Turning Troubled Children Into Public Enemies No. 1

It’s a good thing California cares deeply about its children. Otherwise some people might wonder about the governor’s new appointment to the California Youth Authority. The new CYA head, Jerry Harper, is well-liked and hard-working, but he also oversaw county jails during a period of the most sickening inmate abuses in recent memory.

“Medieval” was, I believe, the term used by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1997, when it issued a report on the treatment of the burgeoning ranks of voiceless, mentally ill inmates on the watch of the late Sheriff Sherman Block and Harper, his then-right-hand man. The situation, of course, got addressed after the feds pressed it, and, to be fair, Harper also oversaw the reform effort. Still, if this weren’t a state that cares deeply about children, some people might wonder about the implications here for voiceless kids.

This may not be the worst moment in modern history to be a troubled kid in California, but it’s hard to remember a time of more openly careless cruelty toward them. Putting the children’s jails in the hands of someone who let the adult jails fall to ruin, is only this week’s piece of the picture. From zero tolerance to youth gang blacklists to Proposition 21, kiddie crackdowns have become the official state fetish of the millennium.

No infraction seems too minor for enforcement. And no amount of accountability is too much to shift from adults onto kids. I know an honor student whose teacher is threatening a slander suit because she thinks he’s spread rumors about her competence. Good thing the teacher is someone who cares deeply about children. Otherwise some people might wonder when children became acceptable targets for grown-up litigants.

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Take the matter of youth gangs, a matter soon to be close to Jerry Harper’s heart. The recently passed Proposition 21 will crack down on them--again--in ways that are fraught with unintended consequence.

For example, under Proposition 21, authorities now can not only impose adult-style punishments for juvenile gang crime, but can wiretap “suspected” gang members’ homes, even if those “suspects” are only kids. Juveniles who are convicted of crimes and who’ve been tagged as gang members will also have to register with the local police, like sex offenders and arsonists. This would be one thing if being a homeboy were like being running buddies with Tony Soprano. But Cheryl Maxson, a USC criminologist and nationally known expert on gang crime, says studies have shown that the majority of gang members stop claiming membership within a year.

Then there’s the small matter of how you actually define “gang member” for the purposes of this adult-style suppression. One of the more interesting debates in law enforcement right now is taking place on the advisory committee of the state’s gang database, known as CAL/GANG. The database, which recently made news because a quarter of the 250,000 names on it turned out to have been input by the LAPD’s discredited CRASH units, has no consistent criteria for determining who belongs on it and who does not.

According to Capt. Gil Jurado of the sheriff’s gang enforcement unit, the advisory committee is hammering out a single statewide set of criteria, but is hung up on one of those kiddie-crackdown-type details: Should the database include only criminals who’ve broken the law in the service of a gang? Or should it include nonviolent youngsters who might just do graffiti now, but who might also turn out to be violent, maybe, someday, on the premise that it’s never too soon to start cracking down?

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This matter of the civil liberties of children would be merely academic were the consequences not so shamefully profound. Contrary to the Proposition 21 rhetoric, kids today aren’t some new breed of lethal delinquents. Kids are kids, same as ever--exactly like us, only younger--and even in this gun-happy era, juvenile crime is down.

But the kiddie-crackdown mind-set has the power now to hurt children forever. We are turning good kids into cynics and troubled ones into career criminals. Here’s hoping the new children’s warden will demand redemption for his voiceless charges, that he cares more deeply about children than do the grown-ups he’ll answer to.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.