Juveniles are pushing drugs, burglarizing residences, robbing, assaulting, maiming, killing, covering properties with painted filth, destroying our every effort to maintain a civilized society.
--Assemblyman George House (R-Hughson) on need for his bill to disclose names of juvenile offenders
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In theory at least, kids deserve a second chance. In practice, fewer and fewer children may be getting one.
According to California lawmaker George House and other sponsors of new get-tough measures, kids arrested for crimes no longer deserve special treatment. They no longer deserve anonymity.
With juvenile crime on the rise--and with it, citizen anxiety over youthful lawlessness--holding youngsters not only legally, but publicly, accountable for their actions is a popular national trend.
According to the National Center for Juvenile Justice, which tracks juvenile crimes as well as laws for dealing with them, the juvenile codes in 29 states now allow the names and sometimes the pictures of juveniles to be released to the public. In some cases, laws go so far as to require that the media be told the names of juveniles.
Since January 1995, California news organizations have had free access to the names of juveniles as young as 14 who are charged with serious crimes. Such new policies are placing newspapers and broadcasters in the uneasy role of gatekeeper, forcing them to reevaluate the media's traditional taboo on publishing minor defendants' names.
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Although most newspapers are holding fast to old habits of printing only the names of juveniles who are tried as adults, all are under pressure to remove the cloak of anonymity from a new generation of so-called superpredators--to quit protecting the privacy of kids who are being labeled "sociopaths" even before they enter high school.
"It turns my stomach whenever I read the line in the paper 'The teenager's name is being withheld because he is a juvenile,' " a reader recently wrote to a Florida newspaper. "There are too many so-called juveniles giving birth, stealing, murdering, etc., to save their faces or names with this stupid law."
In Pennsylvania, juvenile confidentiality became a key issue in the 1994 governor's race, when a woman who was raped by a 15-year-old went on television to complain that the unnamed boy would not rate such protection if voters elected her candidate to the statehouse.
