Florida is a place where a child can be thrown in jail for passing gas, throwing spitballs or hitting a friend on the head with a lollipop.
It’s a practice child welfare organizations heavily criticize. Many people think throwing kids in jail for nonviolent acts is less of a deterrent than it is a traumatic, life-altering event. Civil citation programs like several that have been rolled out locally — including one launching in St. Pete this month — are commonly viewed as a kinder alternative.
“Arresting children and bringing them to an assessment center has an effect on them,” said St. Pete City Councilwoman Amy Foster.
The formula (as reported last month by the Tampa Bay Times) is simple. Instead of arresting kids for relatively innocuous transgressions, an officer under this program simply writes a kid a ticket and forces him or her to do community service, like picking up litter at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. If a kid racks up enough offenses, three for St. Pete’s Juvenile Second Chance Program, then the arrests start.
Arresting kids and young adults on small offenses disproportionately affects African-American communities like Midtown in south St. Pete, and creates a paper trail for youngsters that follows them for life, community advocates say. Local activist Kurt Donley calls this the “digital plantation.” And all that bail money can add up.
“When they arrest some young thug — and that’s another way of saying the N-word nowadays — they’re not punishing the young thug,” Donley said. “The young thug’s mom, girlfriend, sister, aunt, are taking collections throughout the neighborhood to get this kid out, get him a lawyer, get his bail bonds paid, whatever. And all that money is leaving the community.”
Recently, the number of youth arrests has been going down in Florida as more law enforcement agencies adopt civil citation programs.
In the past five years, the state has seen a steady decline in arrests of youths aged 17 and under, going from 121,734 over a yearlong period in 2009-2010 to about 78,447 between 2013 and 2014, according to state Department of Juvenile Justice numbers. Between November 2013 and October 2014, civil citations were issued in 39 percent of misdemeanors committed, or believed to have been committed, by a minor in the state.
Such was the case in 32 percent of such instances in Hillsborough, and 79 percent in Pinellas.
Despite a slight uptick last year, the number of yearly youth arrests in Pinellas has declined by about 2,000 since 2009. The youth arrest rate in Hillsborough, which adopted a civil citation program for juveniles in 2011, has dropped by about 3,300. Polk County is one of the few not to see steady decline over that period, as not one civil citation has been issued to a youngster in Polk.
The rollout of St. Pete’s program is occurring in conjunction with an already-existing countywide effort to keep kids out of jail.
For the most part, Donley said, the program is better than he hoped it would be.
“They widened it to such an amount of possible offenses that allow the kids to be possibly eligible for this,” he said. “I was ecstatic.”
But it’s not perfect, he said. For one, kids who are wrongly accused of a crime might be inclined to say they committed a crime they didn’t to avoid getting arrested.
“So a lot of kids will actually cop to the civil citation and say they did something wrong when they didn’t,” Donley said.
He said he’d increase the allowed number of pre-arrest offenses so kids have time to age out of mischievous tendencies. He also hopes the city will start issuing more civil citations to adults.
Councilwoman Foster said civil citations aren’t going to completely tamp down youth arrests, but it keeps many kids out of the courtroom.
“Is it going to keep everyone from going to jail? Absolutely not,” Foster said. “There’s deeper societal issues. I think it is going to make a good dent in the numbers.”
Some activists don’t want to see kids get any record at all for petty crimes.
Chardonnay Singleton, also an activist, said when a group of young boys recently stole her bike in St. Pete, she refused to press charges. Even if she could have asked police to issue a citation instead, she said, she wouldn’t have gone for that.
“Let’s do something different,” she said. “Make them join Big Brothers and Sisters as punishment. Let’s sit down with the parents and have some counseling rather than putting [them] in jail, bring them on probation.”
More parental involvement is key, Councilwoman Foster said. She attends court hearings every Monday morning for juveniles who offended over the prior weekend. Sometimes parents are there; sometimes they’re not.
“I can’t tell you how disheartening it is to sit in on those hearings, to see kids whose parents aren’t present, who won’t even pick up their phones when their kids are in court,” she said. “Parent engagement definitely has to be a part of it.”
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2015.