Opinion: Help for young offenders

Pinellas' Juvenile Welfare Board deserves praise for working to prevent the arrest of children between 5 and 11 years old. Spurred on by Times reporter Curtis Krueger's December series, "Under 12/Under Arrest," the JWB will spend around $200,000 collaborating with three local mental health agencies and schools to identify disruptive children and offer home visits and therapy for them and their families.

Admittedly, some of these children have committed violent and harmful offenses and should be punished with temporary juvenile detention. That said, counseling for kids and help for parents are the right responses to school and community discipline problems such as temper tantrums and petty theft. Behavior that previously might have been the stuff of Dennis the Menace cartoons has increasingly been criminalized, resulting in the arrest of 413 Pinellas children last year -- some as young as 6. These grade-schoolers are sometimes handcuffed, shackled and carted off for stays in juvenile detention -- the equivalent of kiddie jail. There, elementary school offenders often are held alongside teenagers accused of much more serious crimes and mature enough to exert more bad influences on impressionable and already troubled minds. As if these events weren't traumatic enough, kids could walk away from such experiences with a record of felony charges.

Without programs like the JWB's to step into the breach, it is easy to see how overwhelmed parents and school officials could reach for the extreme option of involving law enforcement. When school officials have exhausted the available discipline, harried parents are often told that releasing children into the juvenile justice system is the only way kids will receive any help. The problem is that help fails to materialize, since even the juvenile justice system is ill-equipped to handle such young children. Failing our children this way not only highlights the dire need for juvenile prevention and mental health intervention services, but exposes a class disparity wherein parents who could buy their kids private counseling might avoid arrest altogether. Now mental health and medical services will come to families who otherwise might have lacked the resources to get them. But programs like Pinellas' are still much too rare.

The escalating trend of arresting younger and younger children lies at the beginning of a continuum that ends with juveniles tried and sentenced as adults. Child advocates statewide should be looking for creative ideas like Pinellas' house call plan to help the 4,574 under-12 offenders arrested last year -- before another child's youthful misbehavior escalates into irreversible tragedy.

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright