Substituting minibikes for hot cars

Juvenile delinquents have been with us for a long time. Horatio Alger romanticized them in books like Ragged Dick, written nearly one hundred years ago. And Henry James, looking at Boston in 1904, complained of "School-bullies who hustle and pummel some studious little boy." To James, the presence of these street urchins was a sure sign that his beloved Boston was on the way down. Today the school-bullies are still a problem, but the method of dealing with them--at least in Massachusetts--has undergone radical change. Ever since the last Massachusetts training school closed in 1971, the state has been shifting its focus away from imprisonment of youth and towards community-based treatment and "preventive medicine" for potential juvenile offenders.

"We're seeking a middle ground between the polarized views of 'Lock them all up' or 'Let them all go,'" says John A. Calhoun, Commissioner of the Division of Youth Services (DYS), a state-funded agency that is charged with detaining and referring delinquent youth both before and after they have been tried in court. Young and articulate, Calhoun has served as commissioner of DYS for the past 13 months. Within the state bureaucracy, he is strongly liked in some quarters, but disliked in others for his innovative and sometimes controversial views on juvenile delinquency.

"The normative mode for treating kids is to lock them up--institutionalize them in some Oliver Twist-esque barn," Calhoun says, referring to the old training schools. He said that Massachusetts leads the country in the use of the more humane, community-based facilities like half-way houses.

Between 80 and 85 per cent of Massachusetts' juvenile offenders are dealt with on a community level. This is in contrast to the nation-wide average of 17 per cent. And, Calhoun is quick to add, there are six states that rely completely on the use of institutionalization--training schools--with no community facilities whatsoever.

Training schools were originally designed to take youthful offenders out of the city and place them in a more relaxed country setting. However, they offered little or no recreational opportunities and, as a spokesman for Governor Dukakis said, "The most a kid learned there was how to be a better criminal."

In 1971, Jerome Miller, then DYS commissioner, abolished training schools with the idea of instituting the newer and more experimental community-based treatment.

"It was a wild movement," Calhoun said. "A flurry of new programs were launched, mostly on zeal and peanut butter. Now things are beginning to settle down once again. We've come to realize that for 'x' number of kids, we do need secured facilities." "But the pendulum isn't going to whip all the way back to training school days," Calhoun adds quickly.

What Calhoun suggests is the need for some 50 new residential slots in a secured facility for juvenile offenders. Now Massachusetts has about 50 such slots, so that this new addition would bring the total to 100. "The truth is," Alan Raymond, Governor Dukakis' press secretary, says, "that there are not enough secured slots for kids."

Four secured facilities for juveniles now exist in Massachusetts: at Roslindale, Chelmsford, Worcester, and Westfield. When they fill, surplus juvenile delinquents must either be diverted into community-based programs or into an adult penitentiary, depending on the seriousness of their crime.

There are a few youthful offenders, aged 17 or younger and comprising about 1 per cent of Cambridge's juvenile criminals, who are doing time at prisons such as Concord and Charles Street.

"We had one precocious, negative 14-year-old--a big, tough kid," Calhoun recalled. "He locked two nine-year-olds in a refrigerator and killed them, then knifed another kid. He wasn't schizophrenic--just a malicious character with violent tendencies." Calhoun said the boy was now serving a sentence at Concord. "In a couple of quirky cases," Calhoun said, "the kid's definition of manhood is Walpole."

These "quirky cases" in which some heinous crime has been committed comprise only about 5 to 10 per cent of all juvenile offenses in Massachusetts. For these juvenile offenders--deemed dangerous to themselves and to others by the courts--the governor has included a clause in his proposed budget for fiscal year 1978 that would allocate $1.7 million toward the implementation of 50 new secured slots. The state hopes to be able to utilize and expand upon existing secured facilities, rather than constructing new ones.

State Representative Philip W. Johnston (D.-Marshfield), a longptime spokesman for child welfare, has expressed approval of the budgetary clause.

"It's a modest program, and something of an experimental one," he says. "I'm glad to see it appear now in the budget, though, because if it didn't, political pressure in the legislature might tend towards a return to institutionalization."

For the vast majority of juvenile delinquents, however, treatment is furnished on a community level within an open setting, such as a halfway house. Though conservatives criticize the "freedom" which this system entails, it seems to be working.

The juvenile crime rate is down in Cambridge, as well as in surrounding towns like Arlington, Belmont, and Somerville. The total of all offenses reported in Cambridge decreased 14 per cent in 1975, with 8 per cent that representing a drop in juvenile crime. Moreover, the proportion of juveniles arraigned before the Third District Court of Eastern Middlesex (which serves Cambridge) who were found delinquent dropped to a lower proportion than in any year between 1964 and 1975.

Most striking of all, perhaps, is the marked drop in the auto theft rate. Back in 1974, Cambridge bore the dubious distinction of having the highest car theft rate in the country. Insurance costs on cars ran so high that it was scarcely worth owning one; in fact, a popular trick was to hire someone to steal your car so that you could then collect the insurance rate on it.

Those days are no more, in the opinion of Sgt. Harold F. Murphy, technical advisor for community relations at the Cambridge Police Department. Citing department statistics, he points out that in 1975, 3687 automobiles were stolen in Cambridge, compared to 5184 in 1974.

