Denver & the west

Crammed state jails will "pop"

By Erin Emery

Denver Post Staff Writer

Denver Post

Article Last Updated:01/30/2007 06:23:02 AM MS

From the Baltimore Sun

Youth describes struggle with staff

Judge orders 3 removed from juvenile facility after teen being restrained dies

By Gadi Dechter

Sun reporter

January 27, 2007

Teen dies at Bowling Brook

Student in facility for youth offenders collapsed as staff tried to restrain him

By Gadi Dechter

Sun Reporter

January 24, 2007, 9:06 PM EST

MESSAGE BOARDS

Read a special report: Crime Rates and Youth Incarceration in Texas and California Compared

Bill's Story:

Why I Forgave My Grandmother's Murderer

Paula Cooper was 15 years old when she killed my grandmother. The prosecution wanted the death penalty. The judge, although he stated he was opposed to the death penalty, said that according to the state law, he had no choice but to sentence her to death.

Bill

Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity

Data May Undermine Giuliani's Claims

By Shankar Vedantam

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 8, 2007; A02

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

June 9, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

School to Prison Pipeline

By BOB HERBERT

RESOURCES

TRAVEL

On the Frontline documentary, When Kids Get Life, parricide expert Paul Mones stated that parents who kill kids get far less time than kids who kill a parent. The following is further proof that a child's life IS far less important than the life of a parent who abuses a child:

Woman Gets 25 Years for Killing Grandson

By Associated Press

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The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She’s in! She’s out! She’s — whatever.

Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

This is an aspect of the justice system that is seldom seen. But the consequences of ushering young people into the bowels of police precincts and jail cells without a good reason for doing so are profound.

Two months ago I wrote about a 6-year-old girl in Florida who was handcuffed by the police and taken off to the county jail after she threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class. Police in Brooklyn recently arrested more than 30 young people, ages 13 to 22, as they walked toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered. No evidence has been presented that the grieving young people had misbehaved. No drugs or weapons were found. But they were accused by the police of gathering unlawfully and of disorderly conduct.

In March, police in Baltimore handcuffed a 7-year-old boy and took him into custody for riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The boy tearfully told The Baltimore Examiner, “They scared me.” Mayor Sheila Dixon later apologized for the arrest.

Children, including some who are emotionally disturbed, are often arrested for acting out. Some are arrested for carrying sharp instruments that they had planned to use in art classes, and for mouthing off. This is a problem that has gotten out of control. Behavior that was once considered a normal part of growing up is now resulting in arrest and incarceration. Kids who find themselves caught in this unnecessary tour of the criminal justice system very quickly develop malignant attitudes toward law enforcement. Many drop out — or are forced out — of school. In the worst cases, the experience serves as an introductory course in behavior that is, in fact, criminal.

There is a big difference between a child or teenager who brings a gun to school or commits some other serious offense and someone who swears at another student or gets into a wrestling match or a fistfight in the playground. Increasingly, especially as zero-tolerance policies proliferate, children are being treated like criminals for the most minor offenses. There should be no obligation to call the police if a couple of kids get into a fight and teachers are able to bring it under control. But now, in many cases, youngsters caught fighting are arrested and charged with assault.

A 2006 report on disciplinary practices in Florida schools showed that a middle school student in Palm Beach County who was caught throwing rocks at a soda can was arrested and charged with a felony — hurling a “deadly missile.”

We need to get a grip.

The Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union has been studying this issue. “What we see routinely,” said Dennis Parker, the program’s director, “is that behavior that in my time would have resulted in a trip to the principal’s office is now resulting in a trip to the police station.”

He added that the evidence seems to show that white kids are significantly less likely to be arrested for minor infractions than black or Latino kids. The 6-year-old arrested in Florida was black. The 7-year-old arrested in Baltimore was black. Shaquanda Cotton was black. She was the 14-year-old high school freshman in Paris, Tex., who was arrested for shoving a hall monitor. She was convicted in March 2006 of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced to a prison term of — hold your breath — up to seven years!

Shaquanda’s outraged family noted that the judge who sentenced her had, just three months earlier, sentenced a 14-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson for burning down her family’s home. The white girl was given probation. Shaquanda was recently released after a public outcry over her case and the eruption of a scandal involving allegations of widespread sexual abuse of incarcerated juveniles in Texas.

This issue deserves much more attention. Sending young people into the criminal justice system unnecessarily is a brutal form of abuse with consequences, for the child and for society as a whole, that can last a lifetime.

Abby Anderson
Sr. Policy Associate
Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance
2470 Fairfield Ave.
Bridgeport, CT 06605
203-579-2727 ext. 323
abby@ctjja.org
www.ctjja.org

Ari Zavaras, the new man in charge of Colorado's Department of Corrections, 
has inherited a prison system that is like a balloon ready to pop.

The problem, corrections officials say, is Colorado has doubled its prison population in the past 10 years, slashed programs designed to rehabilitate inmates and slowed construction of new prisons.
Corrections officers say they feel a sense of unease because fewer people patrol the state's prisons. About 200 corrections- officer positions were eliminated during a statewide fiscal crisis that began in 2001, and only 62 of those have been restored. That leaves officers with less time to glean the kind of intelligence from inmates that can avert violent uprisings. "I would contend that every prison in the state has the potential for a riot situation - every one of them," said state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, whose district includes many southern Colorado prisons.

Colorado's prison population exploded - from 4,000 inmates in 1985 to morethan 22,000 today - after the state toughened its sentencing laws in the late 1970s and 1980s. During the same period, the budget grew from $57 million to $533 million.
	
	
Good news, bad news

The good news: Violent crime in the 1990s dropped by 33 percent, according to a report by the Colorado Lawyers Committee.
The bad news: There's not enough room. The state is trying to manage its prisons by double-bunking prisoners and sending some offenders out of state.

Over the next five years, though, the Department of Corrections says it needs $806 million for prison construction projects alone. By 2011, the department projects that 29,000 people will be behind bars.

Zavaras said his first priority is to keep the public safe. Secondly, he believes the way to get more bang for the taxpayers' buck is to change the behavior of prisoners, most of whom are scheduled to return, eventually, to 
the streets.

