Our View: End systemic abuse of ‘status offenses’

Few phrases say “brace yourself” quite like these words: “The only state in America.”
And so it was last month when S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice Director Eden Hendrick told state senators that South Carolina is the only state in America — brace yourself — where children can be locked up for kiddie crimes like cutting class, running away from home and, heaven help us, loitering in a billiard room.

Talk about juvenile. And criminal. And just plain wrong.

To be clear, we’re not talking about crimes like murder, robbery or assault, but rather what are called “status offenses” — acts which are only illegal if committed by someone whose status is that of a minor.

Unbelievably, these acts that can get you 90 days in juvie here — and only here — in South Carolina.

And if that sounds cruel and dangerous, well, that’s because it is.

“We have status offenders in the same buildings, in the same classes, in the same gyms as youth charged with very, very, very serious crimes,” Hendrick told senators.

She was testifying at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a bill by Orangeburg Democratic Sen. Brad Hutto that would put an end to this blatant juvenile injustice, as reported recently by the S.C. Daily Gazette.

The longer that the testimony went on that day, the clearer it became that the current law isn’t just putting status offenders at risk. It’s endangering the rest of us, too.

Why? Well, first, as Hutto notes, non-criminal kids too often “pick up bad habits” when they’re housed with serious youthful offenders — exactly the opposite of what we want from our juvenile justice system. And second, thanks to chronic overcrowding, these kids are taking up space in facilities our state desperately needs for young people who have committed serious, grown-up crimes.

GOP Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey of Edgefield seemed to speak for the room when he said, “I want them not to be truants. I want them not to be incorrigible, but I don’t know that this is the way to fix them. The idea of sending a 13-year-old who’s just run away from school a couple times to DJJ — that scares the hell out of me, because that’s going to scare the hell out of him.”

Here is where we’d like to tell you that the senators, shocked to hear this testimony, carved out a little time between regulating womens’ wombs and getting more guns out on the street to actually do their part to fix the problem.

But we can’t because they didn’t, settling instead for saying all the right things while not quite passing the bill in time for the House to act on it this year without needing a super-majority.

So now, with the likelihood that passing the bill (the right thing to do) may not happen in the next few weeks of the regular legislative session, we call on the General Assembly to add the juvenile justice bill to the list of special items it considers during a special session. And we urge Gov. Henry McMaster to lobby for the bill, too.

When it comes to reducing risks for South Carolina’s children, we should protect them, not dilly-dally away from a problem that is solvable.