 in 1990 to 3,000 in 1993, legislators introduced Senate Bill 440. The bill passed the Senate 54-0; it became law in 1994.

Since the early 1990s, similar legislation has been passed in 46 other states.

The Central Park case helped push many of the bills through what otherwise might have been reluctant legislatures. The gang of rapists had become poster children for superpredator-dom — which would have been fine, except that earlier this year a man by the name of Matias Reyes confessed to being the sole culprit in the Central Park attack. Reyes, imprisoned for a series of rapes, said he came forward after a decade of silence because he’d found God. His DNA matched samples from semen taken from the jogger. There was no DNA evidence linking any of the six juveniles to the crime.

Lynn Grindall, head of the Southern Juvenile Defender Center at Emory University, says that the Central Park case aside, the juvenile crimes that garner the most attention — from the trench coat-clad killers in Columbine to the murderous King brothers in Pensacola — usually turn out to be anomalies. As a result, anomalies rather than real trends have shaped government policies — and have punished a broad group of children in ways many of them didn’t deserve.

“I think everyone’s missing the true story, which is that violence which has been reported doesn’t exist,” Grindall says. “To take an individual instance that’s statistically insignificant and apply it to children as a whole — it goes against democracy and jurisprudence.”

U.S. Sen. Zell Miller, who pushed SB 440 through Georgia’s legislature when he was governor, credits the law with taking the worst juveniles out of the youth detention centers. He also has claimed the law lowered juvenile crime rates. But reasons to question those assertions keep cropping up.

Between 1987 and 1993, juvenile crime rates across the nation did spike. Then they dropped. Grindall, Schwartz and other child-rights advocates claim tough laws had nothing to do with curbing crime. That six-year jump in crimes had only to do with the crack epidemic and the growing availability of guns. When those factors subsided, the juvenile crime rate started subsiding too — and returned to the pre-1987 numbers.

“Almost all of those bills post-dated the start of the decline in juvenile crime,” Schwartz says.

As for SB 440’s performance, most of the children prosecuted under the law have not been rapists or murderers or child molesters, according to statistics compiled by the Georgia Indigent Defense Council. More than half were charged with a less violent offense: armed robbery. The children arrested also happen to be — about 75 percent of the time — black, this in a state where blacks comprise 35 percent of that age group’s population.

Prosecutors argue that the numbers reflect an unfortunate reality; blacks of that age are committing a disproportionate percentage of crimes. But one thing can’t be disputed: Black children are shown less lenience by the courts.

Superior Court judges have sent white children’s cases down to juvenile court 46 percent of the time, sparing them an adult prison sentence. Compare that with black children, 25 percent of whose cases have been sent down to juvenile court.

What’s most disturbing about SB 440, however, is the minimum sentence it carries. Ten years. That’s the very least. There’s no chance of parole. Adults who commit the same crime can get parole. Children can’t.

The origin and the aftermath of SB 440 are cause for wonder. What has the law truly achieved? Is it the children who are the superpredators? Or is the law preying on them?


br>?Crime of Passage
When a state such as Georgia leaves no room for interpretation or alternatives for juvenile criminals, it ignores the slippery continuum of maturity between the ages of 13 and 16. There are consequences.

“There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all,’ even when we are talking about youngsters who have committed the very same offense,” Temple University professor Laurence Steinberg told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1999.

Steinberg heads the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. The foundation is trying to find out if children have the mental capacity to stand trial in adult court and if incarceration in adult prison does anything to deter future crime. The findings could shape the government’s future policy on juvenile justice.

Children, because they are children, deserve the court’s careful scrutiny when it comes to their culpability, Steinberg says. As one famous U.S. Supreme Court decision states, some of our most vulnerable citizens “know the difference between right and wrong ... but, by definition, they have diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses.”

In this case, the justices were describing the mentally retarded. But they just as well could have been discussing children.

When 15-year-old Immannuel Williams fired 10 rounds into 39-year-old Ernest “Psycho” Jones, he may have stepped beyond the boundary of what was reasonable. He also may have felt threatened; the older man had pushed and grabbed the teenager, ripping his necklace from his throat, according to those who testified at Williams’ 2001 murder trial.

