Juvenile Crime ‘Crisis’ Bill Includes Tough Sanctions Panel’s Version Lowers Age For Adult Trials; Key Partisan Differences Put Off Until Fall

The Senate Judiciary Committee completed work Thursday on a bill that could overhaul how the country treats juvenile crime, leading to many more adult trials of youths as young as 14.

“I think it’ll make a heck of a difference on the problem of juvenile crime in this country,” said committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, as the panel sent the bill to the Senate floor on a 12-6 vote.

The committee intentionally avoided confrontations on many Democratic gun and crime-prevention proposals, delaying those inevitable battles until the bill is debated on the Senate floor, which likely won’t happen until October at the earliest.

Typifying the parties’ perspectives:

“We’ve got a crisis out there, but I think this bill will help,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who chairs the youth violence subcommittee and co-authored the measure with Hatch.

“This may be a cure worse than the disease,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the subcommittee’s top Democrat.

Yet two Democrats - Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey - joined Republicans in voting for the bill.

Like a counterpart measure the House passed in May, the bill pushes states, which handle most juvenile crime, to tighten up treatment of those offenders by offering them $500 million per year in incentive grants.

Under the Senate version, states would have to make reasonable efforts to ensure that by July 1, 2000, they could:

Try juveniles 14 and older as adults for a serious violent felony.

Impose graduated sanctions for juvenile repeat offenders.

Conduct drug tests on juveniles arrested on felony charges.

Fingerprint and photograph juveniles arrested on felony charges and send copies to the FBI.

Maintain criminal records on juveniles like those kept on adults, make them available to law enforcement, courts and schools and maintain them as long as adult records are kept. However, under a Biden amendment the panel accepted, states could keep laws that require that juvenile records be expunged when offenders become adults.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s top Democrat, complained, “We’ve basically made an awful lot of state legislatures, or all 50, irrelevant in a lot of areas.”

Attorney General Janet Reno said the bill “heads us in the right direction, but does not get us to where we need to go.”

She praised it for giving prosecutors more discretion, increasing victims’ rights and toughening penalties for illicit gun sales and drug transactions involving children.

“But to win the long-term fight against juvenile crime, we must do more to break the link between kids and guns - by barring violent juveniles from obtaining guns after they turn 18 and enacting a child safety lock requirement,” Reno said. The bill must also balance tough enforcement with “targeted, effective crime prevention and intervention,” she said.

The legislation requires states to use 35 percent of the grant money for building juvenile detention facilities, 15 percent for drug testing of juvenile arrestees, 10 percent for criminal record-keeping and 40 percent for a variety of approved purposes, including crime prevention.

There is no requirement that any be used for prevention, and the House bill bars the use of the grant money for prevention.

The panel rejected, 9-8, an amendment by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to require states to use 50 percent of the money for literacy, job training and substance abuse treatment for juvenile offenders.

“If you release a functional illiterate without trade or skill, that person is going to return to a life of crime,” said Specter, the only Republican to support the proposal.

Sessions countered: “There’s hundreds … of job-training dollars for at-risk youth in the budget already.”

The bill also would make it easier to try youths 14 and older as adults in federal court, leaving the decision to prosecutors, not judges.

The committee rejected the Clinton administration’s proposal that safety locks be sold with every firearm, supporting only a requirement that firearms dealers stock the devices.