NATCHEZ — After a year of several fights and threats among youths in neighborhoods and schools, local leaders say they are trying to shake up adolescent offenders.

In the past, law enforcement officers often released youth offenders from the scene of the incident almost immediately if the Adams County Youth Court did not wish to hold the alleged offender.

During the past month, however, Adams County Sheriff Travis Patten said his deputies are putting adolescents behind bars until a guardian signs for their release — an effort he says might make youths and parents aware of the severity of their offenses.

“Something has to click in their minds, they have to know it’s serious,” Patten said.

With a complicated system of rules in place concerning youth, that change is difficult to navigate, but Patten said he believes he has received the best confirmation he can for the success of the procedure change: Results.

The shakeup

In criminal court, the rules are fairly simple.

A suspected adult offender is charged and held until trial or released on bail.

When youths are arrested, however, the rules change.

No bonding system exists in youth court, meaning an adolescent who is arrested must remain in custody until the mandatory hearing within 48 hours at the Adams County Youth Court.

No adolescent can be held in the youth court cells without the permission of Youth Court Judge Walt Brown.

“No child is detained unless they call me,” Brown said. “We have jurisdiction over all criminal acts committed by children under the age of 18.”

The old way of treating youth arrests, Patten said, was to call Brown while at the scene — be it at a neighborhood or on a campus — and request permission to detain the child.

If Brown granted permission for the detainment, deputies would take the child to youth court for booking.

If Brown decided against detainment, the deputy would release the child back into the custody of the school or parent.

“Kids had gotten used to that,” Patten said. “The ones you see on a regular basis, they would know the process.”

Instead, Patten said, the new procedure is a warning to the youths and their parents to make them aware of the consequences of their actions.

“When a child needs to be arrested, we know the school has exhausted every other form of punishment for this individual,” Patten said. “We know that if they call us, it’s serious.”

Deputies still call Brown to request detainment in the youth court cells — as youth law dictates — but now they call from the sheriff’s office, he said.

If Brown declines to detain the student in the youth court facility, Patten said the deputies clear out a cell block in the Adams County Sheriff’s Office jail — ensuring the youth makes no contact with any adult inmate — and waits until the guardian arrives, simulating the process a youth might go through if he or she continues to commit crime in adulthood.

Requiring the parent or guardian to come retrieve the adolescent, Patten said he believes makes the youths aware of the severity of their actions and requires the parents to get involved in the punishment.

When parents know the severity of their child’s crime, Patten said, they are more likely to step in, or, at the very least, the parent will not want to leave work or home to retrieve the child again.

Patten said though the procedural change is new, he has seen positive results.

“With the few that we have done that way so far, I think we have made headway,” Patten said. “They haven’t been back.”

Scared straight?

Although this change is within the legal purview of the sheriff’s office, it may be at odds with the ideals of youth court process.

“Our goal is not to lock kids up,” Brown said. “When you take a child away from the home they miss school, they miss work and they’re not with their parents. That’s not what we want.”

In 2017 alone, Brown said his office handled 374 total delinquency referrals.

In most cases, Brown said he releases the child back to their parents.

“The only time I want to lock a child up even for a short while is if they are a danger to the people around them or to themselves or if they are a flight risk,” Brown said. “Otherwise, home is the best place for them to be.”

In 2017, Brown said he heard 10 shoplifting cases, 16 petit larceny cases, 25 probation violations and 34 simple assault referrals.

This data, Brown said, reflect the number of referrals, not children, meaning there are likely several repeat offenders in the list.

In fact, some youth have been in court so many times that Brown said he knows them and their families by name.

“If I get a call about a child that I’ve never heard of, I’m probably not going to detain them,” he said. “But if it is one of the ones I’ve seen time and time again, it’s more likely.”

Brown said he does not believe scare tactics will bring about the change the community wants; he believes in counseling.

Some scientific studies say Brown could be right.

In a study of various interventions and their effects on the adolescent psyche, Emory College’s Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology, Scott O. Lilienfeld, found that scare tactics “are ineffective” for delinquents. 

The premise, Lilienfeld writes, is based on the notion that a negative stimulus will deter an adolescent offender from committing the crime. Instead, Lilienfeld’s study of participants in scared-straight programs — “Scientifically Unsupported and Supported Interventions for Childhood Psychopathology” — showed little change in the likelihood of future offense.

Instead, Brown said he believes in counseling as a change agent for adolescent offenders.

The youth court provides counseling, probation officers and — in some situations — even GPS monitored house arrest, as alternatives to detaining youths long term.

The schools

Many of the youth court cases he receives, Brown said, come from school.

“Definitely not all of (the referrals),” Brown said, “but many.”

Every incident wherein a sheriff’s deputy must remove a student from campus, Natchez High School Principal Tony Fields said, rattles the daily workflow.

“You have to understand, it’s a small percentage of students who do these things, but they disrupt others.”

Fields said he favors the change.

“Getting parents involved is so important to getting kids to change,” he said. “Students need to know what will happen if they continue in the track they’re in.”

Natchez-Adams School District Superintendent Fred Butcher, Deputy Superintendent Zandra McDonald, Brown and Patten have met several times in the past month to talk about solutions to disruptions to the classroom, including the procedural change.

McDonald said the new strategy might affect some students positively, but that no fix will solve all adolescent issues.

“I think it depends on the student,” she said. “What works for one may not help another, but we owe it to the other students to keep the peace.”