Parents aren’t paying attention; pushing their kids toward crime
By ANTONIA BOGDANOVICH Special to the Daily Press
When a juvenile judge recently threw a 16 year-old girl from an affluent Westside family into a boot-camp program after pleading guilty for petty theft, the girl’s mother argued she didn’t want her child mingling with gang-bangers.
“You think your child, if put in a probation camp, would be put in one area because she comes from the Westside and these gang members would be in another area because they’re from east LA or downtown?” asked Pam Davis, a Santa Monica Superior Juvenile Court judge.
Despite her mother’s protests, the teenager wanted to go through the rigorous camp because she thought it would help her. Davis said she was one of the best graduates in the program.
Davis, 41, sees parents and their troubled teens on the road to crime from her small, informal Santa Monica courtroom day in and day out. Because there’s only so much she can do within the confines of the judicial system, Davis wonders how bad it has to get before parents wake up and realize their neglect will breed delinquents and criminals.
Since her time on the bench, Davis has noticed a disturbing trend — parents aren’t paying attention to their kids, which has led to an increase in crime on the Westside.
“Kids want limits, but the problem is they’re not raised that way,” Davis said, adding parents’ unavailability to their children is an underlying factor in why they end up in her courtroom. “Values are just not instilled in young people. Parents are preoccupied in their own lives and that’s frustrating.”
‘One joint’ can lead to much more
Since Davis arrived in 1998, the court was hearing five to 10 cases a day, now it hears at least 60 cases a day. The most frequently seen cases are school truancy and possession of marijuana and alcohol.
David Searcy, Santa Monica’s supervising juvenile judge, thinks parents are too lenient with their kids. He agrees that violations like possession of controlled substances usually lead to far worse crimes in the future.
For many teenagers who end up in the “system,” they started their downward spiral by failing classes and ditching school. Then they turn to drugs, which inevitably leads to criminal charges that land them face to face with judges like Davis.
“Maybe a teacher told them, ‘there’s no way you’re going to pass this class, your going to fail,” Davis said. “And I think maybe the kids internalize that and begin to see themselves as failures.”
Most bench officers who work in the court will oversee the kids’ grades and attendance in school.
“If you look at the prisons, most criminals, the ones that commit heavy duty crimes, they started out by ditching school,” Davis said. “It was way back then that they became failures in school.”
Those messages can breed low self-esteem which leads many kids to stealing, drugs and alcohol or joining gangs.
The spiral can end in tragedy like the case of Deanna Maran, a Santa Monica High School sophomore who was killed at a party last November in Westwood after her altercation with another 15-year-old got out of hand.
The 15-year-old’s half sister, Katrina Sarkissian, 17, reportedly stabbed Maran while dozens of onlookers watched the girls fight. According to teenagers at the party, the 15-year-old, Sarkissian and a Santa Monica High School senior pinned Maran down, beat her and then stabbed her. The incident started after Maran told the 15-year-old to stop destroying property at the house.
Sarkissian died the next day while in police custody from an overdose. Her sister was charged with battery, a misdemeanor. She’ll likely walk away from the charge this week when she faces a juvenile judge in Inglewood.
What’s perplexing to Maran’s mother, Harriet Maran, is how parents can raise such violent individuals. The girls involved in the murder are from upscale Brentwood families and attended multiple private schools. (See letter to editor, page 4.)
Harriet Maran hasn’t heard from the parents of the girls accused of playing a role in her daughter’s murder, or the parents of the 15-year-old boy who hosted the party.
Court intervention takes place of parental role
The teenagers who appear in Davis’ court for traffic and misdemeanor charges range from poor to affluent families. Although she expects parents to be involved, more often then not, she says they don’t.
And if the parents won’t step in and intervene in the child’s life, inevitably the court will.
“Kids don’t have consequences; they have to be accountable for their actions and I think that’s where we come in.” Davis said. “A lot of times 16 or 17 year olds, when you try and make them accountable from a court like this, where we’re not holding detention in a youth authority over their head,” Davis explains, “they’re like ‘whatever.’”
One place Davis sends troubled teenagers is “A-SAP,” a parent-teen counseling program at Santa Monica High School.
“Society usually considers growing up in a family of privilege, a privilege,” said Susie Spain, an addiction specialist who works at A-SAP. “Self esteem has nothing to do with whether you’re rich or poor.”
The Informal Juvenile Court, developed in 1985, acts as a point of early intervention and focuses on rehabilitation. It’s part of what Davis calls a “tag team approach,” where law enforcement, courts, parents and schools work together for the benefit of the kids.
Consequences range from community service, AA meetings and parent-teen counseling to the LA County Sheriff’s Vital Intervention Directional Alternatives program, which is the most stringent of programs assigned. It’s designed to breakdown teens’ negative behavior and rebuild them into socially acceptable citizens. It’s an intense boot-camp training for seven consecutive Saturdays. But there is a pay-off — the last part of the program involves field trips to museums, hikes and admission to Lakers games.
“If you ask most kids who complete (the program) they say what they liked the most was the discipline, the working out and the tough rules,” Davis said.
Sgt. Mike Griffin, the program’s supervisor, said most teens in the program come from parents who don’t participate in their child’s life.
“In fact, most of the time the parents would have been (in the program) when they were little, Griffin said, “but the program wasn’t in place. We’re hoping they’re getting as much out of the program as the kids are and sometimes more.”
The police in Culver City have a similar program, said Lt. Steve Williams.
“We show kids that there are people out there who care about them,” he said. “Kids respond to listening to what they have to say.
1E9,“More common than not the kids in our program come from single families … and yes, some do resent the fact that parents aren’t around,” he added.
Statistics have shown that if a family works together, the child gets cleaned up a lot quicker.
“We believe that an addiction problem in a child is a family problem, not a child problem,” A-SAP’s Spain said. “Like in the movie ‘Traffic,’ it’s about the family, it’s not just about the girl.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 24, 2002. Read the original PDF.