Clinton Assails Juvenile-Crime Measure

WASHINGTON — President Clinton on Saturday harshly denounced the juvenile-crime measure approved by the Republican-controlled House last week, saying the bill “ignores . . . what works” in discouraging young people from committing violence.

“The plain evidence of what is working right now to save our children is nowhere apparent in this bill,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address. “It’s the same old tough rhetoric without any prevention, without any change in the environment to make it harder for gangs to function, or without any real toughness in every state in America.

“Perhaps most troubling, the House bill rejects my call to cut off young people’s access to guns, now the third leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 13 and 24,” he added.

The legislation passed by the House on Thursday would allow offenders as young as 13 to be tried as adults in federal courts. It would give federal prosecutors broad authority to charge juveniles as adults, increase the types of offenses that make juveniles eligible for such treatment, open to public scrutiny juvenile records and court proceedings and allow juveniles to be incarcerated with adults.

The measure also would provide $1.5 billion to states that bring their laws into compliance with the proposed tougher federal standards, effectively abolishing the separate juvenile justice system, which has traditionally been less severe and more committed to rehabilitation than the adult court system.

The Senate has not yet taken up the measure. When the bill passed the House, White House aides stopped short of threatening a veto, saying they still hope for further concessions from the GOP.

Clinton favors an approach that focuses on guns and tries to keep kids off the streets: He wants Congress to require safety locks on guns, ban gun sales to any adult who committed a violent crime as a youth and keep schools open later and on weekends as an alternative for youths who are now hanging out on the streets.

“Not a single hunter would lose a gun because of child safety locks,” the president said in his radio speech, taped Friday aboard Air Force One while he was visiting San Jose, Costa Rica.

Also, extending school hours would enable young people to “stay under the watchful eye of parents, educators and community leaders instead of on street corners, where the most common influences are bad ones,” he added.

Clinton cited Boston’s “Operation Nightlife” as a example of an effective crime-prevention program: Police and probation officers make nightly visits to the homes of young offenders to ensure that they are following the rules of their probation.

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In Boston, “where many of these efforts are already in place, youth murders have dropped 80% in five years, and not one child has been killed with a gun in over a year and a half,” Clinton said.

“To me, a juvenile-justice bill that doesn’t limit children’s access to guns is a bill that walks away from the problem,” he said.

“Now if we can have safety precautions to prevent children opening bottles of aspirin, surely we can have the same safety precautions to prevent children from using guns,” Clinton said.