The Labyrinth

Hannah Wheeling's body was found in the snow on the morning of February 18, 2010, just outside the grounds of the Cheltenham Youth Facility. Cheltenham, in the nomenclature of Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services, is a "secure" facility. Located in semirural Prince George's County, it is the most chronically overcrowded juvenile facility in Maryland, home to more than one hundred mostly African American youth. Wheeling, 65, was a teacher. She drove each morning from her home in Harford County, where she lived by herself, to teach in a program called Re-Direct, just outside the Cheltenham fences, a place for boys deemed of less risk than those incarcerated inside the locked buildings.

A week before she planned to retire, Wheeling was beaten and sexually assaulted during her workday, inside her workplace. She died of blunt force trauma caused, police believe, by blows delivered with a concrete block. Her killer dragged her body outside, where it lay in the winter night, not discovered until the following day. Brian Wonsom, a 13-year-old boy from Forestville, Maryland, who was in the Re-Direct program, was charged in adult court with her murder.

A month after Wheeling's death, Juvenile Services secretary Donald DeVore addressed a press conference to let the public know that things were being taken care of-people were being held responsible not just for the murder but also for the larger problems at Cheltenham. Changes were being made. DeVore had come to Maryland four years earlier with fanfare and a thirty-year record as a juvenile justice reformer. "I've never lost a staff member," DeVore told the press that day. "The death of Hannah Wheeling has been a huge loss." Eight months later, he resigned.

This March, Maryland Circuit Court Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr. ruled that Wonsom, now 14, would be deemed an adult and charged with murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and carrying a dangerous weapon. The youngest person ever to be tried as an adult in Prince George's County, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He awaits trial now in the Western Maryland Children's Center in Hagerstown. "The court is simply not prepared to accept the risk of his premature release," Judge Nichols wrote in his ruling.

The Cheltenham murder and the facility itself embody the profound contradictions and ambivalence within our juvenile justice system. We intuitively know that young people are plastic, capable of being molded. A 13-year-old murderer challenges our sufferance of the young, however. It confirms our suspicions: Those kids aren't like our kids. In America we fear the idea of Brian Wonsom as much as the monstrousness of his alleged crimes. That fear colors our judgment, deforms public will, and enfeebles our ability to even imagine a system of true juvenile justice.

Maryland processed more than 40,000 juvenile cases in 2010. Most of them were nothing like Brian Wonsom's. Yet our current system on any given day keeps hundreds of kids locked in large facilities without meaningful treatment, therapy, or opportunity for redemption. Still, a convergence of forces-outcry over the Cheltenham murder, the substantial decrease in juvenile crime locally and nationally, and the need to prioritize investments for the public good in an age of austerity-make this the opportune time to move beyond our fear and see meaningful justice done for kids.

The quest for justice for young offenders in Baltimore begins with the shouting of names at the city's Juvenile Justice Center, a nearly block-long structure east of downtown that stands out against the abandoned retail hopes of Old Town Mall and the decaying facades of the once-vibrant urban thoroughfare of Gay Street. The institution, which includes three circuit courtrooms, hearing rooms for juvenile masters, offices for prosecutors and public defenders, and a 144-bed detention center, is known more prosaically among those who use its services as "Baby Booking." Inside, adolescents slouch on hallway benches, waiting for public defenders to call their names and sheriff's deputies to open the courtroom doors.

Both the early morning and afternoon sun can cut through the three-story glass atrium so that, sitting in the waiting area, you have to shield your eyes on bright days. Before hearings, you can watch the public defenders file out, shoes clapping upon the tiled floor. Some pull wheeled carriers of file folders. Many leaf through folders with proliferating sticky notes, searching for the name, getting familiar with the case. The lawyers, most of them young, often meet their clients for the first time moments before entering the courtroom where a judge or a juvenile master will decide what should happen to a young person in trouble.

There was a time in the United States when we thought of young people simply as little adults, reckoning them fully responsible for their actions. The country's first juvenile court appeared in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899 as part of Progressive-era reforms that also gave us child labor laws and compulsory public education. The court operated under the English common law principle of parens patriae-the parent of the country-acting on the behalf of those unable to legally act on their own. The new court embodied a then-novel understanding of childhood and how we viewed complicity with crime and meting out punishment. Young people didn't get due process, but they were at least seen as kids.

Parens patriae still informs what goes on at the Baltimore Juvenile Justice Center, but those public defenders are there because of Gerald Gault. When he was 15, Gault made an obscene phone call and was sentenced to six years in a juvenile detention center. In 1967, the Supreme Court threw out Gault's conviction and, in a landmark decision, established that under the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, kids accused of crimes must be afforded many of the same due process rights as adults so as not to be arbitrarily incarcerated.

