Illinois Times, April 29, 2010 "Kids in Prison" examines issues in the Illinois juvenile justice system.
The New York Times
December 1, 2009
A Conversation With Laurence Steinberg
Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland. Here is an edited version of two conversations with Dr. Steinberg last month:
Q. YOU HEAR PARENTS SOMETIMES SAY, “I’M LIVING WITH AN INSANE PERSON. MY CHILD IS A TEENAGER.” ARE THEY BEING HYPERBOLIC?
A. I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.
When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?
Q. IS THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BEGINNING TO TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES INTO ACCOUNT DURING SENTENCING?
A. It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?
With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.
Q. WHAT IS THE NEW EVIDENCE?
A. In the last five years, as neuroscience has moved forward with functional magnetic resonance imaging and with research on animals, there have been dozens of new studies of adolescent brain development. These show that the brain systems providing for impulse control are still maturing during adolescence. Neuroscientists have shown that the part of the brain that improves most during adolescence is the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complicated decision-making, thinking ahead, planning, comparing risks and rewards. And the neuroscientific research is showing that over the course of adolescence and into the 20s, there is this continued maturation of this part of the brain. So now, we have brain evidence that supports behavioral studies.
Moreover, we’re seeing that behavior can change once the brain more fully matures. Take thrill-seeking, for instance. What happens is that when people move out of adolescence, they become less interested in it. For example, I can’t stand riding on a roller-coaster now. I liked it as a teenager. I can’t stand driving fast now. I liked driving fast when I was a teenager. What has changed? I’m not as driven today by this thrill-seeking sensation. And in our studies, we’ve shown that there is a kind of normative decline in sensation-seeking after middle adolescence. A lot of adolescent crime is driven by thrill-seeking.
Q. HOW DOES THIS NEW INFORMATION lead to concluding that the courts shouldn’t sentence some adolescents to life in prison without parole?
A. Given the fact that we know that there will be a developmental change in most people, the science says that we should give them a chance to mature out of it. No one is saying that kids who commit horrific crimes shouldn’t be punished. But most in the scientific community think that we know that since this person is likely to change, why not revisit this when he’s an adult and see what he’s like?
Q. DO YOU HAVE TEENAGERS AT HOME?
A. We have a son, Ben, who is now 25 and who works at Random House. He did something as a teenager that led me to a whole program of research. He and some friends went to the window of a girl they knew and inadvertently set off a burglar alarm. When a police squad car came, they panicked and fled. When I found out, I said: “Do you realize that you were running from armed police officers who thought they were interrupting a break-in. What were you thinking?” He said: “Well, that’s the problem. I wasn’t.” I wondered: “What goes on when kids are in a peer group that pushes them to make bad decisions?”
Since then, we’ve had people of different ages come to the lab and bring two friends with them. We give them computerized risk-taking tests while we image their brains. We compare brain activity when individuals are watched by their friends and when they are alone. For the adults, the presence of friends has no effect. But for adolescents, just having friends nearby doubles the number of risks they take. We’ve found that a certain part of the brain is activated by the presence of peers in adolescents, but not in adults.
Q. YOU ADVISED THE DEFENSE TEAM OF OMAR KHADR, THE YOUNGEST DETAINEE AT GUANTáNAMO BAY. WHY GET INVOLVED IN THAT CASE?
A. Because he was 15 when he was captured in a safe house in Afghanistan, where he’d been sent by his father, who was active in Al Qaeda. There was a battle in 2002 to take this house where American troops died.
He was interrogated for many hours and admitted to having thrown a grenade that killed an American soldier. He later recanted. I was asked by his Defense Department counsel to advise on whether what he said during interrogation was reliable and his degree of culpability, if he did do it.
In my deposition, I said I don’t know whether he did it or not, but there are studies that say that adolescents are more likely than adults to give false confessions. There’s the Central Park jogger case, where it turned out a group of teenagers gave false confessions. Five were convicted. Several years later, an adult murderer and rapist confessed to the crime.
Q. IT HAS JUST BEEN ANNOUNCED THAT YOU’VE WON THIS $1 MILLION KLAUS JACOBS PRIZE. WHAT DO YOU INTEND TO DO WITH THE MONEY?
A. I want to extend our work on adolescent development to teenagers in other cultures so that we can determine whether the patterns are universal. There’s a longstanding debate over how much of adolescent behavior is biological or cultural. Perhaps this award will lead to more answers.
The Daily Herald
Arlington Heights
Sept. 18, 2009
A boy dies on the state's watch, and we know little
A 16-year-old boy died inside a juvenile prison in St. Charles a few weeks ago. And that is nearly all we know.
A 16-year-old boy. He is someone's son. Maybe someone's brother. Our state had a responsibility to guard and protect him. To keep him safe. He is dead and that is nearly all we know.
Officials from the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Illinois State Police and the Kane County Coroner's office all refused to say any more nearly 17 hours after the death was reported Sept. 1.
On Sept. 2, officials with Kane County Coroner Chuck West's office said the boy had "self-inflicted" injuries, but would not say the cause of death was suicide or release any other information. They said then that the boy's relatives had not been notified, but that claim was contradicted by juvenile justice department spokesman Januari Smith, who said that same day that her office had notified the boy's relatives. So for at least a good 18 hours until someone did say publicly that the family had been notified, every single person who has a loved one among the 300-plus inmates could have heard and been tormented wondering if it was their loved one who was gone. In fact, we heard from someone who knew an inmate and was trying to determine if he was the dead boy.
It remains unclear how long it took state officials to tell relatives. Just about everything about this death in a state, taxpayer-funded facility remains unclear. And that ought to alarm us all. That ought to outrage every single one of us.
Normally, information about juveniles involved in crimes is kept from the public so the juveniles may have a chance to rehabilitate themselves and move on to productive adulthood without the scars of youthful errors.
But this teen is dead. Someone failed to protect him. There really is no reason to withhold so much information about him and his death now. There is every reason to stand up for him, every inmate in St. Charles now and every inmate who will be there in the future. For him and all of them, we must have more information from the state and county officials who are wrongly refusing to provide any.
The public probably does not need to know this boy's name. But we do have a need to know how he died, how his death was discovered by state employees, what they did then, what procedures they followed or did not follow. We should know why he was there, what town he comes from, whether he needed psychiatric treatment and whether he got any.
Gov. Patrick Quinn, we need answers. Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael P. Randle, Illinois Youth Center Director Bobby Moore, we need answers.
On Sept. 8, an audit of the youth prison was released that found overtime hours had doubled in the past two years while employees were not getting required training. During the 2008 budget year, the audit said, staff in St. Charles worked nearly 40,000 overtime hours. The numbers of correctional workers dropped by 41 from a high of 169 in 2006 to 128 in 2008.
This is troubling, to put it mildly. It only underscores the need for more transparency, not less. It only heightens our concern that the boys who are inmates could hurt themselves, each other or the overworked guards on duty.
A 16-year-old boy died. We are told he injured himself. We have no other information to help us judge what happened. Five public agencies were involved and still we know next to nothing. Are there still dangers there?
Some guardian somewhere failed to protect that boy. And now he is gone. And the state's silence is an abomination.
