Juvenile Delinquency
Kids Roaming the Streets
By Daniel Muniz

Years ago I was at a party and I struck up a conversation with someone who was a juvenile probation officer. I complained to him how juvenile delinquency has gotten out of control in our city, particularly with so many teenagers and even pre-teens who roam the streets at all hours of the night even on school days.

Kids allowed to wander the streets at night are also prone to plenty of mischief such as vandalism, burglary, and other petty crimes. And if left unchecked especially by their parents, then the juvenile delinquency could easily escalate into far bigger and more serious crimes if these kids don’t grow up and develop some responsibility. Although there are many places around town where kids like to congregate, I pointed out to this probation officer one popular boulevard where there are always hundreds of teenagers hanging out every weekend.

Overall, I supposed that I was really upset at the parents who don’t know where their kids are at night and don’t even care what they are doing. And if their children were ever involved in some kind of trouble, these parents simply expect that someone else, like the court system, would take care of it.

For juvenile delinquency, most municipalities including the city I live in, use a catch and release program. At worst, if a juvenile delinquent is a big of enough of a nuisance, then the police will simply return him or her to a parent. Without any kind of real punishment involved, a kid is emboldened to continue roaming the streets at all hours of the night especially if his parents don’t care.

After patiently listening to my tirade, this probation officer told me that if I was in charge and if all these juvenile delinquents were rounded up in one night, which could easily number over a thousand, where would I put all of them at?

He went on to explain that there are only a couple of hundred beds in the juvenile detention center (of a metropolitan area of over a million) and that facility is only reserved for the worst of the worst cases involving assault, robbery, murder, and rape. There simply is no room in juvenile detention to put over a thousand kids who broke the curfew while there are gang bangers and hoodlums that the police are after. Except for the county jail which is already full, there is nowhere else to put a kid so it is pretty much a “catch and release” effort.

Additionally, to implement a program that would not only apprehend these kids but to house them would require an enormous expenditure in city resources. However, he pointed that the biggest obstacle is for the city to spend so much money on what is considered to be either non-violent offenses or petty crime. Since jail is already so expensive, it is very difficult to convince a city council to allocate this kind of serious money especially since they have so many mouths to feed in regards to special interest groups.

He agreed with me that juvenile delinquency is a serious problem and he deplored the breakdown of the family unit and the disintegration of parental involvement because he directly deals with it on a day to day basis. However, he gave me a brutal education on how local government works and what it takes to really solve a problem. Basically, it is not that law enforcements wants to ignore juvenile delinquency, it is that they don’t have the manpower or the infrastructure to bring it to an abrupt end especially when there already is violent crime running rampant.

The real issue boils down to cost.

Correctional facilities are outrageously expensive to build and costly to maintain. And throughout the country, that is the primary reason why governments at all levels are reluctant to allocate that kind of money to it especially since the mischief is so petty.

However, there is a solution.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Phoenix Arizona has erected tent cities to house his non-violent offenders. In fact, his facility has an old fashion neon VACANCY sign because his jail will never turn away prisoners. If overcrowding ever becomes an issue, he can always erect more tents. But more to the point is that these tent cities are ridiculously cheap to set up and maintain than the fortified structures of correctional institutions.

The Maricopa County Jail even has an accredited high school aptly named Hard Knocks. It is the only high school in the country that is located inside a jail; talk about a true alternative school.

One of the reasons that juvenile delinquency can be so rampant is because there are no serious consequences involved. Cops are reluctant to enforce the laws already on the books unless it becomes a problem.

But if low cost facilities like tent cities can be constructed, then the police and the court system now have a viable option to deal with first time and repeat offenders.

Of course the conditions have to be harsh and Spartan, much like the jails in Maricopa County in which there are no luxuries like weightlifting equipment and the only television and movies to watch are G-rated. A no-frills facility can provide the deterrence for the kids not to want to come back to it. Of course it won’t stop all recidivism but it will keep the juvenile delinquents off the streets.

Cities need to have these kinds of negative consequences to mete out to the kids who roam the streets at night. And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to end juvenile delinquency.

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