Then, between 1984 and 1994, the juvenile homicide rate nearly tripled, and the use of guns by juveniles to kill their victims quadrupled. The public and the lawmakers they elected became terrified by the behavior of the dispossessed young living in this country's metropolitan cores. By the mid-1990s, nearly every state had amended its laws to transfer more young offenders to the criminal courts and to sentence them more severely than they would be in the juvenile system.

By 1996, then-Princeton University professor John DiIulio was warning that "America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile 'superpredators'-radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders."

DiIulio, first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush, later distanced himself from his theory, which spawned a small industry of promoters and elaborators. And while the crime wave that he predicted would peak in 2010 never materialized, the emotional essence of his allegory remains with us. "The state's juvenile justice system isn't set up to deal with today's violent, repeat, youthful offenders and it leaves vulnerable communities less safe than ever," an August 2009 Baltimore Sun editorial trumpeted after 17-year-old Lamont Davis shot another teenage boy and, while doing so, accidentally put a bullet in a 5-year-old girl's head.

The scary phantasms of youth cut loose not just from our laws but also our social norms recur in the American social imagination. Less the youth-outlaw hustle of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in his Adventures and more the ominous nihilism of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son, they reappear and always seem to make us feel less safe than ever. Today, that fear challenges our very notion of what kids are and disfigures our notion of juvenile justice: Do we simply lock those kids away, or do we really invest in saving them?

Juvenile justice in Maryland has grown by accretion into an archipelago of courts, treatment programs, group homes, secure institutions, detention areas, and lock-ups that are run by a combination of for-profit, private, and public companies and agencies. These institutions are staffed and run by public defenders, judges, masters-in-chancery, truant officers, psychologists, social workers, probation and corrections officers, and philanthropic benefactors who see a problem in need of a solution and find their raison d'être in the state's arrested and euphemistically "adjudicated" youth.

I have worked in this landscape, as a teacher in the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center; in prison, where young people are not uncommon; and in programs for kids in the community after they have been adjudicated. I have also visited and counseled dozens of youth in far-flung corners of the state's juvenile justice system. I have seen how each of these corners lacks consistency with other parts of the system and how a community that proclaims belief in rehabilitation and redemption often lapses into incarceration and control. More, in the absence of shared purpose, appropriate institutional spaces, and adequate staff, I have watched again and again how the failure of children is attributed to some inherent criminality. I have seen our prejudice and fear, spoken and unsaid, in jurisprudence, pedagogy, programs, and practice, work itself out on the very bodies of the state's young people.

Kids' voices can be painful and revealing as they narrate their journey through Maryland's system, so I always make sure to listen. Last fall, I asked a group of adjudicated boys I was teaching to consider Hannah Wheeling's murder. "I don't think he should have killed her," a dreadlocked young man on juvenile probation said in a measured tenor that cracked occasionally into something higher, younger. "But I have been at Cheltenham. That's some real country, and they don't give a fuck about what we're going through. Cheltenham is about being locked down and away from home. That's it. Sometimes the stress and all just gets to you."

I asked them about the kids who commandeered a vehicle and escaped from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County last fall. The former Maryland Training School for Boys, Hickey was under a consent decree with the United States Department of Justice for its inadequacy when then-governor Robert Ehrlich ordered it closed in 2005. It is still open.

Others tell me about their time at the Silver Oak Academy, the rebranded Bowling Brook Preparatory School in rural Carroll County where guards killed an incarcerated teen in 2007. I hear their stories of being locked in the city Juvenile Justice Center, which was under Justice Department oversight until 2010 for violations of the federal Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.

Many who have worn them also tell me about how they are able to juke GPS monitors attached to their ankles or simply cut them off, knowing that the system didn't work or that the people tracking their movements didn't seem to care where they were. Lamont Davis was wearing one of these when he shot the teen and the 5-year-old girl. At trial, the Nebraska company that was supposed to be monitoring him and the Department of Juvenile Services both acknowledged that the system couldn't or didn't work. Davis, 17 at the time of the crime, was charged as an adult and found guilty of attempted murder. "What'd they give Lamont? Life plus thirty?" one of my students offers. "They are going to bury him under the jail."

I always ask my students about any time they spent in L-Section, a former maximum security lock-up in the Baltimore City Jail, sections of which date from the 19th century, where juveniles charged or waived-up as adults are confined prior to trial. In 1999, Human Rights Watch found the conditions in L-Section "appalling." The State of Maryland has for years proposed building a new pre-trial detention center to house juveniles charged as adults. Last year, however, as plans for a new $100 million facility neared completion, local faith and youth advocacy groups rallied to oppose it. Groundbreaking was to begin this fall, but Governor Martin O'Malley has suspended awarding contracts for the building until the state completed a study of how many youth it will need to hold. (That study was released at press time. See http//:bit.ly/juvenilejail.)