"We are going to have a heavy focus and a heavy emphasis on what we can do to slow down growth in the department," said Zavaras, who served as director of the Department of Corrections from 1993 to 1998 and as Denver's police chief before then.

Among Zavaras' first moves will be to try to restore programs cut during the budget crisis. Drug, alcohol and sex-offender programs, along with education programs, were sharply curtailed.
Between 2001 and 2005, state lawmakers cut $11.4 million in funding forinmate programs, according to a Joint Budget Committee study of budget cuts during the recession. Almost none of that funding has been restored.

If programs are not restored, the current recidivism rate of 49.2 percentcould get even higher, Zavaras said.

The Colorado Lawyers Committee recently drafted a report recommending that a commission be formed to study modifying sentences.

Glen Keller, a Denver lawyer who co-authored the report with lawyer Jim Scarboro, suggested that sentences for more severe crimes could be made longer, while sentences for lesser crimes could be shorter. "Other states have done this, and they've been very successful in reducing their costs," Keller said.

Sentencing reforms could help free up money for inmate re-entry andcrime-prevention programs, said Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Carroll said his committee will be looking at
the Colorado Lawyers Committee report.

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, said he supported putting state money into faith-based programs. "Education is not enough," he said. "You have to cure the heart."

Incidents fluctuating

Inside prisons, it is difficult to measure whether violence is on the rise because the Department of Corrections three years ago revamped its definitions of serious incidents. In the past three years, the number of serious incidents has fluctuated from year to year.
In July 2004, inmates rioted at the Crowley Correctional Facility in OlneySprings. In October 2002, prison guard Eric Autobee was bludgeoned to death at Limon Correctional Facility. However, prison officials say that extensive
training of officers may have prevented more violence.

"We have managed to keep the lid on the place, and it almost becomes a Catch-22. It's easy to become lulled into the thought that if we're managing it, we can do it," said Alison Morgan, corrections spokeswoman. "But it's inevitable that it is going to pop at some point, whether it is a serious staff assault, an inmate death, another riot."

Some corrections officers worry that a drop in their number will lead totrouble. "You lose intelligence," said Joe Nicolini, a corrections officer who recently retired after 10 years.

With fewer hours spent walking the units, there are fewer opportunities for inmates to inform management of potential problems inside.

In southern Colorado, representatives of Teamsters Local 537 are trying toorganize corrections officers who, according to Nicolini and union officials, have been forced to work 16- hour shifts or longer.  Along with the decreasing number of corrections officers are problems created by the loss of inmate programs, Morgan said.

"We have a philosophy that a busy, tired inmate is an inmate that does not cause problems," she said. "If an inmate is not in a program or in a class or has yard time, then you absolutely have a greater reliance on these officers." As a result, "there has been a greater unease among our line 
staff and we recognize it, absolutely," she said.

Zavaras said locking up prisoners without trying to change behavior is "shortsighted."

"If we don't change behavior, it's a public-safety issue," Zavaras said."There's going to be more victims, more crimes."

Staff writer Mark P. Couch contributed to this report.

At least four youths at a private residential program for juvenile offenders have independently told their lawyers that they witnessed staff members sit on a struggling Isaiah Simmons for three hours Tuesday until he passed out and died, Maryland's chief public defender said last night.

The statement by Nancy Forster came after a Baltimore judge ordered three city youths removed from the Bowling Brook Preparatory School in response to an emergency request by public defenders. The emergency hearings will continue next week across the state, Forster said, until all of her office's clients at the school have had their cases reviewed by a juvenile court.

"We want our children out of there," she said.

In three hearings that lasted until 7:30 p.m. yesterday, Baltimore Circuit Judge Edward R.K. Hargadon released one youth, remanded one to house arrest and sent the third for a brief stay at the Maryland Youth ResidenceCenter, a juvenile shelter in Baltimore.

The youth who was released, Ronnell Williams, 18, told The Sun that he and other students watched as "four or five guys" held Simmons to the ground for more than two hours Tuesday. During that time, Williams said, Simmons cried out several times that he couldn't breathe.

"We watched a guy die," Williams said after he was released into his mother's custody.

Hargadon, who is in charge of the city's juvenile court, will hear removal petitions Thursday on behalf of 13 other city youths at Bowling Brook, Forster said.

Of the 170 students at Bowling Brook on Tuesday, 74 were sent there by Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services, which has a contract with the private school in Carroll County, according to a department spokesman. The spokesman, Edward Hopkins, said the department did not know where it could place all those youngsters if they are ordered out of Bowling Brook.

Sheriff's deputies are continuing to investigate the death of Simmons, 17. According to the Carroll County Sheriff's Office, staff at Bowling Brook said Simmons collapsed Tuesday evening while being restrained after an outburst in which he threatened to harm other students and school personnel. It was the first death of a youth in the custody of juvenile services since 2001.

The Department of Juvenile Services has dispatched staff to provide indefinite 24-hour supervision inside the school, Hopkins said yesterday. Bowling Brook has been in operation for decades and has enjoyed a positive reputation among youth advocates.

School officials did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Williams said that Simmons was having a hard time adjusting to the program, which he had entered two weeks before his death. He was in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services after a juvenile court effectively found him guilty of armed robbery.

According to Williams' account, Simmons told him Tuesday afternoon, "I'm gonna spaz out," and then had a disobedient outburst before school counselors.

"He couldn't deal with the pressure," said Williams, who spent about a year at Bowling Brook.

Simmons had been physically restrained by staff once before, on Jan. 10, according to a "use of force" report provided by Bowling Brook to the Department of Juvenile Services. Though the report was not sent to the department until Jan. 16, it would not have caused alarm among department officials, Hopkins said.

In 2006, school personnel made nearly 50 such reports to juvenile services, according to records provided by the department. Of those, three included "minor injuries" to the faces of the restrained youths.

In the three emergency hearings yesterday, prosecutors did not object to the removal of the students from the school, and the death of Simmons was not explicitly mentioned.

During the third hearing, defense attorney Deborah St. Jean alluded to a "sidebar" discussion with Hargadon in which, she said, the judge ruled that discussion of Simmons' death would not be admissible.

