The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) requires that states keep minors out of adult jails, but a legal loophole has allowed states to incarcerate young prisoners in adult jails: the JJDPA does not apply to young people tried as adults, in adult court.  

The JJDPA was scheduled for reauthorization in 2007, but the Senate could manage only three hearings on the subject. Congress now has the chance to extend the bill and eliminate the loophole that allows states to hold children as young as ten years old in adult jails.  

The Department of Justice estimates that 7,500 youth are put in adult jails every day, most often to await trial.   The misery of the conditions that these young people face is almost impossible to overstate.   According to a report from the Campaign for Youth Justice, youth are 36 times more likely to commit suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile detention center.   In 2006, 13 percent of victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence were less than 18 years old.   The perverse and often baffling reality of prison life is that inmates in this age group make up only about one percent of all inmates, but they are the most vulnerable to sexual assault.  

And after having been in one adult jail, these young offenders are very likely to find themselves in one again.   According to   weekly electronic public policy magazine intellectualcapital.com, studies in New Jersey and New York show that the rate of criminals who continue to commit crimes after being released from prison is higher among juveniles prosecuted as adults than among those tried in juvenile courts.   One of the reasons for this is that 40 percent of adult jails provide no educational services for minors, even though they are required to by law.   These young people never get the education and experience they need to live a successful life in the real world.   The horrible conditions in adult prisons, coupled with the lack of training and developmental aid in those facilities, essentially sentence most juvenile offenders to a future of crime and involvement in the penal system.   

Unfortunately, ending this cycle is not the biggest priority of our justice system.   Private companies are taking advantage of the weaknesses of the justice system and making money off its failure. In the 1990s, the capacity of private adult correctional facilities increased almost 900 percent, according to the Crime & Delinquency   policy magazine.   Crime has become a business enterprise all over the country with the growing trend toward the privatization of the correction system, and young offenders are proving to be the best customers.   Privatization has historically been a part of the prison system since the eighteenth century, but not all traditions deserve respect.   The goal of the justice system is supposed to be rehabilitation, and private interests should not be allowed to compromise that.  

We need to stop looking at criminals as people who can never reform themselves, who will be useless and destructive until the day they die.    The purpose of the justice system must include rehabilitation and crime prevention in addition to punishment.    The high rates of teenage murder and gun fatality in the early 1990s occurred only among poorer youths.   The most effective way to prevent crime is to fight it at its source, to work on reducing poverty.    According to the online economic, political and social journal The Written Word,   California, Texas and Oklahoma tried to counteract the rising youth-crime rate by getting tougher: hiring more police, building more prisons and sentencing younger children to longer prison terms.   All three states saw record increases in violent crime.  

Congress can begin to reverse the failings of the justice system by reforming the JJDPA to eliminate the legal loophole that sends 7,500 minors to adult jails every day.   The system we have now, without standard quality education and training, breeds more criminals. Public juvenile facilities need to be enlarged and improved so that when released, kids don't find themselves in court again.   The solution is not to get tougher on young offenders, to lock them in with hardened criminals in adult jail.   The most effective way of combating juvenile crime is to tailor the education offered within prisons to helping kids rehabilitate, and to start a vigorous anti-poverty effort to stop crime at its source.   It is time for our nation to take some responsibility for the minors who are falling through the cracks, to actually commit to making a real change to the justice system so that real justice is ensured for all: criminals and law-abiding citizens, old and young.