Jones had earned his odd moniker. More than 20 police reports, spanning Jones’ two decades of crimes, refer to him as “Psycho.” In 1997, Jones tried to beat a criminal trespass rap by choking the Atlanta cop who came to arrest him at an AutoZone. “This subject is extremely violent and tried to kill a police officer,” the police report states. “He also threatened to kill ... the store owner.”

Did Williams, a high school freshman, do the right thing when he shot Jones, who had been bullying him for weeks? Probably not. Were Williams’ capacities “to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logistical reasoning, to control impulses” diminished? That’s not something the court considered. The jury convicted him of voluntary manslaughter, and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Manis sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

Williams’ mother, A’Sheerah Walker, has rallied to keep her middle boy, one of 10 her children, out of prison. “You just set them there for years and years and years to do nothing but fuss and fight and learn how to be savages,” says Walker, who lost her battle to keep her son away from incarcerated adults. He was transferred this summer from a youth detention center to an adult prison.

In 2000, Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan finished tracking 1,000 juvenile criminals arrested in 1992 in New York and New Jersey. All of them were charged with robbery, burglary or aggravated assault. Their histories were similar. The difference was that in New York they were sent to prison, in New Jersey to a youth facility.

Fagan found that 42 percent of the New York inmates were rearrested for a violent crime within seven years of their release. Thirty percent of the New Jersey children were.

The gap between the re-offenders and reformed grew even larger when Fagan looked at children who, prior to their arrests, had no history of violence. Police rearrested one in three of the New York prison graduates for a violent crime. For the New Jersey youth facility alumni, the number was one in seven.

“Public safety would not be endangered and in fact improved by having the juvenile system intervene,” says the Juvenile Law Center’s Schwartz. Schwartz is working with Fagan and Steinberg on the MacArthur Foundation’s research project. The research is not complete, but Schwartz says that based on preliminary findings, the study will question the prudence of the broad sweep of imprisoning children. “The kids that Georgia began locking up 10 years ago,” he says, “we’re going to pay the price for.”

Georgia must wait until at least 2005 to determine the impact of its decision to send children to adult prison. That’s the year the first wave of children sentenced to the mandatory 10-year sentence will emerge, as fully transformed adults.


br>?The Children of Arrendale
Back in the 1920s, the three-story Greek Revival building tucked in a deserted corner of northeast Georgia operated as a hospital. It hid away the state’s tuberculosis patients. In the 1940s, the hospital was converted to serve soldiers returning from World War II with venereal diseases.

Now, surrounded by less ornate brick barracks and coils of razor wire, the compound has been reserved for a third set of outcasts. Lee Arrendale State Prison — although most call it “Alto” for the tiny town in which it sits — shelters 1,200 convicts. Among them are the children sentenced under SB 440.

Back when SB 440 passed the state Legislature, Georgia’s Department of Corrections decided Alto would be the prison of choice for young inmates. At the time, inmates in their late teens and early 20s already were placed there. The prison was equipped with a 12-room school.

But it was, and remains, a prison for adults, stocked with aggressive men with aggressive libidos. For many of the children passing through Alto’s gates, rape is part of their sentence, according to Vanessa Filley, an investigator with the Southern Center for Human Rights. She has helped amass evidence for a lawsuit recently filed against the prison, alleging that security is insufficient for protecting inmates from each other.

Filley claims that in interviewing dozens of prisoners, she’s glimpsed Alto’s typically unspoken terror. It’s doubtful the staff knows the extent of the abuse of children and other younger inmates, Filley says. Children are supposed to be isolated from the adults and under a guard’s watch at all times. But according to many of the younger inmates’ stories, moments arise when the protection lapses. They get pulled aside on their way to the cafeteria or the school, Filley alleges.

“They’re in their totally formative, not-even-young-adult years,” she says. “They start using sex as a defense. They start using it so they can be safe, to curry favor with the adults.”

Or as Adams puts it, after he explained why he worked to keep Yuvain Watson out of Alto: “It’s fight or fuck.”

Warden Tony Turpin, who came to Alto a year ago from Jackson State Prison, home to death row, says children are not raped at Alto — at least not since he’s been there.

“If you think for one minute that when you’ve got a guy institutionalized for 10 to 12 years, that he’ll try to instigate something, you’re right,” Turpin says, sitting in his wood-paneled office in what used to be the TB hospital. “But as far as putting the juveniles in their hands, I can guarantee you that doesn’t happen.”