Youth advocates in the state have expressed surprise that a young man died at Bowling Brook. "My experience with Bowling Brook had always been that it's a great program," Susan B. Leviton, who directs the juvenile law clinic at the University of Maryland, said yesterday.
"When you [visited] Bowling Brook, every kid was involved in sports, they were going to school, they were keeping facilities clean. It was a very active and engaged place." Leviton said.

Sheriff's deputies and state police are investigating the death of a 17-year-old East Baltimore youth who collapsed Tuesday evening while being restrained by staff at a privately run residential program for juvenile offenders.

Isaiah Simmons III was pronounced dead at Carroll Hospital Center after paramedics found him in cardiac arrest at the Bowling Brook Preparatory School near Westminster, officials said.

Staff at the school attempted to subdue the youth after an outburst in which he allegedly threatened to harm other students and school personnel, according to the Carroll County sheriff's office.

An autopsy will be performed, but a preliminary investigation by the state medical examiner's office Wednesday revealed no apparent trauma to Simmons' body, the sheriff's office said. Still, his death has raised questions.

"Children in state custody should be safe from harm, and last night's death reminds us of the work that needs to be done to reform our Department of Juvenile Services," Gov. Martin O'Malley said in a statement.

Simmons was sent to Bowling Brook after he was effectively found guilty in juvenile court of armed robbery. In February, he used a box cutter to rob another juvenile of a cell phone near the Inner Harbor, according to police records.

This is the first death of a youth in the custody of juvenile services since a girl committed suicide at the state-run Waxter Children's Center in Laurel in 2001, a department spokesman said.

Bowling Brook officials declined to comment Wednesday.

O'Malley dispatched his chief of staff to Bowling Brook Wednesday morning and directed juvenile services officials and state police to help sheriff's deputies investigate the incident.

Simmons' grieving family and youth advocates are also demanding an investigation.

"I'm trusting in the Lord that the truth will come out," his mother, Felicia Wilson, said. "So it won't happen to another child. They need to look over their policies. They need to be retrained."

Among the 20 or so relatives gathered at Wilson's Aisquith Street rowhouse Wednesday afternoon were Simmons' 22-month-old daughter, Shakiya, and the child's mother, Quequerra Johnson, 15.

Johnson said she was having a hard time acknowledging Simmons' death. "It isn't true," said the New Era Academy tenth-grader. "He's still alive."

Relatives described Simmons as a basketball and football fan with a gentle demeanor who was excited about going to Bowling Brook.

The school's incorporation of organized sports into its curriculum has drawn praise as a progressive alternative to troubled state-run facilities.

After graduating from Bowling Brook, Simmons hoped to attend Michigan State University, where his sister, Danielle Wilson, is a graduate student, his family said.

"My impression of Bowling Brook has been generally favorable, but I do know of some incidents where kids had injuries," said Stacey Gurian-Sherman, who runs an advocacy group in Montgomery County for families of delinquents.

"There should be a thorough and independent investigation. We should not rely on [the Departiment of Juvenile Services] to evaluate this." delinquents.

Since September, Bowling Brook has reported 22 incidents to the department in which staff have used physical force to restrain a student, according to agency spokesman Edward Hopkins.

Wednesday, several police officers and county sheriff's deputies guarded the long driveway to the school in rural Keymar. The hum of bulldozers could be heard flattening earth around the facility, which is expanding.

The program houses 170 juvenile offenders. In the past, some would have been sent to the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School, which has been largely closed.

John and Tammy Fouchie sat in the school lobby, upset about the news of Simmons' death, and threatened to pull their 15-year-old son out of the program.

While restraining their son, Josh Gorsuch, on Friday, school counselors had dislocated his shoulder, stepfather John Fouchie said. "I can see trying to discipline them, but not that kind of stuff," he said.

School officials declined to be interviewed Wednesday, but sheriff's deputies provided a sketch of what happened to Simmons on Tuesday.

About 8:20 p.m., deputies were summoned by paramedics who were treating Simmons for cardiac arrest, according to Lt. Phil Kasten.

School staff told the deputies that Simmons had become "enraged for no apparent reason, and during an outburst threatened to harm other students and staff," the sheriff's office said in a statement.

"As counselors worked to calm the student, he reportedly advanced threateningly toward them and was restrained, but continued to struggle with staff. During the struggle, staff noticed that the student had become lethargix and quickly lost consciousness," the statement said.
According to court records, Simmons was 5 feet 9 inches and 147 pounds at the time of his arrest in February.

The death at Bowling Brook comes after a brawl among a group of about a dozen girls late Monday at the Waxter Center that state police were summoned to help break up.

Hopkins said there were no injuries, but that girls involved in the disturbance ripped out light fixtures and fire sprinklers in a day room, causing water and other damage.

He said the brawl started about 6 p.m. with a fight between two girls over a candy bar as the youths were having dinner.
It was broken up, but fighting resumed and others got involved when the girls moved to the day room for recreation a short time later.

The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has long promoted reduced reliance on detention and incarceration of youth through its Detention Diversion Advocacy Project and the policy development of CJCJ.

In this newly designed CJCJ Bulletin, CJCJ will pay special tribute to its DDAP staff, their work and accomplishments and the special role they play in the future of community based juvenile justice service. In 2007, CJCJ will collaborate with local juvenile justice stakeholders to develop a Plan for Effective Juvenile Justice.

CJCJ will propose a reformed organizational structure for service delivery to youth and a strategic plan for capacity building among juvenile justice service providers. A plan will envision service delivery to youth on a case-by-case basis through community-based programs.

CJCJ is currently seeking funding to implement its work to support San Francisco community-based organizations that provide services to youth involved in the juvenile justice system. San Francisco is well placed to become a pioneering county in changing the manner in which juvenile justice reaches the community.

Santa Cruz County has made great changes within its probation department to reduce detention numbers and rely more heavily on alternatives that keep youth in the community. San Francisco must reduce its reliance on detention and develop a framework to incorporate the resources of the community into the lives of youthful offenders. CJCJ’s juvenile justice plan relies on the continued viability and innovation of local CBOs, recognizing that they are best suited to provide services to the city’s youth.

What’s Inside?

