Criticism of Gascón policies leans on discredited myths about youth crime

I have read and considered the recent columns by Kathleen Cady on “Injustice in the juvenile justice system.”

Ms. Cady ‘s predictive judgments conclude that Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is not committed to public safety. As evidence for this conclusion, Ms. Cady cites the return of Andrew Cachu, a minor at the time of his crime, to the juvenile justice system. Ms. Cady concludes that “appropriate” charges and enhancements are not being filed against juveniles and prevents the public from learning that persons under the age of 18 commit “heinous crimes.”

Appropriate by whose standards? How is the public being hoodwinked? Are the facts of the alleged crimes somehow concealed by lesser charging policies? Hardly.

Ms. Cady urges the need for publicity for supposed accuracy in “statistics” and for the satisfaction of societal vengeance that outweighs Gascón’s policy for youth justice. Ms. Cady, a self-styled victim advocate, envisions the promise of crime prevention in the re-implementation of a most unlikely, failed and discredited theory. Ignoring over 30 years of empirical evidence that would indicate her arguments are nothing but dog whistles for a return to the era of discredited “superpredator” theory, Ms. Cady reposes her faith in the wisdom of a return to yesteryear. A time when otherwise intelligent people were fooled into thinking that filling our prisons with minorities and the children of minorities was necessary to keep crime from spiraling out of control.

This line of thinking has clearly harmed more than a generation of minority youth. It has served in no small part to dislocate our entire culture along both societal and racial divides. Adoption of this malignant theory got us to exactly the place we were on the cusp of Gascón’s election.

In the wake of the recent mandate for color-blind justice that seems to have gotten Gascón elected, his promise of prevention is not so fleeting or easily brushed aside by way of sympathetic victimology. Such attentions are but a convenient distraction from the real issue at hand. That is to say, preventing crime by means of mass youth incarceration has been an abysmal failure. The tired old canard of equating juvenile justice and rehabilitation objectives with empowerment to commit crime (“with little fear of consequences”) has simply lost its former allure in the wake of empirical evidence that all human brains take much longer than 18 years to mature.

If Ms. Cady wants to excite panic among those who fear improvements, that’s fine. But the rest of us have realized the ballooning costs of having recklessly imposed excessive sentences without regard for anything but the amorphous concept of vengeance against youthful offenders. Many such offenders are persons whose family and home environments are often, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan “brutal” (Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460(2012)). Their choices of exit from such environments are often nil, unless and until the juvenile justice system intervenes, which it does, for better or for worse. Gascón wants it to be for the better. We all should.

Welfare and Institutions Code Section 202 makes it crystal clear that Gascón’s policy is consistent with “the protection and safety of the public and each minor under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court.” As a “participant” in the “juvenile justice system” (something that Ms. Cady is not), Gascón is statutorily bound to hold himself and his staff “accountable for its results.” His policies appear to be clear of necessity and “in conformity with a comprehensive set of objectives established to improve system performance in a vigorous and ongoing manner.”

As hard as it is for some people to shake off the myths about youth and crime that Ms. Cady so arduously reaffirms here, the least common denominator is, or ought to be realized as this lockstep adherence to the myth of the superpredator. Gascón’s rejection of that myth and his fearless attempt to do something evidence based that promises prevention reveals only that he has less ego and more intellect than his detractors. How can anyone show more empathy for the victims of crime than by placing actual prevention on the highest plane of shaping these core prosecutorial policies? 

— Eric H. Schweitzer

Clovis