Dealing with tough kids is a tough business

Juvenile court does not have the luxury of locking up the offenders it sees and throwing away the key.
There are those who would say that's a pity. It is easy to take a knee-jerk reaction to all crime, juvenile and adult: lock 'em up, teach them a lesson, beat a little sense into their heads. We've voiced similar sentiments ourselves from time to time.
Mahoning County -- especially the city of Youngstown -- has been gripped in a cycle of adult violence that both fascinates and horrifies. Juvenile crime flies under the public radar most of the time.
Then along comes something as seemingly innocuous as the wilding incident at a Boardman theater three weeks ago and people are asking, "what's the matter with kids today?" (A question, by the way, that dates to the 1963 musical "Bye Bye Birdie.")
The theater incident involved, first, the ejection of about 100 youths for rowdy behavior at the Cinema Movies 8 in Shops at Boardman Park. When they continued to mill about, the police were called. That led to a confrontation between a 13-year-old Midlothian Avenue girl and a police officer.
She's accused of kicking a can of pepper spray from one officer's hand and then resisting arrest. Her 15-year-old sister was charged with disorderly conduct. The crowd, which at one point closed in around the officers in an attempt to interfere with the arrest, got off free.
The most immediate effect of all this is that the theater put into place a new policy barring anyone under that age of 17 from attending weekend night movies unless accompanied by an adult.
The sisters will face charges in juvenile court. And if this is their first offense and if they recognize that what they did is wrong, and comply with whatever orders the court makes, they may be among the lucky majority that doesn't end up in court again.
The court's job
If that happens, Mahoning County Juvenile Court will have met its obligation, which is to rehabilitate the young people who come before the court.
And they come every day. In the course of a year, the court handles about 7,500 new cases, The largest single number of cases are traffic -- about 1,500 strong -- but unruly youngsters, drug dependent kids and delinquents, combined, equal the number of traffic cases.
Judge Theresa Dellick and Anthony D'Apolito, court administrator, say there is an interesting rule of thumb with juveniles who come to the court. About 6 percent of the kids will be the toughest of the tough, those likely to end up in a detention cell. And about 6 percent of those will be tougher still. The judge won't say it, but the implication is that these six percenters are the ones almost destined to end up in an adult jail cell.
The court has a well organized predisposition program to determine which juveniles need only a second chance, which ones should be on probation and which ones should face detention here or at a state facility. It takes little for granted.
Those lucky enough to be given an opportunity to be on probation are subject to spot checks, and those spot checks are now being conducted by teams of court personnel and city police.
Dellick says there is no quick fix, and that's true enough. She also acknowledges that juvenile court can err on the side of leniency, with unhappy results. But if the court errs in the other direction, sending a kid who is on the cusp of straightening out to state detention, the result will almost certainly be the loss of a potentially productive member of society to a life of crime.
That's enough to give second thoughts to even the most confident member of the "lock 'em up" crowd.