Welcome To The Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act

Imagine this: It's the second week in March, 2000, just days after the election. A fifteen-year-old boy named Alonza Thomas walks into a convenience store wearing a bandana over his mouth and nose. He's carrying a gun. He places the gun against the clerk's chest and demands money. Another clerk tackles the boy and a struggle ensues in which the gun is fired leaving a tidy hole in the store rooftop. Plaster and dust sprinkles on the combatants while the boy is subdued.

Here are the facts: It is the boy's first crime. His record is as clean as an upscale restaurant. He is alone. No one was hurt.

Alonza pleads guilty to second degree robbery, admits to a personal firearm use violation, petitions for a remand to juvenile court. But there is a problem. The laws have been changed. March 2000 is an off-election. The voters of California have just passed the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act of 1998, AKA - Proposition 21.

Quick education. Proposition 21 has two primary extensions. The first takes crimes where the presumption was that a child would be tried as an adult and removes the discretion of the prosecutor and the court, mandating the youth enter into the adult correctional system. The second, and here is where Alonza Thomas comes in, takes crimes committed by juveniles where the child could be tried as an adult but the presumption is that they would be tried as children, because they are children, because as a society we know what a child is, we know the difference between a child and an adult and the potential of youth, it takes these cases and allows the prosecutor to file the case in adult court, if the prosecutor so desires. And this is what happens to Alonza Thomas.

It's really not so complicated. A fifteen-year-old boy sets off to commit his first crime. He's a bumbling criminal, his chances of success were never good. Where are his friends? There is evidence of psychological trauma, but isn't there always? Who is this young Jesse James and where did he get his gun? Who cares? The boy is sentenced to thirteen years in adult prison. There will be no school, no rehabilitation. The child is thrown into a warehouse, a crowded meat locker, separate from the adult population but without access to education, gang intervention, drug programs, etc. Not even eligible for education courses offered to adults because the child populations has to be kept separate from the adult population until they turn eighteen, at which point they are mainlined into the system. There is no doubt Alonza will come out worse then he went in. His chances were always low; now there is no chance at all.

He should have thought of that before he walked into a convenience store with a gun. But he didn't think of it. Most likely he had never even heard of Proposition 21, or Pete Wilson, it's original sponsor, a man who wanted to be president but whose hopes died. And the legacy he left behind, this misguided proposition, sat in the political ether like a weed. It's unlikely that Alonza knew what was heading down the pipe for him as he tied the scarf behind his head, cinching the knot at the top of his neck, striding into the store, gun drawn, a stupid but meaningful threat uttering from his lips.

It was an off-election. March 2000. The voters that supported this strange law were conservatives. But this is not a conservative law. This is in fact a wasteful law. Because the financial expenditures that we are going to put into punishing Alonza Thomas are much higher, hundreds of thousands of dollars higher, then they would have been had we tried to rehabilitate him. And the likelihood of his continued drag on society are astronomically higher. There is no academic debate on this. Everybody knows the numbers. Studies have been done. It is well documented that threats of longer sentences do not deter crimes, particularly threats to adolescents that they will be tried as adults. The research is unambiguous and the conclusions exactly what one would expect.

Alonza Thomas will spend thirteen years in adult prison for a crime in which no one was hurt. The measure in this case is purely punitive. Supporters of the proposition talk about "the will of the people" when questioned on the sanity of putting children like Alonza in adult prisons. "That's the law that was chosen," Deputy Attorney General Kathleen McKenna was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, as if that somehow absolved her of responsibility, as if there was no such thing as right or wrong. But did the people really understand the cost? Or that the children could already be tried as adults if the court so ruled? Meanwhile, the prosecutor deranged with power, or trying to climb an ambiguous and ever shifting career ladder, or attempting to act feebly on the will of the people who passed a ballot proposition, turns justice into tragedy and the expense is ours.

Proposition 21 was approved by 62 percent of the voters. This year in April the proposition withstood its most recent challenge with a ruling by the California Supreme Court that juveniles tried as adults must be sentenced to the adult system rather than the California Youth Authority. And still we sleep at night.

- stephen elliott