* Meet Kimo Uila, DDAP Program Director.
    * DDAP expands to serve reentering youth.
    * CJCJ Executive Director Invited to Little Hoover Advisory Committee.
    * CJCJ Juvenile Justice Advocacy Updates

Read the rest of CJCJ’s newest Bulletin by clicking here (adobe acrobat reader needed to read)

CJCJ Bulletin:

A Plan For Juvenile Justice in SF

MONTAGUE, Texas - A 62-year-old woman was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing her teenage grandson while he slept, then setting their mobile home on fire.
Jamie Larue Holmes had pleaded guilty to murder and arson. She will be eligible for parole when she's 75, prosecutor Jack McGaughey said.
Firefighters found the body of Brock Holmes, 18, inside the burning trailer near Nocona, northwest of Dallas, in June 2006, and police found his grandmother hiding in woods nearby.
She said she shot the teen in the back of the head while he was sleeping at his desk the morning after they had argued about his getting a job, McGaughey said. Holmes told authorities she planned to shoot herself but ran out of bullets.

Investigators never determined a motive, but McGaughey said Holmes indicated a conflict with her grandson that she did not want discussed during a trial.
"It seemed to be very important to her that her grandson's conduct toward her not be an issue brought out in court," the prosecutor said.

At that time I had no problem with Paula being sentenced to death. I felt that if they did not issue the death sentence in this case, that what they were saying to my family was that my grandmother was not an important enough person to merit the death penalty. And I felt that my grandmother was a very important person.

It was about four months after this time I was having some personal problems. I was reflecting on my life and on some of the things that hadn't worked out very well. I began to picture someone who had a whole lot more problems than I did: Paula Cooper. I could see her slunk in a corner of her death row cell, tears running down her eyes, saying, "What have I done? What have I done?"

I began to think about my grandmother's life and some of the things that my grandmother stood for. I became convinced that my grandmother would have been appalled by the fact that this girl was on death row, that the state of Indiana was going to take her life, and that many of grandmother's friends and family were supporting this.

I came to a conclusion that forgiveness was the right way to go. At that time I had absolutely no love and compassion for Paula at all. My grandmother had been heinously murdered. But I was convinced that my grandmother wanted someone in our family to have love and compassion so I began to pray in tears, begging God to give me love and compassion for Paula on behalf of my grandmother.

I no longer wanted Paula to die. I began to correspond with Paula, and shared my experience of forgiveness with her. I told Paula about my grandmother and gave her some different verses in the Bible, sharing my grandmother's faith with her.

After I asked for love and compassion for Paula, within eight months I became very concerned about the other juveniles who were on death row for crimes that they had committed. And I began to ask for love and compassion for them also.

I carried that a step farther and began to pray for love and compassion for all 2700 death row inmates throughout the United States. And that prayer basically was answered, too, where I do have a love for all these people. I believe it's terribly wrong for the state to take their lives and it's because I see these people as human beings.

Vengeance is not the answer. Vengeance is never the answer. Many people in our organization say that it's a discredit to our lost loved ones to say that the life of another person would ever repay the life of the loved one we lost.

Having compassion for Paula Cooper did more for me than it did for her. Helping Paula Cooper did more for me than it did for her. That's the way that forgiveness is.

Graphs:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/07/08/GR2007070800371.html

Sarah Bryer

Director

National Juvenile Justice Network

at the Coalition for Juvenile Justice

1710 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, 10th Floor

Washington, DC 20036

202/467-0864 x 105

cell: 202/714-1162

fax: 202/887-0738

bryer@juvjustice.org

www.njjn.org

This Is Your (Father’s) Brain on Drugs

By MIKE MALES

Santa Cruz, Calif.

A SPATE of news reports have breathlessly announced that science can explain why adults have such trouble dealing with teenagers: adolescents possess “immature,” “undeveloped” brains that drive them to risky, obnoxious, parent-vexing behaviors. The latest example is a study out of Temple University that found that the “temporal gap between puberty, which impels adolescents toward thrill seeking, and the slow maturation of the cognitive-control system, which regulates these impulses, makes adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability for risky behavior.”

We know the rest of the script: Commentators brand teenagers as stupid, crazy, reckless, immature, irrational and even alien, then advocate tough curbs on youthful freedoms. Jay Giedd, who heads the brain imaging project at the National Institutes of Health, argues that the voting and drinking ages should be raised to 25. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, asks whether we should allow teenagers to be lifeguards or to enlist in the military. And state legislators around the country have proposed raising driving ages.

But the handful of experts and officials making these claims are themselves guilty of reckless overstatement. More responsible brain researchers — like Daniel Siegel of the University of California at Los Angeles and Kurt Fischer at Harvard’s Mind, Brain and Education Program — caution that scientists are just beginning to identify how systems in the brain work.

“People naturally want to use brain science to inform policy and practice, but our limited knowledge of the brain places extreme limits on that effort,” Dr. Siegel told me. “There can be no ‘brain-based education’ or ‘brain-based parenting’ at this early point in the history of neuroscience.”

Why, then, do many pundits and policy makers rush to denigrate adolescents as brainless? One troubling possibility: youths are being maligned to draw attention from the reality that it’s actually middle-aged adults — the parents — whose behavior has worsened.

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises:

•

18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

•

46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today’s middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19, according to the national center.

•

More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.

•

630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

•

21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.

•

370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.

•

More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

What experts label “adolescent risk taking” is really baby boomer risk taking. It’s true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Strangely, the experts never mention even more damning new “discoveries” about the middle-aged brain, like the 2004 study of scans by Harvard researchers revealing declines in key memory and learning genes that become significant by age 40. In reality, human brains are highly adaptive. Both teenagers and adults display a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors derived from individual conditions and choices, not harsh biological determinism. There’s no “typical teenager” any more than there’s a “typical” 45-year-old.

Commentators slandering teenagers, scientists misrepresenting shaky claims about the brain as hard facts, 47-year-olds displaying far riskier behaviors than 17-year-olds, politicians refusing to face growing middle-aged crises ... if grown-ups really have superior brains, why don’t we act as if we do?

Mike Males is a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and a founder of Youthfacts.org.

_______________________________

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York and his colleagues in the State Legislature got deserved kudos earlier this year for passing a law that provides aid and protection to victims who are smuggled into this country and forced to work as sex slaves. Unfortunately, the sex trafficking law did nothing to protect the growing numbers of American-born children, as young as 12 or 13, who are forced into prostitution by street pimps.

