child care - Digital Library Collections

THE STATE OF AMERICA'S CHILDREN YEARBOOK 1998
Act of 1974. This landmark legislation took a giant
step forward in seeking to keep children away from
adults in jails and prisons and to remove "status
offenders" (runaways, truants, and others whose
actions would not be criminal if they were adults)
from the criminal justice system. The 1974 act required
states to separate children from adults as a
condition of receiving federal funds for their juvenile
justice systems.
The law was passed because ofa deep national
concern about what happens to children when they
are locked up, especially with adult criminals. The
Children's Defense Fund helped spotlight the issue
by filing a number of lawsuits in the early 1970s
involving children in adult jails. In 1973 CDF President
Marian Wright Edelman and Judge Justine
Wise Polier, head ofCDF's juvenile justice project,
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee
drafting the juvenile justice reform act. Judge
Polier warned the committee that failure to institute
reforms would mean giving up on thousands of
children, denying them services, and thrusting
them back into the criminal courts, jails, and prisons
of America. CDF later published Children in
Adult Jails, documenting many of the tragedies-sexual
assaults, physical abuse, suicides-that
had occurred when children were confmed with
adult criminals.
In 1998 Congress is poised to pass legislation
that would turn back the clock and allow children
once again to be incarcerated with adults, without
adequate safeguards for their well-being. The proposed
measures also would more often put runaways
and truants in jails rather than community
facilities. CertainlY, strong measures are needed
to deal with the small percentage of young people
who commit violent crimes-D.5 percent of all
youths ages 10-17, according to the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
(OJJDP). However, subjecting them to abusive
conditions in adult jails is not the answer, nor
should that be the fate of the nonviolent youths
who constitute the vast majority of juvenile
offenders.
The gun epidemic. Beginning in the late 1980s,
guns in the hands ofchildren and those who would
harm children became far too prevalent. Children
themselves too often have been the victims ofgun
violence. In 1973 an average of nine children died
from gunfire each day; by 1983 the number had
fallen to eight per day. Over the next decade, how-
• An overage of 14 children die each day from gunfire in
America-approximately one every 100 minutes.
• In 1994 there were nearly 200 million firearms in American
homes-almost one for every adult and child.
• Violent crime by young people peaks between 3 and 7 p.m.
• Children in adult prisons ore eight times more likely to commit
suicide, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and two
times more likely to be assaulted by stoff than are children in
juvenile facilities.
• Each new juvenile correction facility typically costs $102,000 per
bed to build. The overage after-school program, by contrast, costs
approximately $3,000 per child.
78 CHI L D R EN'S D E FEN S E FUN D