Delinquent: Read all the stories from Week 1. Cuyahoga County sends more kids to adult prison than any other county. Why?Delinquent: Our System, Our Kids is a special project of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer examining the juvenile justice system through the eyes of the people who have been through it.As boys growing up in Cleveland’s Collinwood-Nottingham neighborhood, he and his friends inherited a feud with rivals in adjacent Glenville. Eventually, fistfights turned into gun battles.
Delinquent: Cuyahoga’s juvenile system is supposed to rehabilitate youth when they offend. Most of the time it works – Cameron is one example Reporters also attended court hearings and collected police reports, transcripts and other legal filings to better understand the influences that led these young people to crime, escalations from petty misdemeanors to violent acts and the barriers that delayed or blocked their rehabilitation, despite interventions.
Montori’s mother says he often disrespected her. “I don’t beat my kids, I whip their a--,” she says, suggesting there is a difference when a child needs discipline. “I was beating his a-- when he needed it beat. I wasn’t going to let him overrule me. I’m the parent.” After violating probation for a kidnapping charge, he was sent to Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility, one of three prisons run by the Ohio Department of Youth Services. For two years, he says, life was a blur of fighting.
Meanwhile, his family’s house was shot up three times, his mother says, forcing her to flee. “I could have lost my life,” she says. At some point he was transferred downtown to the adult jail. There, sitting in his cell, the now-18-year-old felt a strange emotion rush through his body. Something he’d never felt before. It was a tinge of remorse.
“I had a lot going on as a kid,” he told the court. He pledged to create a social platform to help troubled teens upon his release from prison. During a recent phone call, Montori had cause for excitement. Following a prison transfer, he was given a special cellmate: his older brother, who is serving a 28-year sentence for a murder he claims was self-defense. “I’ve been a little tied up remembering old times,” Montori says.
If interventions fail to disrupt patterns of violence or address issues of neglect, trauma, abuse, mental health or childhood poverty, it can leave youth cycling through the juvenile justice system.When Deon was 12, his bus driver caught him touching a girl’s buttocks. He claimed she was his girlfriend, but he was charged with sexual imposition and given probation.