During the last term, the Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have provided those protections. Under the Safe Harbor Act, children who are too young to legally consent to sex would no longer be charged with prostitution and would no longer be treated as criminals. The courts would instead be required to provide them with counseling, medical care and the long-term shelter they need to reclaim their lives.

As might be expected, sexually exploited children come from society’s most troubled families. A study ordered by the Legislature estimated that about 85 percent of the state’s exploited children are from families that had been involved with the child welfare system, while in New York City, three-quarters of the children had been placed in foster homes.

Prosecutors opposed the Safe Harbor Act, arguing that the threat of detention was necessary to force the children to testify against the pimps. But these are battered, terrorized children who are typically in no condition to confront their exploiters in court. By threatening to lock them up, we deepen their distrust of an adult world that has brutalized and mistreated them.

Other opponents argue that the Legislature has underestimated how much the law’s requirements for counseling and other services will cost the state and failed to clarify certain legal technicalities. But these issues can be resolved and should not prevent Governor Spitzer and legislators from reaching agreement on an essential bill that provides help and protection for the state’s most vulnerable children.

Children in Need of Safe Harbor

September 15, 2007

Editorial

Life without hope

In the US, there are 2,270 prisoners who were sentenced as children to life without parole. They will die behind bars. Ed Pilkington asks five of them - from a 21-year-old to a 70-year-old - how do they cope?

Saturday August 4, 2007

The Guardian

"Closing!" A woman prison officer bellows out the word, her arms stretched across the doorway. She presses a button and a grate of thick iron bars slides shut with a thud. I'm inside now. It's impossible not to be overcome by a sense of deja vu. You've been in this place a hundred times in a hundred movies, walked these colourless corridors, breathed in the sweat and disinfectant, flinched as the doors slam behind you. Over there is the observation desk where the guards are laughing at some joke behind bulletproof glass. There are the inmates' relatives in the visiting room, some looking bored, others trying hard not to cry. There are the prisoners themselves, dressed in their dark blue uniforms like pyjamas. There are the 30ft walls for you to stare at, and dream of scaling. Here are the rolls of barbed wire, glistening platinum white in the midday sun.

And there in front of you is a person looking up, with a nervous smile. She has blue eyes, hazel brown hair and freckles. Her prison number is stamped across her back: 599905. Nicole Ann Dupure. Height: 5ft 2in. Weight: 140lb. Date of birth: July 8 1986. Earliest release date: Life.

When she was sentenced, the judge ruled that the time she had spent in jail awaiting trial - 264 days - should be credited against her term of incarceration. What does that mean? Nobody can predict when Dupure will die, so nobody can calculate when to let her out. Her sentence demands she stay in the Robert Scott Correctional Facility, the main women's prison within the state of Michigan, for the rest of her natural life. She will never have the chance to demonstrate her remorse or convince anyone she has reformed: it is stipulated she is not entitled to parole.

Dupure was 17 when the crime for which she is convicted took place. She is one of 2,270 juveniles across the United States who were sentenced to life without parole, a punishment second only in severity to the death penalty. All were under 18 when they committed the crimes. Six of them were 13, and 50 of them were 14 - an age at which US law forbids them to drive a car, give medical consent, vote, leave school, sign a contract, drink alcohol in a bar, serve on a jury, be drafted in the army, live away from home. Yet they were tried as adults in an adult court and given no possibility of a second chance.

In Michigan, Dupure is one of 307 such inmates, the third highest number in any American state after Pennsylvania and Louisiana. She describes her prison day. She gets up at 4am to work in the kitchen. She does a 40-hour week, earning 18 cents an hour. When she asked the prison authorities if she could take a business vocational course, she was turned down on the grounds that as she will never be set free there is no point learning skills geared to rejoining the outside. It's not exactly what she intended to do with her future when she was a teenager, she tells me. At school she had aspirations to become a medical lab technician, specialising in the treatment of heart defects. Her background was far from typical for a lifer - no criminal record, no history of alcohol or drug abuse, a high school graduate with mainly B grades. Her next step was to be college.

A chance encounter when she was 17 changed everything. She was working in the holidays to earn petrol money at a grocery store near her home in Michigan's St Clair County. There was a 19-year-old working there called William Blevins who was funny and charismatic - they started dating. "I wasn't able to see the warning signs. My mum did. She said he didn't seem like a good kid and I shouldn't be around him as he would bring me down. I didn't listen to her. I thought like any teenager that she just didn't want me to have a boyfriend."

When Blevins was thrown out of his home by his parents, Dupure, by then pregnant, left home to be with him. "I just didn't want him to be alone," she says. They went looking for a motel room to rent. On April 23 2004 they stopped off at Big Boy, a fast-food restaurant she knew well because it was near the apartment of her great-aunt's best friend, Shirley Perry. Perry, who was 89, used to babysit for Dupure when she was very young; Dupure and Blevins had been to her flat several times, offering to help her with shopping and odd jobs.

At this point the official version parts company with Dupure's. In court, the prosecution alleged that the teenagers plotted together to kill Perry for her money. They took just $30 from her flat to pay for motel fees and two milkshakes at Big Boy. Dupure actively participated in the murder, striking the old woman on the head with a cooking pot and fetching the kitchen knife Blevins used to kill her.

Dupure insists she was not in the apartment at all, but waited in the restaurant, oblivious to the events unfolding, while Blevins went off on his own. What is certain is that Blevins murdered the old woman, stabbing her several times and strangling her. Under police questioning he admitted it, saying he acted alone. But shortly before he went on trial he changed his evidence and put Dupure alongside him at the scene of the murder. In return, the prosecution agreed he should be given the lesser charge of second-degree murder and avoid lifelong incarceration. Under cross-examination, he conceded to the jury, "I never had intentions to pin it on her until I ran out of options."

Blevins got 20 to 50 years, with the hope of reducing his sentence through good behaviour. Dupure got life without parole, with no forensic evidence tying her to the crime and entirely on the strength of Blevins' testimony.