Still, talk to the kids who have spent time in L-Section, and you hear the often fatalistic realism that both state officials and the advocacy community regularly miss: "Of course they want a new jail for us with their millions," one of my students quips. "But they do need a new jail, because L-Section is hell, straight up hell. And them ministers and what-all out there protesting need to get with that too."

More than just in the voices of children, the contradictions of Maryland's juvenile system have played out in state politics in a tragicomedy of rhetorical excess.

"We are outraged by the patterns of abuse that are being alleged at the Department of Juvenile Justice's boot camps," wrote then-Governor Parris Glendening and Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 1999 in response to the horrors of a now-discredited reform effort. "Violence will not be tolerated," they assured the citizenry.

Robert Ehrlich, who defeated Townsend in the 2003 governor's race in no small measure by hammering her stewardship of juvenile justice, declared in 2005, "My administration is working to dismantle a broken system that suffered from a decade of neglect and replace it with a new, child-first culture centered on treatment and education."

Five years later, Governor O'Malley stated that "anyone would be pressed to find evidence of improvement under [Ehrlich's] watch." His own administration, he asserted, had "made great strides in the toughest of times ... better serving the youth that these facilities are trusted to care for."

This type of partisan one-upmanship and piecemeal reform is a recurring national theme that keeps us from seeing the bigger picture, says Barry Feld, a national expert on juvenile justice from the University of Minnesota Law School. "I once was at a conference at Harvard for judges who heard juvenile cases," Feld says. "They would tell the story about how they saved this kid or that one. It was like kids coming down a river, struggling, drowning without help. The judge would reach in and save one. But more were coming down the river needing help. And this would go on and on. Save a few, others drown. But no one was running up the river to see where all these kids were coming from in the first place."

However, more than a century after the creation of the concept of juvenile justice, a remarkable national consensus about the way forward is emerging-even if, as in Maryland, the politics of fear can still stand in the way. "I've been to some states where I have to tell them, 'You can't get there from here,'" says Mark Steward, founder and director of the Missouri Youth Services Institute, an organization that helps states reform their juvenile justice systems. "When I was in Maryland I could see that you had some of the pieces to work with."

Steward spent seventeen years as director of Missouri's Division of Youth Services, where he led the creation of what is widely acknowledged as the country's most successful juvenile justice system. What Missouri does with young offenders is deceptively simple but politically and culturally very hard. The state has abandoned the large locked facilities like those that define Maryland's system. Instead, youth are housed in small facilities in groups of ten to fifteen on average. Dormitory-like homes are located in the kids' communities, not isolated behind walls or out in the countryside. But more than its institutional spaces, the Missouri model fundamentally changes the way people view kids who break the law. It treats them as kids, inherently capable of redemption. Highly trained teams of staff provide intensive treatment, therapy, care, and extensive support after they are released.

The system works. In Maryland, 26 percent of kids released from residential confinement in a juvenile facility are sentenced to adult prison within three years, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which champions the Missouri model. In Missouri, only 8.5 percent end up in prison three years later.

Steward is at pains to point out that his approach is not somehow easy on juvenile offenders. "Missouri is not soft on crime," he says. "I've worked under Republican Governor John Ashcroft and Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan. There are very few things in Missouri that everyone believes in, but this is one of them."

Of course, building that broad support took work. Lawmakers, Steward says, "can get that Willie Horton syndrome." Horton was the convicted felon serving life who, after participating in a weekend furlough program in 1986, committed assault, armed robbery, and rape and became a symbol for those who believe that rehabilitation and redemption are fantasy.

To combat the politics of fear, Steward used to take freshman state legislators to Missouri's juvenile maximum security building. "It really was just a former school building," he says. "Once [the legislators] met them, got some exposure, played around with these kids, and saw our numbers and success, it was easy for them to support the work."

Bobby Zirkin, a Maryland state senator from Baltimore County, has worked for years for Missouri-like reforms in this state. "If we could do one thing in Maryland," he says, "it's to get on the phone and get Mark Steward up here." Speaking in February about Donald DeVore's replacement as Secretary of the Department of Juvenile Services, Zirkin said, "After so many decades of decay, we need someone with fresh ideas. The main requirement for the job, in my mind, is to come in like a house afire and change things dramatically."

