According to a new article by Joe Boven at the Colorado Independent, kids awaiting trial “find themselves part of a system that fails to educate them [or] provide them equal access to services like mental health care.”

Boven’s article delves more deeply into the problems created by direct file than any other previous report on the subject, noting that “juveniles in Colorado used to undergo a transfer hearing by a judge who decided whether a juvenile should be charged as an adult.” But to understand, fully, why direct file is still a problem a little more background is probably in order.

The year was 1993 and the entire nation was undergoing what appeared to be a spike in violent juvenile crime. The Denver media dubbed it the “Summer of Violence.” Seizing on the political opportunity District Attorneys actively lobbied in a special session called by Governor Roy Romer for the power to charge juveniles as adults in order to stem what was perceived to be a plague of gang violence.

As Fred Brown of The Denver Post noted in 2007 Op-Ed piece entitled Gang fear lurks in shadows, the “Summer of Violence” would have been more accurately dubbed the “Summer of Fear” because homicides had actually fallen 22% from  the previous year. While juvenile violent crime continued to spike through the 1990s, it has since fallen back to pre-1991 levels and remained relatively steady for almost 10 years.

While it is unclear what factors contributed to a decade-long decline in juvenile violent crime, one thing is clear: District Attorneys are still filing adult charges against kids.  In fact, in 2007 District Attorneys used direct file at least 138 times and in 2008 they upped the ante to 179.

DAs claim that they only file adult charges in the most egregious cases. Colorado’s Office of Research and statistics currently documents juvenile violent crime up to 2007.

Source: http://dcj.state.co.us/ors/stats5.htm

The graph clearly shows that violent juvenile crime has leveled off. The question, then, is “why?” Why, if juvenile violent crime is on the decline do we need to keep punishing kids as adults?

Maybe the answer is that filing adult charges against kids isn’t a matter of keeping violent crime under control. Maybe, just maybe, its about playing on our fears. In the final analysis we’re only left with one more question: Is that right or wrong?