Turpin says that of the 1,200 beds at the prison, only 15 are currently occupied by children between the ages of 13 and 16. They stay in the prison’s “A-unit,” in a hallway set aside for the young, with 8-by-6-foot cells and an open shower. A-unit houses adults, too, but they must be designated “Level 1” — inmates with no record of bad behavior.

The 300 other children sent to Alto under SB 440 who have since come of age live in either A-unit, if they’re good, or in the less desirable B, C or D units. They become “adults” at 17. At around age 23, they can apply for transfer to another prison.

Travis Glover, who arrived at Alto three years ago on a murder charge he received at age 15, moved to B-unit shortly after his 17th birthday. “You gotta watch your back at all times,” Glover says of his B-unit digs.

At 5 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2001, Alto guards mistakenly left all 40 cell doors open in one B-unit building — a major prison violation, according to the lawsuit filed by the Southern Center. Five inmates allegedly entered the cell of an inmate named Willie Burns and knocked out four of his teeth with prison-issued deadbolts, the lawsuit states. “After at least 10 minutes, a guard found Mr. Burns,” it says, “lying unconscious in a puddle of his own blood.” Burns, 24, was hospitalized for nine days.

The lawsuit names three other plaintiffs — two 17, one 16 — but does not elaborate on their assaults.

When asked how many fights he’s been in, Glover sighs. “I’ve been in several,” he says. “Some of the guys I know have a homosexual mind, and I tell them to leave the little guys alone,” says Glover, a husky 19-year-old with a baby face marked by a tattooed tear. He’s serving a life sentence.

Of his own first days at Alto, Glover says, “I really felt like I had to protect myself. It has cooled down a whole lot.”

Glover’s desperate for a transfer to a prison down south. But first he has to get out of B-unit, since you’ve got to be a model inmate to earn a transfer. That means no fights. “It would be a better chance of seeing my mom,” he says.

He hasn’t seen or talked to her since he arrived at Alto just before Christmas of 1999. She doesn’t have a phone or, as far as he knows, a place to live in their native Macon. In a two-hour conversation with Glover, separation from his mother is the hardship he speaks of most eloquently. He doesn’t complain about not belonging in Alto. He’s come to accept his sentence.

“It’s never going to replace a good home environment,” warden Turpin says. “It was never supposed to do that.”


br>?Alternatives to Alto
In the end, Yuvain Watson wound up lucky. Out of fear of what might happen if a jury convicted him of murder, his attorney urged him to accept a plea of involuntary manslaughter. Involuntary manslaughter is not listed among Georgia’s seven deadly sins, so Yuvain was spared an automatic transfer to adult prison. He was sentenced to five years at the Regional Youth Detention Center in Eastman.

“Yuvain was a smart little kid,” says Adams, Yuvain’s attorney. “But what the hell does he know about the consequences of pleading guilty or the risks of going to trial? All he kept saying was, ‘So when am I going home?’”

As a former DeKalb County prosecutor, Adams sent a 15-year-old to prison for life in 1998. But he was bothered by a lurking suspicion that the law should allow exceptions, that not every child is cognizant of his or her crime — let alone capable of maneuvering the court system.

“There are not a lot of prosecutors or enough legislators with — pardon the language — enough nuts to stand up and say we can’t do this to our children,” Adams says.

What Georgia really needs is a juvenile system equipped to handle children who commit bad crimes — and an adult system able to handle those who commit the worst, Schwartz says.

“You beef up the juvenile system so it can actually deal with serious offenders, and lots of states do it well,” Schwartz says.

There’s little movement in the state Legislature to go back to the old way of doing things — letting a juvenile judge decide whether each individual child’s case warrants adult treatment. Nor is there any talk of easing the sentencing guidelines of SB 440. That would be admitting a mistake too big for politicians to eat, according to critics of the law.

“Whether you’re a rabid law-and-order advocate or whether you’re a children’s advocate, I think there’s a common ground if you ask the question, ‘What does the job most effectively?’” says state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, who was elected after SB 440 passed. “But legislators are more comfortable talking about easy answers to crime. So it’s going to be difficult for any legislation to either revise or repeal SB 440. That’s just the reality of it.”

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com??