Congratulations Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony. You’ve just been handed the toughest job in Broward County. Your predecessor’s incompetent response to the Parkland shooting delivers to you a grieving community in desperate need of strong law enforcement leadership.
Your first line of business is to make our schools safer and to protect our children. There is a natural urge post-Parkland to try to do this by arresting more kids for minor offenses. After all, the argument goes, if we arrest more troubled kids, maybe we can prevent the next mass shooter.
That thinking is dangerous and is wrong. The last thing our community needs is an expansion of the aggressive “tough on crime” policy against kids that has failed for so long.
The research is unequivocal — arresting children causes far more harm than it prevents.
Consider the trauma to a child of being arrested in the first place. The child is first “caught” by police officers and placed in handcuffs. The child may be placed in a room, alone, and questioned by police, sometimes for several hours. The child is then put in the back of a police car and brought to a detention facility. The child is told to remove his or her clothing and given a standard issue jail jumpsuit. The child congregates at the facility with other delinquent youth. The child may be threatened, abused, or conscripted into more crime. When it’s time to go to court, the child is placed in leg and arm shackles for the trip to the courthouse.
The child eventually will be released, usually within a matter of days. But the court process is just getting started. The child will have to miss school to go back to court every few weeks and appear before the judge again and again until the case is resolved.
Juveniles that get sucked into our juvenile justice system do not magically become better. Instead, the Justice Policy Initiative has found that arresting and detaining children often makes them more likely to commit future crimes, not less. Children are not miniature adults and placing them into miniature prisons does far more harm than good.
We also know that locking up mentally ill children in juvenile facilities makes them worse, not better. It shouldn’t be any surprise that putting an already mentally ill youth into an overcrowded facility that breeds violence and chaos among young people doesn’t help anyone. Some studies have shown that incarcerated youth are between two and four times more likely to commit suicide than non-incarcerated youth.
Arresting a child also makes that child more likely to miss classes and drop out of school. That’s because a kid who is sucked into the system must repeatedly miss school to show up for court and court-ordered sanctions.
We know that the mass incarceration of youth is borne disproportionately by children of color. African-American and Hispanic kids are more likely to have the police called on them, to be arrested by police, to be charged by prosecutors, and to serve longer sentences in custody than White kids for the same behavior.
None of this is to say we should do nothing. But if anyone thinks that locking up more children will decrease crime or the risk of mass shootings, they’re just plain wrong.
We should expand high-quality alternatives to arresting our kids. We should expand diversion programs that provide mentorship, tutoring, ethics-building, and counseling for our kids. We should provide high-quality in-patient psychiatric treatment for those kids that need it.
If the last 30 years have taught us anything, it’s that the old “lock ‘em up” mantra doesn’t work. It never has. As our new sheriff, you have an enormous opportunity to usher Broward County into a new era of juvenile justice policy. An era that says it is better to be smart on crime then tough on crime.
We are all watching and cheering for your success. Broward County is hungry for change and you’ve been put in the perfect position to enact it. I hope you’ll seize this opportunity and be a real leader for juvenile justice reform.