But for researchers like the American Youth Policy Forum's Mendel, the fact that a youth stays at home away from other troublemakers is exactly the point: minimizing youths' interaction with delinquent peers. "Roughly two-thirds of all dollars now spent on juvenile justice go to housing delinquent youths in institutional settings outside their family homes...The majority of the youths removed from their homes are not violent or chronic felony offenders. For far less money juvenile justice innovators have demonstrated that we can supervise these young offenders in the community, keep most of them crime-free and reduce the likelihood that they will offend again in the future," Mendel writes.
Made to Pay
Mark Graham
Kendrick Carson, who committed armed robbery and attempted rape at 13, spent most of his teens locked up by the Texas Youth Commission. Four months after being paroled, he was arrested for stealing a van.
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Carson's attempted rape victim, sobbing on the witness stand, showed a remarkable degree of concern for Carson. "I would like for Kendrick to be in a place where he can get counseling and be helped so that his life or these series of events that he's started be stopped," she said. "I don't want him to face a life like this, and I want him to be somewhere where he can be helped and not terrorize anyone else, but I very much want Kendrick to be helped."
Would Carson have been stopped from recommitting a crime if he had been helped at home?
Judge Gaither emphatically says no. "There's nothing anybody could have done with him. He must be a sociopath," he says when he recalls the facts of Carson's case and his most recent arrest.
Until he was arrested, Carson had never done anything to prompt authorities to throw him or his family into counseling.
At school, he earned B's and C's, and an IQ test at the juvenile facility gave him a score of 106, above average. The mother in Carson's home was not his natural mother. His birth mother was a drug addict, the father told juvenile authorities.
Several years before, Carson's father said, he had let Carson and his twin sister visit their mother in South Dallas. They had called within a few days to come home, appalled by the poverty.
Carson told a Dallas County juvenile department psychologist that his biological mother had never married his father but that they had lived together until he was 4. When his father left his mother, he took the twins and a year later married their stepmother. He said his father used to have an alcohol problem and would come home drunk and give him whippings with a belt or a stick, but he had stopped drinking when Carson was 9 or 10 and "turned his life around."
When Carson first left TYC, he entered a halfway house in Houston for six months and then an assisted living program in the same city. Kenneth Madison, a TYC official who monitors the assisted living program, would not talk specifically about Carson's case. But he said the juveniles in the program--which costs taxpayers $42 a day--live in subsidized apartments. They are required to work or prove they're looking for work. "The majority of them don't go home because their parents don't want them," Madison says. "We really don't know of any alternative for them." Twice daily, they are required to report to their supervisor, and they attend weekly therapy sessions.
Linda Perkins, the woman victimized by the boy's first break-in, remains friends with Carson's father. She learned from him that Carson was working at a fast-food restaurant and visited him, delivering him a package from his father and offering to drive him home from work. In her car, she says, "Kendrick was apologetic and remorseful."
"I hope you're not mad at me," Carson, now 18, told her. "I'm big now. I've grown up."
The woman was affected by what appeared to be Carson's new-found maturity. "He really seemed like he had learned something at TYC," Perkins says.
A few weeks later, Carson got arrested for auto theft.
The "devil was very busy" again, but this time Carson's probably on his way to the state pen.