Dupure has just turned 21 but she still looks 17. She was told about life without parole for the first time when she entered prison - "You never go home." She spent much of her first year crying, she says. The prison doctor put her on Prozac but she stopped taking it; as she puts it, "I'm depressed because I'm in this place, not because I'm depressed." Instead, she sees the prison therapist once a month. She finds talking to the therapist helpful - she can't be open with other prisoners about her fears and despair, as it would be taken as a sign of weakness. In prison, "you have to pretend to be strong".

"The difficult bit is blocking out the thought that I'm here for ever. You can only do that for so long, and then you break down. Something hits you. Somebody will say, 'I'm glad I haven't got life' and it will get you. Or one of the friends you made will leave for the outside and that hurts, so you stop getting close to people." She was recently sent a questionnaire by lawyers conducting a survey of juvenile prisoners on life without parole. Asked what was the most difficult challenge she faced inside, she wrote, "Trying not to feel alone."

Michigan is one of 41 states in America that allows children under 18 to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The US is among a tiny minority of countries (Somalia is another) that have refused to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that expressly forbids the practice. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, only three other countries - Israel, South Africa and Tanzania - mete out the sentence and they have collectively just 12 prisoners serving it.

Technically, a child of any age could be incarcerated for life in Michigan for first-degree murder. Above the age of 14, suspects can be placed directly into the adult court system. At that point, even the judges' hands are tied. If a child is convicted in an adult court of a range of serious offences - taking part in a robbery that leads to murder, say - they must automatically be given life without parole, even where the judge feels that is inappropriate.

That's what happened to Matthew Bentley. Prisoner 271014. Height: 5ft 4in. Weight: 135lb. Date of birth: October 4 1982.

Bentley broke into a house in Michigan's Colfax township on September 2 1997 looking for a car to steal and some ready cash. By ill luck, he chose a house where the owner was a gun enthusiast and had 25 handguns and rifles on the property. Bentley had no experience with firearms, but when he came across them in the hallway, he grabbed a couple of handguns along with a bottle of Coke. The woman of the house, Betty Bardell, surprised him when she walked into the hallway shouting, "What the hell are you doing here? I'm going to call the police!"

Bentley pointed one of the guns at her and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit her in the left shoulder, and she fell to the floor bleeding. He told me what happened next: "I stood over her and I spoke to her and I said, 'I'm sorry. If I could I would call the police to get you out.' I cried a little bit. And then I left."

Bardell bled to death on the carpet.

There is nothing innocent about Bentley. He has never disputed what he did. He was aware immediately he pulled the trigger that he had done a terrible thing. "Have I felt remorse? I felt sorry from the first second and I always have done." The only mitigation was his age and his background. When he murdered Bardell, Matthew Bentley was 14. His legal file contains details of his immediate family ...

Father: In jail for sexually abusing a relative. Mother: Alcoholic; facing trial for receiving stolen property. Half-brother: In jail for raping a family member. Sister K: Alcoholic. Sister T: History of arrests for domestic assault. Half-sister C: In mental hospital.

Bentley's parents, Terry and Debra, were serial divorcees. They married in 1975 and divorced two years later. Terry took a second wife, Grace, in 1978. They divorced a year later. Terry remarried Debra in 1980, and she gave birth to Matthew in 1982. They divorced for the second time in 1989. Terry remarried Grace in 1991, by which time he was already in jail as a sex offender. Matthew's childhood was as you might expect in the circumstances. He was a straight E grade student. He was regularly suspended for truancy and often in trouble with police. He started smoking dope aged 10. He was in and out of children's homes, and at the time he murdered Bardell he was on Zoloft for depression and Dexedrine for hyperactivity.

The jury took just an hour to find him guilty in July 1998. He was 15 by then. One of the jurors told the local paper that "a couple of the older ladies on the jury broke down when we got in the jury room. They had feelings for the Bentley kid and they said they had grandchildren about his age."

Judge Richard Knoblock gave him the only sentence available to him under Michigan law. But he made his feelings clear. "I don't agree with the legislature that he should be sent away for the rest of his life without parole," the judge said. "It was a horrendous crime he committed and certainly he should be punished very severely. I'm just not confident in having to lock him up for ever."

Bentley is now 24. He says he has spent the past nine years in jail first in denial, then in deep despair, and now in some degree of reconciliation with his fate. He has stopped fighting in prison and no longer gets punishment cards. He has thought, too, about why he did what he did when he was 14. "I was a child trying to be a man. I tried to step up to the roles that were missing in my home. I thought I'd get away with it. Even that was childish."

There is another document in his file, a poem that he wrote about his time inside. Part of it reads:

"Everyday that goes by,

You know you have to die

before you finish your time.

Suddenly you're all alone

and 50 or 60 years is too damn long.

Isolated in a world turn cold."

There are only three ways that prisoners put away for life as juveniles can hope to see the outside again. They can win an appeal, by proving there was a flaw in the trial process - they cannot challenge the sentence itself. They can receive a pardon from the governor of Michigan - except the governor has never pardoned a juvenile lifer. Or the state assembly could pass legislation outlawing the practice, and implement it retroactively. Lawyers working on many of the 307 cases have pulled together a bill that would do just that, which they hope will go before Michigan's lawmakers this autumn.

Deborah LaBelle, a leading lawyer who is supporting the bill on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, says she is as hopeful as she has ever been that the legislation might pass. "Sending someone to prison is partly about public security and partly about punishment. People are coming to understand that child prisoners should have a chance to prove they no longer pose a risk. And on punishment, then surely having a person spend more of their life in a prison cell than they had lived as children on the outside has to be sufficient even for the most unforgiving of people."

LaBelle has been careful to involve victims of juvenile crime and their families in the debate about changing the law, and several victims' families have privately offered their support. "They say that what happened was horrible and has devastated them, but they do not want the knowledge that the child who committed the crime will stay in jail for ever to rest on their conscience."

Kevin Boyd. Prisoner 251328. Height: 5ft 7in. Weight: 170lb. Date of birth: September 26 1977. He was 16 when, on August 6 1994, he helped his mother murder his own father. Like Matthew Bentley, Boyd came from a disturbed home. His mother, Lynn, was addicted to prescription and illicit drugs, his father, Kevin, was an alcoholic who regularly beat him. His parents separated on Boxing Day when Boyd was 11 and his mother went to live with another woman. Boyd went to 10 different schools before he dropped out at 15. He received psychiatric treatment and was in hospital after a suicide attempt.

