Frank Jackson knows something about violent crime. As head of the Dangerous Offenders Task Force in Wake County, North Carolina, he’s been around his share. Even so, this tape makes him cringe. It’s a 911 call made to police the night of July 27. A young woman is phoning for help from her apartment in Fuquay-Varina, about 15 miles from Raleigh. Just before the tape goes dead — police believe the phone was ripped from the wall — she can be heard screaming, “Don’t harm my baby!” Jackson knows what happened next. Over the next several minutes she was beaten bloody with a mop handle and raped. The attacker was a neighbor who had apparently become infatuated with her. The woman, who survived, is 22. The accused rapist, Andre Green, is 13. Green will be the first youthful offender tried under a North Carolina law passed earlier this year that permits children as young as 13 to be tried as adults. If convicted of rape, Green, who confessed to the crime but has no previous criminal record, will not be eligible for parole for 20 years. Jackson, who will prosecute the case, thinks Green is somebody who can’t be let off lightly. He also wonders if lengthy confinement won’t make Green worse. “It’s kind of scary to think what kind of monster may be created,” Jackson says. “He could be released at the age of 33 after having been raised in the department of corrections with some of the most hardened criminals North Carolina has to offer.” The American juvenile-justice system was designed 100 years ago to reform kids found guilty of minor crimes. Increasingly these days, the system is overwhelmed by the Andre Greens, by pint-size drug runners and by 16-year-old gunmen. The response on the part of lawmakers has been largely to siphon the worst of them out of that system by lowering the age at which juveniles charged with serious crimes — usually including murder, rape and armed assault — can be tried in adult courts. Last week California Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill lowering the threshold to 14. Earlier this year Arkansas did the same, and Georgia decided that youths from the ages of 14 through 17 who are charged with certain crimes will be tried as adults automatically. This being election time, candidates around the country are engaged in a kind of reverse auction to see who would send even younger felons to the adult system. Fourteen? Why not 13? Why not 12? Even if the spectacle of politics coming to grips with pathology is not pretty, who can deny that when 11-year-olds like Robert Sandifer kill or when a 14-year-old drives nails into the heels of a younger boy — a recent episode from Somerset, Pennsylvania — there is good reason to be unnerved? A breeding ground of poverty and broken families and drugs and guns and violence, real or just pictured, has brought forth a violent generation. “We need to throw out our entire juvenile-justice system,” says Gil Garcetti, the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, whose biggest headache, after the O.J. trial, is the city’s youth gangs. “We should replace it with one that both protects society from violent juvenile criminals and efficiently rehabilitates youths who can be saved — and can differentiate between the two.”