"It's a decrease of 30 per cent," Murphy says, adjusting the gold braid on his officer's cap. "When you consider that half of all people that steal cars are juveniles, then that represents a considerable drop in juvenile crime." There also have been significant auto theft declines in other suburbs of Boston.

Murphy is quick to draw a causal link between such community programs as half-way houses and the decrease in juvenile crime. He especially credits the National Youth Program Using Mini-Bikes (NYPUM) as a central factor in contributing to the youthful crime drop in Cambridge. "NYPUM's probably the most significant factor in keeping kids busy," Murphy says.

Started in 1974, the program is directed at repeat offenders, and aims to give them an opportunity to learn to ride mini-bikes in exchange for a signed contract on their part that pledges them to "stay out of trouble," Murphy says.

"We have some kids in the program that stole 50 cars a week," he says, adding that between 18 and 22 per cent of the kids in the Cambridge program are of this "hardcore" variety; 40 per cent are kids referred by schools' probation officers or families as potentially troublemakers; and the remaining 40 per cent "may have some problems but are fairly normal kids for the most part. We think it's important to have a mixed group of kids."

Cambridge's program, with an enrollment of 120 juveniles and 40 bikes, receives its funding partly from the Cambridge Police Department, and partly from the Massachusetts Youth Resources Bureau (YRB).

"We're trying to prevent delinquency before it occurs," Detective Ed Loder, who acts as the Cambridge Police Liaison with NYPUM, says. Loder explained that each boy or girl (girls comprise one-quarter of the program) is given two hours' riding time each week, and a two-hour a week group meeting. During the summer and school vacations, the young people make a field trip to Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, where they can experience trail riding.

"Going to Camp Edwards is 'the peak,'" Carol Kolson, chief mechanic of NYPUM, says. "The kids really love it." She said that they were encouraged to maintain their own bikes, and help one another. "It's a genuine motivation--for some of them, the first kind of motivation they've ever had."

Loder agreed that NYPUM teaches its enrollees a sense of responsibility and consideration. "Going down to Camp Edwards, they're swearing at each other and at each other's throats," Loder says. "By the end of the trip, though, they're helping each other out."

In addition to NYPUM, there are other community-based programs in Cambridge credited with helping to lower the juvenile crime rate. One such program is Hastings House, a half-way house in Cambridgeport under the auspices of the national Dare House Program.

Located in a residential section, Hastings House is a red-frame structure on Chestnut Street. Old and traditionally built, it might be just another home in the neighborhood for all that its appearance suggests.

"The kids can walk out the door," Renee Weinrauch, educational director says, explaining that youths assigned to Hastings House are under no legal obligation to stay. The 11 boys--all of whom are in their teens--sign a contract that is renewed from week to week. If they don't live up to the agreements of their contract--whether that be abstention from stealing cars, playing hooky or vandalism--then they are not allowed to go out at night.

"It's a form of behavior modification," Weinrauch says, adding that it is generally quite effective because "most of these kids are multiple offenders and understand that this is their last chance before receiving some harsh--and maybe adult--punishment."

Hastings House accepts juveniles from the DYS and the state welfare agency. The bulk of the youths there are lower-middle class children, Weinrauch said, from "busted homes--with frequently a divorce or an alcoholic parent figuring into it."

Weinrauch emphasized that Hastings House has readjusted goals from those of the old training schools. "We're not trying to turn these kids into wonder boys. We just want to make a dent--get them to work at a job, enroll in school. They mingle with regular kids in the community."

Crucial to the success of community-based programs such as NYPUM and Hastings House is participation by creative judges, staffers and acceptance in the community. In some courts, this kind of dedication exists, but in others, lack of interest is such that "the courtroom's empty by 2 p.m.," Calhoun says.

Cambridge's Third District Court has a fairly good reputation for being just and humane--even from the days of the old training schools. Cambridge judges have used restitution liberally--the idea of employing a youthful offender to pay back the out-of-pocket costs to the victim--in recent years.

One problem with this method of rehabilitation, however, is that "though adult offenders can earn the money to pay, juveniles often can't," Judge Lawrence F. Feloney, senior presiding justice at Cambridge's Third District Court, says. Feloney said in most of his juvenile cases, the youth is assigned to a probation officer and dealt with on a one-to-one basis.

"Ideally, the probation officer acts as a kind of counselor to the child," Feloney said. "If, over a trial period, this arrangement doesn't work out, then the probation officer refers the child to another agency--say, a half-way house."

Calhoun describes Feloney's court as "one of the best in the Commonwealth. In a system that is not standardized, where fiefdoms and mini-kingdoms abound because of life-time appointments, Judge Feloney has proved a benevolent baron."

*****

Probation, half-way houses, NYPUM, all mark the beginning of a newer and more benevolent mode of dealing with youthful offenders. The emphasis in Massachusetts now is on education, rather than incarceration; on community-based treatment, rather than on training schools.

That juvenile crime is down is an encouraging sign for this new approach, as is the recognition of the need for some new secured facilities for youth. From the hyperactive, almost slap-dash days of Jerry Miller, Massachusetts has sat back, reevaluated its child welfare program, and begun to pick up the pieces.