In Baltimore, so many youngsters are charged with crimes as adults that the state says it needs to spend $100 million to build a new jail for them.
In Washington, lawmakers fed up with crime want to publicly expose the sealed criminal records of recidivist teenagers — to deter them from furthering their criminal careers and to hold the district's secretive and juvenile justice system accountable.
These are just some examples of how local jurisdictions are struggling to satisfy the desire to protect, rehabilitate and salvage the lives of young criminals and at the same time assure a scared and skeptical citizenry that government is doing all it can to keep them safe.
Youth advocates vigorously argue that maintaining secrecy is vital to protecting society's most vulnerable charges even as they condemn the juvenile system as a failure. Those on the other side argue just as vigorously that the system fails because its leaders can hide behind a facade of protecting the young criminal's privacy.
Terry F. Hickey, founder and director of Baltimore's Community Law Center in Action, which works with at-risk youths, likens naming teen offenders to publicly flogging them, as nothing more than a bid by politicians without real ideas to placate voters angry over seeing the same young suspects over and over again.
"I don't see what purpose it serves," Hickey told me. "Naming them is not going to change the mind of kids who think that violence is going to be their hallmark on the world. … Let's make sure he never gets a job, won't get housing and will never get a student loan."
I agree that making their records public might not keep them from stealing another car. But it would help explain how and why a youth had another opportunity to steal another car, or had another chance to shoot someone, and whether the system worked or simply pushed them into the revolving door.
Hickey argues against a new jail, saying that it "represents the status quo" of warehousing youthful offenders instead of trying to help them. He's also against opening juvenile records: "Are we going to balance accountability on the backs of these kids?"
Unfortunately, sometimes accountability carries the price of public exposure.
Phil Mendelson, chairman of the District of Columbia City Council's Public Safety Committee, is proposing legislation that would open to the public all of a youth's juvenile records, and outcomes of hearings, after a juvenile has been found guilty of serious offenses.
The lawmaker had wanted confidentiality lifted after a second offense. His committee rewrote the bill and sent it to the full council to open files after just one offense, demonstrating the level of frustration over repeat juvenile criminals.
"I believe that confidentiality has made it more difficult to hold the system accountable," Mendelson told me. He called D.C. laws regarding the secrecy involving juvenile proceedings among the most restrictive in the country, noting that even police officers have a difficult time getting records.
"In the short run it may be that there's a juvenile who will suffer more than he, she would have with confidentiality," Mendelson said. "But I think, what we're getting at are the violent offenders, and they're not the ones who are so innocent. But more broadly, if the system is more accountable, then I hope the system will make better decisions. And that will benefit the kids more.
"This is only for violent crimes," the district lawmaker said. "If a kid as been convicted 13 times of shoplifting, he's not caught up in this. But he's been convicted once of stealing a car, the next one he loses confidentiality."
Donald W. DeVore, secretary of Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services, said this state is already far ahead of the district when it comes to sharing the criminal histories of juveniles with a myriad of law enforcement agencies. Police have access to juvenile records from their patrol cars, while such information is blocked to officers in D.C.
In addition, he noted that in Maryland many juveniles are automatically charged as adults (which makes their names and some of their criminal history public) in many crimes, while in the district it is up to prosecutors who in some cases have to petition the attorney-general for permission. In D.C., the cutoff for being charged as an adult with murder is 16; in Maryland it's 14.
DeVore and his chief of staff, Tammy Brown, argue that Maryland juvenile agencies are heavily scrutinized within the law enforcement community and that every killing of a youth is studied all the way up to the governor's office.
It is such reviews, the officials said, that have led to stark reductions in juvenile crime across the state. So far this year in Baltimore, DeVore said, seven youths have been shot and wounded, down from 13 at this time in 2009. An additional four youths have been killed in the city so far this year, including one on Thursday, compared with eight at this time last year. Slayings of youths in Maryland have declined from 24 through June last year compared with 13 this year.
"We're looking at public safety and providing information that won't hamper the youth's ability to be rehabilitated," Brown said, adding that her agency feels that the information-sharing with law enforcement personnel "ensures our communities are safe and that we're focusing on the most difficult kids and the kids at greatest risk."
DeVore said treating juvenile offenders the same as adults means throwing them away, noting that the recidivism rate among imprisoned adults is two to three times that of juvenile offenders. "Do you really want the types of outcomes the adult system gets?" DeVore said.
Attempts to strike this delicate balance have led to a confusing and confounding array of laws that leave even judges perplexed. Maryland's legislature has expanded public access to juvenile proceedings — but not to records. That has helped people gain a greater understanding of juvenile court, but it stops short of opening full files and hearings and most often leaves the most crucial questions unanswered.
For example, last fall a 17-year-old freed from the juvenile center after a drug bust went home with his mother and was charged with killing a man just a few hours later. His name became public because he was charged as an adult, and that led me to his juvenile history, not from public records, but leaked by a law enforcement source angry that this teen had been arrested a dozen times before his 12th birthday.
The charges included firing a gun, drug dealing, assault and stealing a car.
Not exactly swiping bubble gum from a candy jar.
But trying to determine what happened to this young man while locked up by juvenile authorities proved impossible. The newspaper had to fight in court so I could watch a one-minute, 38-second video of a court hearing that immediately preceded his latest release.
Unfortunately, the hearing offered no clues as to how the juvenile system dealt with this young man in the years, months and even hours before the killing.
After 5-year-old Raven Wyatt was shot in the head in Southwest Baltimore last year, pitched battles were fought over the juvenile record of the 17-year-old suspect, and the secrecy surrounding his past only led to more confusion and anger.
Horrified officials repeated that the young man had violated his home detention more than 100 times, a figure that sparked cries for reform and the rolling of heads and became so ingrained in the rhetoric of the case that both the prosecutor and the defense attorney stipulated it was true at trial.
After the trial, and after Lamont Davis was found guilty, we learned the actual number: eight.
If only the public had been privy to this "top secret" information earlier. Making these records public would've helped the young suspect and exposed false statements perpetuated by law enforcement.
Openness can help everyone.