On the night of the murder, Boyd's mother, high on drugs, met him at a Burger King and asked him for the keys to his father's flat, saying she was going to kill him. He handed over the keys. The next morning Boyd went to his father's flat and, hearing no one inside, forced open the door. Kevin senior was slumped in his easy chair. He had been bludgeoned with a baseball bat and stabbed 23 times.

Boyd was interrogated by police for eight hours. He told them he had handed over the keys and that was all. Then a second team of officers questioned him. They turned off the tape recorder, and kept repeating to him the mantra, "The truth will set you free."

"Every time I tried to tell them what happened, they shouted me down. 'No, you didn't do that!' This sounds totally irrational, I know, but after hours of that, I thought if I told them what they wanted they would let me out and it would all go away." He confessed to having been the one to stab his father 23 times, and was given life without parole.

Boyd has contemplated his actions and its consequences a great deal over the past 12 years in jail. He is writing an account of his childhood, the murder and his subsequent imprisonment. Though he protests that he was not the killer, he still holds himself wholly to blame for giving his mother the keys and thinks it was right that he was sent to prison for many years. "I'm not innocent. I was responsible for his death. I could have said no to my mother. I could have picked up the phone to warn my father. Anything. But I didn't, and I am suffering the consequences."

He says he has made that phone call to his father a "million times". "I think about it every night before I go to sleep." He has had a clean prison record for six years and leads a pretty solitary existence. He once had a pet, an injured meadow vole he found in the exercise yard that he nursed and then let go. He hasn't had a human visitor for 10 years, though he does correspond with his mother who is a lifer in the same prison as Dupure. He finds comfort in playing guitar, jogging around the yard and writing his memoir. In one chapter he says sorry to his father. "If I could change it, I would die in your place, just to hear your rare but contagious laugh one more time. Dad, I am so, so sorry. For what it's worth, I always loved you. I always loved you both."

Donald Logan. Prisoner 132850. Height: 5ft 5in. Weight: 135lb. Date of birth: June 23 1954. He was tried and convicted twice for the murder of a paperboy, Thomas Eldridge, who went to his school. They were both 16. At the first trial, Logan, who is black, was found guilty by 12 white jurors. His lawyers appealed on the grounds that the racial composition of the jury was prejudicial, and a retrial was ordered. In the second trial there were 11 white jurors, including two who were members of whites-only organizations. The 12th juror was black, but during the course of the hearing it emerged that she was the aunt of the prosecution's key witness who was giving evidence against Logan in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Logan's case illustrates two key statistics about juvenile life without parole. Of the 307 prisoners in Michigan on that sentence, 69% are black, compared with 15% of the state's population as a whole. A study by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty also found that more than one in four of the juveniles incarcerated for ever was convicted of "felony murder" - serious crimes during which someone is killed yet where the juvenile did not personally or directly cause the death.

The prosecution case against Logan was that he identified the paperboy to a gang of his elder brother's friends who had robbed Eldridge the previous week and wanted to prevent him giving evidence against them. Logan was alleged to have acted as lookout when two of the gang members shot the boy. It was never alleged he had pulled the trigger himself or even held a gun. "I killed nobody," Logan said. "The guys asked me who was the paperboy. I was the one who pointed him out. That's all I did."

At the trial, a psychologist who examined Logan said that though he was 17 by then, he had the level of understanding of a 12-year-old. The pre-sentence investigation described him as being "a failure in almost everything he ever tried" and he was labelled a "retard". As soon as he was arrested, aged 16, he was placed in an adult jail where he faced physical and sexual harassment from older prisoners. "That's one of the things I'd preach if I ever get out: never send a teenager to adult prison. They are just like a little animal who will get eat up the minute they arrive," he told me.

In the early 90s, Logan taught himself to read and write and discovered, to his own surprise, that he wasn't a "retard" after all. He also became a Jehovah's Witness and, with the help of the Bible, he has learned how to live peacefully in prison. The last time he had a disciplinary ticket was in 1996. "I can see now how I messed up my whole life. But I've also learned something in all these years inside: how to be a man, how to respect people, how not to take life for granted."

Under the terms of his sentence, though, he will never be able to argue in front of a parole board that he has changed. His most recent - and final - appeal against his sentence was in October 2001. His lawyers argued that to keep him inside any longer was tantamount to warehousing. They said he had proven himself to be a reliable, God-fearing and reformed person.

The judgment handed down at the end of that appeal sits in his legal file. It reads: "It is ordered and adjudged that the petition for habeas corpus be, and hereby is, DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE."

So what if life continues to mean life? What if this autumn's bill falls? What if Donald Logan, and all the others, remain in their cells to the day they die?

I had been intending to put some of those questions to a man, now aged 70, who knows he will never see the outside of a prison again. Allen Smith. Prisoner 085017. Height: 6ft. Weight: 158lb. Date of birth: December 6 1936. He sent me word that he was keen to talk to me, but warned that he hadn't been feeling well lately and had been spending a lot of time in the prison infirmary. He would telephone me at his lawyer's office.

As I waited for the call, I read his file. Smith had an unhappy relationship with his stepfather, had been in and out of homes, and had a reputation for angry outbursts. He was 16 when, on December 2 1953, he walked up to the house of an old couple he knew well, Robert and Celeste Holton. He said he only intended to steal from the couple but things got out of control. He picked up a deer rifle that happened to be standing by their refrigerator. Afterwards, he said he didn't know what came over him, why he emptied the whole cartridge and killed them both.

He was arrested that day and taken to prison. The lawyer appointed to his case advised him to plead guilty. That way he would be out after 10 years. "Listen to him, son," said the sheriff. "He's telling you right." Smith did as he was advised and on December 19, just 17 days after the murder, he was sentenced to life without parole. The judge said he had no choice. "It is hard on the court and hard on you and hard on everybody, and too hard on the two dead people, but crime does not pay," he said.

Smith spent several years in solitary confinement with hard labour. He writes in his file that soon after the murder he was struck by a deep feeling of remorse. "I had hoped they'd take my own life, and I couldn't understand how I could have done such a thing to such wonderful people, because they really were. It really tore me apart for a long time."

