As if recalling a dream or a movie, he remembers climbing in the van, which he claims was already running, and stopping to purchase $5 worth of gas. At that point, he says, he reconsidered his crime. "The Lord told me to put it back, but I didn't listen."
Climbing back into the van and speeding along at 100 mph, Carson recalls with excitement the flickering police lights behind him. "I was like, 'Oh man, not again.' I knew I shouldn't have done that," Carson says.
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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On TYC's Web site (tyc.state.tx.us), officials boast that the percentage of youths who are rearrested for a violent crime within a year of release has dropped from 14.2 percent in 1996 to 7.6 percent in 2000.
But other researchers say it's more important to look at who's been arrested within three years of release. Delving further into the TYC Web page reveals that in 1996, 54.3 percent of the TYC graduates were jailed for an offense within three years of their release. In 2000, that rate had fallen a few points, to 50.7 percent. And the rearrest rate for all offenders--not just violent youths--after one year has actually risen slightly, from 52.6 percent in 1996 to 53.7 percent in 2000.
Dallas County Juvenile Department officials are looking at the numbers and beginning to ask if there might be a better way to keep kids from committing further crimes. One approach being considered at the county level keeps nonviolent offenders at home and intensively counsels the children and their families. In the relatively rare instances in which it has been tried in Texas in the past five years, early intervention has shown promise.
In Tarrant County, juvenile department authorities rejected $3.7 million from the state five years ago for construction of county boot camps, opting instead to set up a nonresidential program that offers counseling, 24-hour crisis intervention and parenting, anger-management and problem-solving classes. Only 25 percent of the kids participating in the program have subsequent contact with the juvenile court. Intervening early and counseling kids and their families are the underlying principles to the programs juvenile justice research has spotlighted as effective and cost-saving. Since the early '90s, juvenile justice officials in Memphis, Tennessee, have implemented a practice given the clumsy moniker "Multisystemic Therapy" that amounts to baby-sitting a juvenile delinquent's family.
Now adopted throughout Tennessee because of its success in lowering recidivism rates, the program dispatches trained mental health counselors to work with troubled teens in their homes every day for months at a time. It's more expensive and staff-intensive than some of the other intervention efforts, but at less than $70 per day per kid, still cheaper than residential treatment, which ranges from $70 to $120 a day.
Dallas County has contracted with Intercept, a nonprofit company that runs the Tennessee program, to work with some 45 delinquents and their families in the next four to six months in Dallas. Sixteen kids who committed crimes as serious as car theft have gone through a pilot program in the past six months at $60 a day per kid. (A stay at a Dallas County boot camp costs $10 a day more per kid.)
Jay Pruett, the regional director for Intercept, says he expects a slightly higher recidivism rate in Texas because it is accepting only children who have been recommended because of delinquency. In Tennessee, the program also handles cases of child abuse and neglect, calculating the "recidivism" rate based on the number of families that need further help. Daniel, the 13-year-old nephew of Nicky and Carolyn Jordan, graduated from the Intercept program in Tennessee. Before he started it last November, while he was living with his mom, Daniel was caught several times for vandalizing and breaking and entering.
"I was stealing things," recalls Daniel. "I goes into people's home and take fishing poles and lawn mowers and once a talking [electronic] fish."
His aunt and uncle, who both work for the state's prisons, had agreed to take temporary custody of Daniel, but they were reluctant to have the intrusion of an Intercept counselor. "When we got into this, we thought we could handle it ourselves. I was kind of uncomfortable with the idea of them coming in. But they have showed us things that we wouldn't have recognized on our own," says Nicky Jordan, who works as a gang leader at a boot camp for 18- to 35-year-olds and has raised two children of his own. "They suggested we make a daily schedule, setting up when he would brush his teeth and get dressed and what chores he should do when he gets home."
Since adopting the tactics the counselor recommended, Daniel's relatives have seen tremendous progress; his grades are in the high 90s, and he's midfielder on his soccer team. "We're starting to see the fruits of our labor. I believe that a failure would have occurred here without them," Jordan says. "There were days when we were ready to give up."
While more effective at stopping kids from recommitting crimes, home care doesn't impress many of the reformers, because they don't think it's real punishment. "For so many years we had people who wanted to coddle these kids...Only recently when kids have started to be held accountable have we seen crime go down," says Gaither when he hears about the Intercept program.
