51ºÚÁÏ

Take, for example, the arrest a couple of weeks ago of a 16-year-old after a carjacking in 51ºÚÁÏ. He was released to his parents and then carjacked again the same week. Law enforcement blamed the juvenile system in Missouri, which has a point system that determines when a child must be held in detention.

“Allowing juveniles to continue to commit felony-level offenses and offering no deterrent doesn’t help that young person succeed,� Lake Saint Louis Police Chief Chris DiGiuseppi said in a news release on behalf of the , a statewide police group. “It sets them up for failure as they continue to escalate in criminal offenses.�

Here’s what will happen next: there will be a bill filed in the next session of the Missouri Legislature to change the broken juvenile system.

To be clear, it is broken, but not necessarily in the way the police organization thinks. For years, the Missouri Model of juvenile detention has treated its facilities like schools and not prisons, focusing on education and rehabilitation. It has been touted as a national leader by, for example, turning 16-year-old carjackers into productive members of society.

But a lawsuit filed in Missouri recently suggests that model has been abandoned. Young people in need of special services for disabilities or mental health issues — who are the majority of juveniles in the system — are not getting the care they need, the lawsuit claims.

Regardless, the legislature will pass a new law, and the next 16-year-old carjacker will end up in a juvenile facility. He won’t get the care that was promised and he’ll come out worse for wear, perhaps with increased mental health difficulties. And he’ll be arrested a couple of years later as an adult.

This time he’ll end up in adult jail, but his criminal case will go nowhere. A judge will declare him incompetent to stand trial and order the Department of Mental Health to treat his illness. But the Department of Mental Health will say there are no beds available for detainees with mental health issues. The young man, now 19, will be stuck in jail, not receiving mental health treatment — and not being held accountable for the case police filed against him because it will be on interminable hold.

The young man will find himself on a list of 400 or more people like him in city and county jails all across Missouri. Most of those jails pay a private, for-profit company to provide health care. The companies are notorious for choosing profits over quality care. He’ll have a mental health episode. Correctional workers will strap him in a restraint chair because they don’t know what else to do.

He’ll be left there for 90 minutes, or several hours, and he’ll die.

This is how a 16-year-old gets the death penalty for carjacking.

All of the above scenarios — from the juvenile detention issues, to the mental health treatment issues, to the jail death — are very real. I and other Post-Dispatch writers have covered them all.

It’s not that the mistakes stem from malice. The police pushing for tougher laws are well-intentioned, responding to pressure from residents who don’t want to be carjacked. The lawmakers are responding to their constituents, though they don’t realize that in another room, their colleagues are cutting funding for the juvenile justice system and for the Department of Mental Health.

Because of term limits, nobody remembers what the process was more than two decades ago, before Missouri reformed its juvenile justice system. They don’t even remember a decade later, when lawmakers rewrote the criminal code after it became unwieldy for the crime of the day to result in tougher charges without concern for the consequences.

The folks running jails know that the mental health patients don’t belong there, but their hands are tied. The politicians who hire the health care companies for jails can’t hire enough people to pick up the trash in local alleys, so they’re happy to check a box and consider the problem solved.

One part of the system damages another. When it ends with people dying in jail, everybody points fingers.

The greatest tragedy is that not enough people care when someone dies in jail. Too many of us assume the worst about people who are locked up. America leads the world in mass incarceration, putting a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country. But not enough of us stop to ask: if mass incarceration is the answer, then why are politicians always complaining that crime is out of control?

If we don’t want a 16-year-old carjacker to re-offend, we’d spend more time patching the cracks of the criminal justice system before we rush to add more weight to its crumbling foundation.

The cracks aren’t that hard to see. They’re right in front of us. If only we’d open our eyes and see that one is connected to the other.