If he’d been arrested on Saturday, he would have been treated as a juvenile and sent to Family Court and possibly to the state Training School.
But because he was busted on Sunday — the day Rhode Island began trying 17-year-olds as adults — Johny Joseph went to District Court and was sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions.
Joseph, of 71 Summer St., Central Falls, is believed to be the first 17-year-old charged since the General Assembly lowered the age of adult criminal jurisdiction as a way to save money amid a budget crisis, court officials said yesterday. Legislators are banking on savings from the lower cost of placing people at the ACI as opposed to the Training School.
With an early deadline, due to the holiday week, for this week's Phoenix, such information wasn't available early Monday when I wrote about the same subject. The critique of the new approach, however, was already clear:
“I think people should be absolutely outraged,” says Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence in South Providence, who works with young people in the city. “Some people in the Senate have told us that this was the worst part in the budget.” And with Providence being a minority-majority city, too many people have the outlook, Gross adds, that young people are expendable.
On the surface, trying 17 year olds as adults, and keeping these offenders at the ACI, rather than the state Training School, is about half as costly. Yet Gross notes how the plan also threatens to make younger offenders “more institutionalized,” in part by putting them into contact with more serious offenders. “None of us who work with young people doubt that this will have costly effects,” he says. “If it saves money, how about we start at 14?”
. . . .
The plan to save money by trying 17 year olds as adults was developed by the state Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF). “The governor recognizes that there are no easy answers to resolving the budget deficit, and this proposal demonstrates that,” says Michael Maynard, a spokesman for Governor Donald L. Carceri. At the same time, notes Maynard, “Not every 17 year old who is convicted is going to go to the ACI.”
For 17 year olds now tried as adults, their juvenile records will not be considered at sentencing. This means, Maynard says, that individuals convicted in such cases would be first-time offenders, making them most likely to receive probation as a sentence. “It’s not as cut and dried as where every 17-year-old who commits a crime is going to go to the ACI,” he says.
To critics, though, the idea of even putting some juveniles in an adult prison represents a slippery slope.
Gross describes the measure as a double-whammy for disadvantaged young people in the state, since they enjoy fewer benefits while growing up and will now face the prospect of stiffer punishment for crimes committed as a juvenile.
While changes seem unlikely in the short term, advocates plan to continue organizing and working behind the scenes. As Gross puts it, “This is a very sobering one for me. I am not negotiating the 17. This is non-negotiable for me.”
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