In Tennessee, when a minor commits a crime and is charged as a juvenile, she remains in the custody of the Department of Children's Services until her 19th birthday, after which the court loses its jurisdiction. But if she is tried as an adult, she faces the same procedures and penalties as any other criminal. Juveniles charged with murder are almost always transferred, facing trial as adults.
The stark choice for judges — between the out-by-19 sentence that's perceived as light for a murderer and the black-and-white justice of life in prison for a crime committed as an impressionable teen — reveals a fundamental inadequacy of the current system, one in effect promoted by a state legislature pleased with the status quo. Under the current system, nobody — not DCS, the district attorney or the juvenile judge — has any control over juveniles past their 19th birthdays. That leaves judges like Green with little choice but to transfer them.
"OK, I've got nothing I can do with this girl or this guy. She's committed a terrible crime," attorney Jim Todd, a former special prosecutor for violent juvenile offenders with the district attorney's office, says of defendants like Cyntoia. She "needs an extreme amount of work. DCS isn't gonna do it. So my only other option is to transfer her to [adult criminal court], and if she's found guilty there, [the Tennessee Department of Correction] will take her for the rest of her life. There is no in-between."
A compromise was proffered in 1999, when former Gov. Don Sundquist convened a commission — of which Todd was a member — that recommended a system known as blended sentencing. Instead of transferring juveniles to criminal court to be tried as adults, they'd be remanded to a secure facility and the juvenile judge would maintain an extended jurisdiction until the inmate's 24th birthday. Meanwhile, counseling and vocational training would be provided. If certain benchmarks were met, and the inmates truly applied themselves to personal development, they could be released while still young enough to reintegrate into society.
The concept recognized that you can't keep a kid in juvenile lockup until her 19th birthday and release her back to the very environment that created her. It was proposed as a way to transform juveniles in danger of becoming adult felons into law-abiding citizens. Rather than writing them off and locking them up for decades based on crimes they committed as impulsive, even malleable youths, the program amounted to a second chance — a program Preston Shipp says is the solution.
The state legislature balked at its price tag, however, and none of the commission's recommendations were implemented, Todd says. This was particularly shortsighted, since incarcerating the 20,000 Tennessee inmates in adult facilities in 2010 cost taxpayers roughly $1.26 million a day. And so kids like Cyntoia Brown find themselves on a scale, the safety of the public counterbalanced with a state agency's ability to rehabilitate juveniles when it can't keep them past their tumultuous teen years.
