All 50 states have seen protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the past two weeks, but Oktibbeha County Youth Court Judge Lydia Quarles saw another lesson to be learned from the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer in May.
“I know many young men in our community who I believe are growing up the same way George Floyd grew up,” Quarles said at the Starkville Rotary Club’s virtual meeting Monday. “There’s no excuse for his death, but I believe the community failed him many, many years prior to his untimely death.”
Floyd had several felony convictions to his name and had served prison time, she said, and such behavior patterns start young. Some children in Oktibbeha County receive as many as 50 felony charges before they turn 18, she said.
The purpose of youth court is to address crimes committed by minors, but the court sees many of the same offenders over and over again, indicating an inefficient juvenile justice system, Quarles said.
During last week’s racial justice protests, she couldn’t help but think of three minors, between ages 15 and 17, who were recently arrested for a total of 59 car burglaries all in one day. All three were charged with at least 15 counts of felony auto burglary, including the theft of firearms, and all three were later released to their mothers.
Quarles called this “an average week” for her, Starkville Police Department and Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office. They all know these youths well, she said, and they come from a predictable background: poor, not attending school and lacking father figures.
“There are young men in our community who need some intervention to change the course of their lives,” Quarles said. “The juvenile justice system really has nothing to offer these young men (and) is no substitute for the concern of a community.”
She appealed to the Rotarian ideal of “service above self” to challenge the club to form an ad hoc committee to consider solutions to “one of our greatest problems.”
“We need people with more experience than we have, with more clout than we have, with louder voices than we have, and more importantly, we need people with better ideas to get involved, to save these children, and also to save us from them,” Quarles said with strong emotion in her voice.
In March, Quarles asked the Oktibbeha County supervisors to add $10,000 to the youth court budget with the possibility of receiving $6,000 back by the end of 2020. The Mississippi Supreme Court chose Oktibbeha County to participate in a pilot program that would provide legal representation for parents whose children are in CPS custody.
The board voted unanimously to take Quarles’ request under advisement and revisit the discussion at a later meeting.
The board allocated $117,600 to the youth court in the Fiscal Year 2020 budget that passed in September, but the court had already gone over budget by March for sending children to juvenile detention for gun-related crimes, Quarles told the board.
It costs the county $150 per day to keep a child in the juvenile detention center in Lowndes County and $175 per day in Rankin County, not including transportation costs, she said. The county must cover most of those costs because it is illegal to charge the child’s family if they live below the state poverty line.
Besides cost, the other reason juvenile detention does not help children is because it was never meant to be penal, and it does not rehabilitate or deter a child from reoffending, Quarles said. She only sends children to juvenile detention “when the minor is in jeopardy of harm from someone in the community” or vice versa, she said.
She can authorize testing for mental illness, but she said treatment is only likely if a child qualifies for Medicaid, which is not always the case.
“(The system) doesn’t have resources that can aid broken kids, and it doesn’t have adequate state or county financial support,” Quarles said. “It doesn’t have programs in place that might break the behavioral cycle of a 15-year-old burglar with a 15-year-old brain and a gun to boot.
“My dread every day, and (Starkville Police) Chief (Mark) Ballard’s as well, is that one of these kids may be shot by another kid, or by law enforcement, or that one of our law enforcement officers may be killed by one of these kids, just because these kids lack the judgment to conform to societal norms,” she added.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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