UPPER MARLBORO, Md. -- "Judge Dawson, he don't play," a parent once said about Herman Dawson, the main juvenile-court judge in Maryland's Prince George's County. And on this Tuesday morning, Dawson was definitely not in a playing mood.
"Who's in court with you today?" he asked of Tanika, the 16-year-old standing before him in handcuffs.
"My mom," she said.
"I know that," Dawson said.
An honors student, Tanika had never been in trouble with the law before. But for the past year, ever since she was involved in a fight with another girl at her high school, Dawson had ruled her life, turning it into a series of court hearings, months spent on house arrest and weeks locked up at a juvenile-detention center in Laurel, Md.
Most recently, he had detained her for two weeks for violating probation by visiting a friend on the way home from working off community-service hours. Now he was deciding whether to release her.
"I'm hesitating because I don't know whether you got the message," he said.
Juvenile-court judges in the United States are given wide discretion to decide what is in a young offender's best interest. Many, like Dawson, turn to incarceration, hoping it will teach disobedient teenagers a lesson and deter them from further transgressions.
But evidence has mounted in recent years that locking up minors, especially those who pose no risk to public safety, does more harm than good. Most juvenile offenders outgrow delinquent behavior, studies find. And incarceration -- the most costly alternative for taxpayers -- appears to do little to prevent recidivism and often has the opposite effect, driving youths deeper into criminal behavior.
"Once kids get in the system, they tend to come back, and the farther they go, the more likely they are to keep going," said Edward Mulvey, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the author of a large study on delinquent youths.
After decades when states grew more punitive in their approaches to juvenile crime, locking up more and more youths, more than a dozen have now revised statutes or regulations to avoid the overuse of incarceration, among them New Jersey and Indiana.
But judges are not always so quick to follow. And often the judges most resistant to change are those most determined to help troubled youths, juvenile-delinquency experts say.
Dawson is an example. He subscribes to a "tough love" philosophy that venerates hard work, education and personal responsibility as the antidotes to poverty, negative peer pressure, chaotic parenting and other forces that can tip children into delinquency.
The youths who end up in his courtroom, Dawson says, have often been allowed to run wild without consequences. "People have made too many excuses for them, and they end up believing it," he said in an interview.
But Dawson's critics, who include defense lawyers, delinquency workers and some parents of young offenders, say that in his zeal to change wayward youths he goes too far -- acting not just as judge but also as prosecutor, probation officer and social worker.
He relies too heavily on locking up young offenders, these critics say, which contributes to incarceration rates that are among the highest in the state. And in several instances, Dawson has been accused of overstepping the law to keep young offenders locked up for longer periods. In October, a state appeals court ordered him to reconsider his disposition in four cases in which he had set minimum periods of confinement for youths, saying that the orders appeared to violate state law.
"These child-saving judges, they think they're doing something right-minded," said Mary Ann Scali, deputy director of the National Juvenile Defender Center, "but in fact it's very wrong-minded."
Dawson says that in court, where his docket can run to 75 or more cases a day, his goal is to do whatever he can -- including yelling, if necessary -- to get the attention of young offenders.
"If I can get one of these black kids, Hispanic kids, get them out of high school and get them into college, I've done my job," Dawson said.
To that end, he engages the youths in a wide-ranging public catechism, peppering them with questions about school performance ("How many times were you suspended last year?"), attire ("You can walk around in a fancy hillbilly shirt but you can't get an education?") and behavior ("Why do you do all these dumb things?").
But it is Dawson's use of incarceration that has stirred the most controversy.
In Maryland, as in other states, the number of minors held in locked facilities has declined over the past decade, a result of dropping juvenile-crime rates and increasing efforts to keep youthful offenders at home when possible. A project in Baltimore led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is financing efforts in 39 states to develop alternatives to locking up youths while protecting public safety, has helped decrease the use of detention there by about 40 percent, according to state statistics.
But in Prince George's County, the rates of detention and longer-term incarceration have remained high and have risen in the more than five years Dawson has presided as the primary juvenile-court judge, according to an analysis by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services.
Public defenders believe that the high detention rates are driven in part by the multitude of review hearings Dawson schedules to monitor the youths' progress. The hearings, the public defenders said, place a teenager's behavior under a microscope, allowing prosecutors to seize on violations they might never have heard about otherwise.
"I think he cares about the kids," said Erin Josendale, chief of the public defender's juvenile division in Prince George's County. "But having that level of involvement, at least in our county, creates significant due-process concerns."
Over the past year, the Maryland public defender's office became concerned that Dawson was testing the accepted limits of judicial discretion. In at least a dozen cases, he had committed youths to locked facilities for specific lengths of time: 18 months in one case, 12 months in several others.
The public defender's office was not the only agency unhappy about the commitment orders. The state Juvenile Services Department worried that the orders put strain on institutions that had limited bed space and were not set up to hold offenders for longer than the time it took to complete the six- to nine-month programs they offered.
In early October, the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered Dawson to reconsider the set-term commitments he had ordered. He has since either released the youths or revised the language of the orders to comply with the law.
And this fall, the Casey Foundation expanded its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative to Prince George's County. Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy in Washington, is leading the effort, which offers training and technical assistance to help jurisdictions reduce overreliance on locked detention and develop other ways of holding youths accountable.
"We want judges to understand that the juvenile system is not the solution to all the problems of children and families," Soler said.
Asked if he believes some youths should be locked up for longer stretches, Dawson said that for serious offenses like armed robbery and carjacking, they should.
"I'm not in good conscience, no matter what they say about me, going to put that child back in the community," he said. At least one of the youths involved in the appeals court cases violated probation within a week of being released, he said.
"I am what I am," Dawson said. "If I don't tell these kids to get out and get an education, for the most part, they are not getting it, and nobody seems to care."
A Section on 12/21/2014