DeVore's replacement, appointed this winter, has begun his tenure with deliberation. Sam Abed, 35, is a former prosecutor and spent five years as deputy director of Virginia's juvenile justice agency. "The biggest deficiency that we need to address is the management function here at [the Department of Juvenile Services], how we operate as a system," Abed told me recently when I called to ask about his vision for Maryland. One of his first priorities is to address the chronic lack of therapeutic settings that leads to kids remaining in detention settings or being sent out of state. "One of the best practices in Missouri is having therapeutic settings near families," he says. "Obviously if we are having to send kids out of state, we are not achieving that."

Still, when asked about trying to fit practices like Missouri's into Maryland's existing system, Abed says, "I have to caution myself every day not to try and fit a square peg in a round hole. I am still getting to know the system and all the other child services and providers, figuring out how to coordinate with other agencies, leverage resources. We don't have the capacity of Missouri. If we don't work together we won't have enough resources."

Mark Steward, for his part, says juvenile justice is more than fitting the pieces together. "The way I like to describe it is that the ideas are just really the roux of the gumbo," he says. More important is changing how we treat kids: "Those on the administrative track can get lost. You have to lead by example, sell it to your frontline staff. You need staff with understanding, empathy, real passion, and dedication.

"The other thing that gets mistaken for meaningful reform," Steward says, "is simply making kids comply. Programs can spend a lot of time, effort, and money getting compliance, and that is seen as success. It is not." He tells me about the graduates of a particular boot-camp program that the police revered. "They said these kids were the most polite kids they re-arrested."

By exchanging fear and prejudice for hope and redemption, the Missouri model points to a successful way forward for Maryland and America. "The decline [in juvenile crime nationally] really makes this the time to do meaningful juvenile justice reform," says the University of Minnesota's Feld.

But ultimately, the challenge of reform comes down to a question of political will, and on that front, reformers are less than optimistic. "It's easy to shortchange this issue now, given the financial times," Zirkin says.

Feld is more blunt: "America is unwilling to invest in the welfare of other people's children."

The detention area at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center where I taught is on the first floor. Employees are searched when they arrive, but after you become a regular, or if you come early enough to work, when the entrance is unmanned, the guard behind the glass just buzzes you in. There are no windows on the Gay Street side, but the hallways have natural light from the windows that open onto an interior courtyard. In that light, the pastel cinderblock interior doesn't look like a prison-just a generic institution.

Kids are separated into "pods" based on who they are, what they've done, and where they are in the process, and officers facilitate each pod's movement through the facility in single file. White T-shirts and gray sweats or jeans are the uniform. The institution-issued sandals keep the danger of laces and the invidiousness of shoe consumption in check. Kids assert their individuality in the details and the exaggerated exposure of boxers.

The Juvenile Justice Center was, when I taught there, still under federal monitoring, and the young principal at the school worked tirelessly to make sure all the paperwork was in order and everyone got his lessons. Everyone tried to stay in compliance. Occasionally, I would deliver a lesson to a kid confined to "the Unit"-the area where they slept-for behavioral or safety reasons. I usually preferred this, because I could get some one-on-one time with a student.

On one such occasion, I visited a young man who, earlier in the day, had cussed out a guard. I told him I knew he did it on purpose, that he was making a show, trying to make his minders afraid. "Yeah, I just didn't feel like going," he said with a mischievous grin. Some kids, particularly those who have been in Maryland's system for a while, develop a sophistication about compliance.

"Ain't a damn thing going on at that school," the boy told me. "You got a shop class with no tools, a technology class"-he puts air quotes around "technology"-"with no computers, some teachers showing movies all day everyday, and a bunch of [Black Guerilla Family] comrades beefing with a bunch of fake-ass Bloods. I'm 'a just stay over here and chill."

A youth counselor sat in an office nearby talking on the phone. The guard who brought me over to the unit had already dozed off in a chair near the locked door. I was overwhelmed by my inadequacy to intervene in this young man's life, to change where this story was going. We didn't do the lesson I brought over and played a game of chess instead.

We talked about his time at Hickey after he got kicked out of Thurgood Marshall High School. He also spent some time in Frederick County at the Victor Cullen Center. He had been at the Juvenile Justice Center for five months after the judge convicted him. Even though the center was designed for pre-trial juvenile detention, it regularly holds kids after their adjudication as they await placement and meaningful help. There's always a backup.

In his ruling that Brian Wonsom would be tried as an adult, Judge Nichols noted that, according to expert medical witnesses, the boy needed ten to fifteen years of therapy and that none of the juvenile facilities the court had approached was willing to accept him. A date for Wonsom's murder trial has still not been set. He remains held without bond.

"They say as soon as a bed opens at Cheltenham I'm over there," the young man in the Unit told me, without emotion, as he looked over his plastic chess pieces. "I really don't want to go over there. My mans told me it was a mess."