Details from the file are sketchy, but he has clearly suffered other periods of anger and despair, punctuated by moments of hope and happiness. He realised only a few years into his sentence that he would stay in jail for ever. In 1976 he tried to build a better life for himself in prison and he married a woman who had been visiting him. At the time he had hopes he might be given a parole hearing. When it became clear those hopes were groundless, he told the woman he wanted a divorce, to spare her. They still write. Then in 1982 he escaped from prison, and was recaptured after a few days. Futilely, he was given an additional five years on his sentence.

Recently he has become more at ease with himself. He took up courses in Bible studies and literacy. He has also versed himself in the law, and until he became ill would act as a legal adviser to younger prisoners, helping them prepare appeals. Smith writes in his file that he has come to accept that he will die in jail. In an entry a few months ago, he says he is certain he has not long to live. He says religion has proved a comfort to him: "I know I have been forgiven."

I spent most of the day in the lawyer's office waiting for his call. It never came.

Nicole Dupure is at the beginning of the journey and has the experience of despair and reconciliation still in front of her. She's started to think about what has happened to her and why. "I just wanted to grow up too fast, I wanted it all right then."

Her mother and father visit her regularly. "I do my best to hide it when I'm not coping. Especially from my dad. He's 73 and he thinks he will die before I get out." Her child by Blevins is now two years old and has been adopted by Dupure's mother. The little girl came to see Dupure for the first and only time in April. Dupure was shocked because she had assumed her daughter would not remember her, but she did and ran into her arms calling, "Mummy!"

It's time to go and I ask Dupure a couple of last questions. Should the bill fail this autumn, should she remain in jail for ever, could she find any value in life? "I'm going to keep positive," she replies. "I'm not going to try to kill myself or anything. I'm in prison, yes, but it's still a life. I'm just in another world now."

And her regrets?

"I just wish I'd listened to my mum. She laughs when I say that and says, 'It's a little late now, Nic.'"

I stand to leave, walking back past the observation post and into the antechamber with the sliding iron doors. The woman guard steps forward to meet me and shouts, "Closing!" for a second time.

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say that lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

Giuliani's presidential campaign declined to address Nevin's contention that the mayor merely was at the right place at the right time. But William Bratton, who served as Giuliani's police commissioner and who initiated many of the policing techniques credited with reducing the crime rate, dismissed Nevin's theory as absurd. Bratton and Giuliani instituted harsh measures against quality-of-life offenses, based on the "broken windows" theory of addressing minor offenses to head off more serious crimes.

Many other theories have emerged to try to explain the crime decline. In the 2005 book "Freakonomics," Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner said the legalization of abortion in 1973 had eliminated "unwanted babies" who would have become violent criminals. Other experts credited lengthy prison terms for violent offenders, or demographic changes, socioeconomic factors, and the fall of drug epidemics. New theories have emerged as crime rates have inched up in recent years.

Most of the theories have been long on intuition and short on evidence. Nevin says his data not only explain the decline in crime in the 1990s, but the rise in crime in the 1980s and other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, indicate that lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

Because the countries phased out lead at different points, they provide a rigorous test: In each instance, the violent crime rate tracks lead poisoning levels two decades earlier.

"It is startling how much mileage has been given to the theory that abortion in the early 1970s was responsible for the decline in crime" in the 1990s, Nevin said. "But they legalized abortion in Britain, and the violent crime in Britain soared in the 1990s. The difference is our gasoline lead levels peaked in the early '70s and started falling in the late '70s, and fell very sharply through the early 1980s and was virtually eliminated by 1986 or '87.

"In Britain and most of Europe, they did not have meaningful constraints [on leaded gasoline] until the mid-1980s and even early 1990s," he said. "This is the reason you are seeing the crime rate soar in Mexico and Latin America, but [it] has fallen in the United States."

Lead levels plummeted in New York in the early 1970s, driven by federal policies to eliminate lead from gasoline and local policies to reduce lead emissions from municipal incinerators. Between 1970 and 1974, the number of New York children heavily poisoned by lead fell by more than 80 percent, according to data from the New York City Department of Health.

Lead levels in New York have continued to fall. One analysis in the late 1990s found that children in New York had lower lead exposure than children in many other big U.S. cities, possibly because of a 1960 policy to replace old windows. That policy, meant to reduce deaths from falls, had an unforeseen benefit -- old windows are a source of lead poisoning, said Dave Jacobs of the National Center for Healthy Housing, an advocacy group that is publicizing Nevin's work. Nevin's research was not funded by the group.

The later drop in violent crime was dramatic. In 1990, 31 New Yorkers out of every 100,000 were murdered. In 2004, the rate was 7 per 100,000 -- lower than in most big cities. The lead theory also may explain why crime fell broadly across the United States in the 1990s, not just in New York.

The centerpiece of Nevin's research is an analysis of crime rates and lead poisoning levels across a century. The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

"Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do," said Needleman, one of the country's foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin's theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, "If I do this, I will go to jail."

Nevin's work has been published mainly in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research. Within the field of neurotoxicology, Nevin's findings are unsurprising, said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Environmental Research.

"There is a strong literature on lead and sociopathic behavior among adolescents and young adults with a previous history of lead exposure," she said.

Two new studies by criminologists Richard Rosenfeld and Steven F. Messner have looked at Giuliani's policing policies. They found that the mayor's zero-tolerance approach to crime was responsible for 10 percent, maybe 20 percent, at most, of the decline in violent crime in New York City.

Nevin acknowledges that crime rates are rising in some parts of the United States after years of decline, but he points out that crime is falling in other places and is still low overall by historical measures. Also, the biggest reductions in lead poisoning took place by the mid-1980s, which may explain why reductions in crime might have tapered off by 2005. Lastly, he argues that older, recidivist offenders -- who were exposed to lead as toddlers three or four decades ago -- are increasingly accounting for much of the violent crime.

Nevin's finding may even account for phenomena he did not set out to address. His theory addresses why rates of violent crime among black adolescents from inner-city neighborhoods have declined faster than the overall crime rate -- lead amelioration programs had the biggest impact on the urban poor. Children in inner-city neighborhoods were the ones most likely to be poisoned by lead, because they were more likely to live in substandard housing that had lead paint and because public housing projects were often situated near highways.

Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

Nevin's finding implies a double tragedy for America's inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.