And then there was
one
Published
Monday, July 10, 2006
The tough-love, Marine-style boot
camps for teens who had run afoul of the criminal-justice system
sprung up across Florida in the mid-1990s. They were run by the
state's sheriffs.
A 1996 study done for the National Institute of Justice quickly
identified the reason for their popularity, noting that
short-term, strict, military-style treatment was popular as an
alternative to a longer jail sentence on several fronts.
"It appeals politically," said the report, because of tough
punishment, coupled with financial savings through shortened
sentences.
"It appeals to the citizenry, largely because of its
noncompromising image of rigorous discipline for offenders; it
appeals to corrections administrators by offering the
opportunity to free up scarce correctional bed space."
The Polk County Sheriff's Office opened its boot camp Sept. 30,
1994, with a platoon of 20, then the largest capacity in the
state.
Then on Jan. 6, Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died after guards at a
Bay County boot camp beat him until he collapsed.
The Legislature vowed reform. The Martin Lee Anderson Act was
passed. Boot camps would be replaced by a program called
Sheriffs Training and Respect (STAR) -- a kinder, gentler boot
camp.
Four of the five sheriffs left with boot camps prior to the July
1 date of the rules taking effect simply closed the doors of the
boot camps and walked away from STAR.
Legislators, they said, had once again addressed a problem in a
familiar way: They passed lots of new requirements for the new
program -- but failed to fund the mandates they expected the
sheriffs to follow. The money the state provided wouldn't pay
the costs needed to run the STAR facilities.
Polk Sheriff Grady Judd now has the only STAR program in the
state. He's the only one left because emotion won out over
logic.
"My heart wants to stay in but my head keeps telling me to get
out," Judd told a reporter shortly before agreeing to sign the
contract with the Department of Juvenile Justice. "There's just
so much bureaucratic overlap now. . . . Making this program work
is a tremendous burden."
Judd said because Polk's boot camp was one of the largest in the
state, it benefited from the economies of scale. Administrative
staff and labor costs were about the same "whether you have 30
beds or 100 beds."
Other sheriffs decided STAR wasn't worth the hassle. One of the
now-closed boot camps was run by Sheriff Robert Crowder in
Martin County. The Legislature's STAR program was supposed to be
modeled after Crowder's Juvenile Offender Training Center, which
has been recognized for encouraging 200 delinquent teens to earn
high-school diplomas.
But when asked about the Legislature's finished product, Crowder
told The Palm Beach Post, "I'm not sure what they've created."
Crowder didn't hook on to STAR because he said it was
underfunded. "If we continued to water the program down, we were
going to be doomed for failure," he said.
It's particularly sad, because Crowder's boot camp had one of
the highest success rates in the state: 78 percent of the
graduates stayed out of trouble.
But success came with a price. Crowder told lawmakers he would
need about $3.76 million to keep the program going while
maintaining its standards. They offered about $2.8 million for
him to run the STAR program.
"I'm very frustrated the powers that be in this state do not
recognize the value of doing something meaningful with juvenile
offenders that saves so much for the future," Crowder, a
Republican, told Geoff Oldfather, a columnist for the South
Florida Sun-Sentinel. "We prevent literally thousands of crimes,
hundreds of victims, reduce the need for future prison space and
save these young lives."
And that is the exact reason Judd gave last week for sticking
with the STAR program: "The reason we stay with it is because we
have seen young criminals in our program turn into young,
productive citizens."
Here's hoping that Judd, in thinking with his heart, has made
the right decision.
Perhaps he can convince legislators they need to start thinking
with their wallets.
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