How easy is it for a minor who has had a run-in with the law to turn things around? Panagiotis Houdalas, head of the Nafplio Juvenile Probation Service, talks to us about the critical juncture at which a juvenile shows up on the radar of the Criminal Justice system and it’s hard not to feel that valuable time has already been lost.
An African proverb came to mind as I was coming to meet you. It says that a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it to feel some warmth. Is that how it is?
“Apart from imitation, yes, that’s a clear cause of delinquent behavior. And it’s not something we only observe in children who have been victims of social, racial or other forms of discrimination since birth; because it also manifests in children from “good families”, in the form of what Kundera calls rebellious boredom. Let me give you a personal example. A child in my extended family circle, who’s now 16 years old and comes from a middle-class and highly conservative family, has been showing signs of rebellion over the last year. He has repeatedly come to the attention of the police and has tried various ways to get himself noticed. He joined a crew of football fans, for instance, but when I ask him who coaches the team, he has no idea. What he’s trying to tell us is that he joined to take part in the aggressive behaviors of the group; that he wants to provoke somehow; that he wants to be seen. There is no family or social background in his case. But he achieved his goal: he has our full attention.”
Is that usually the age at which children become transgressive?
“Yes, that’s the age, around 15. That’s something I took away from the workshops and seminars and the wisdom of colleagues and our criminology professor, but my everyday experiences have reinforced their message over and over and over again. You see, the kids come here and most of them give you the impression that they could go easily end up going either way. You seldom come across a child who you know you cannot save, because they already have a long history of criminal behavior. But it’s just as rare to come across a juvenile who has committed a single one-off transgression that they aren’t going to repeat. In my experience, the vast majority are laying the foundations for delinquent behavior in their adult lives. There are exceptions of course—those cases that have cropped up in recent years of minors selling child pornography, for example, where the perpetrators tend to be middle-class.”
And you? Aren’t you at a crossroads between frustration and hope?
“You do see kids you’ve worked with being led into court a couple of years later in handcuffs, as adults. And both experience and the professional fatigue that comes from working years in the field, mean I can’t tell you I have any well-founded hopes of kids sorting themselves out. But what motivates us to come to work every day and try is that if we can save even one kid out of ten, what we do is worthwhile. But I can’t hope for more than that. However harsh that may sound, it’s just the way it is.”
Don’t the measures you take help at all?
“They work in theory, but they can’t always be implemented. Because when a minor refuses to comply, I have no way of forcing them to. Because you can’t simply impose those measures on them. A lot of the time, juvenile court reminds me of the mock trials we did in law school, retrying Kolokotronis or Dreyfuss, simply to learn how the process works. I’m not saying we should be moving toward more punitive approaches, just that we’re kidding ourselves if we insist the measures we have are working. And to an extent, that renders what we do futile, too.”
What do you do then? Do you adapt, or try to resist in some way?
“We do all sorts of things to get them to want to come; we try to stimulate their willingness to participate in the process. We’re always on the lookout for new ways of doing things that will make the service more attractive. For example, I’ve arranged for kids to participate in first aid training programs with the Greek Rescue Team as a rehabilitative measure, especially for minors who have committed crimes which involve disregard for other people’s physical integrity. In other words, kids who’ve beaten people up and caused bodily harm go there and learn how to protect the legal good they violated.”
Tell me about the measures that don’t work, or can even backfire…
“There are rehabilitative measures which don’t work in my opinion—community service, for instance, which is imposed as a last resort before imprisonment. Because, while it’s a valid approach from a legal policy point of view, in practice it runs into all sorts of obstacles. For example, arranging the necessary supervision with the relevant institutions, which are the municipalities in this case, or providing insurance for the minor when he or she is working in the street. And then, in small communities in particular, a minor who’s seen sweeping the village square in a yellow vest is going to be socially stigmatized when their friends see them and figure out they’re serving their sentence. And that’s not at all what we want when we’re trying to rehabilitate a minor.”
Have they lost the ability to imagine a better future?
“I always ask them the same question: ‘If you had a magic wand, what would you want? Tell me what’s impossible.” The answers they give are tightly bound up with their particular cultural background. I mean, you know that a Roma child, whose world ends at the stream at the bottom of the encampment, will tell you he wants to have a lot of money and a lot of children. However, most of them dream of just being average or normal. Many want a job, because we see children all the time who are no longer of school age, but who committed an offense at 17 and are now 19. If I was given a platform like the Manpower Employment Agency to find jobs for the people I work with, it would solve 90% of my problems. I’ve done it in a few cases with people I know, and most of the time, the kid goes off, works the season as a waiter, finds their feet and does better from then on in.”
Do the parents thank you? I read an interview with a judge in the US juvenile courts, who joked that the best thing would be for the kids to go back home after the trial, but for the parents to be sent away.
“Generally they cooperate, but most of the time they tell you what you want to hear, at first at least. No matter how hard we try to convince them that we’re working for and with them, they still feel like they’re up before a judicial authority. It takes a lot of effort to build trust and uncover what it is that isn’t working in the family and the family home. They start out painting a picture of ideal family environments and trying to pass off the juvenile’s transgressive behavior as an isolated incident—when of course it isn’t. We also refer them to parental counseling, which is offered free by the mental health services, to a degree, but very few have responded to it. And, of course, we hear a whole lot of lies—there’s no denying that. Which is logical to a point, and something we’re understanding about.”
You’re the intermediary between the child and the judge. Do the boundaries of your role ever get blurred?
“We’re neither investigators nor prosecutors, and when we appear in the juvenile courts, I often feel, because of my legal background, that when I’m given the floor by the court to speak about what corrective measures could be applied, I am advocating for the juvenile in a way. That isn’t our procedural role, but you can connect with a minor on a profound level, even after just a few meetings, so that you end up defending them in court without even realizing it. Which can sometimes put you in a difficult position during the trial, because it’s the first time you actually come into contact, visual or otherwise, with the victim. We haven’t seen the victim, but we may have seen the perpetrator four or five times and forged a connection with them. Then the trial comes along, and there they are. Still, we’re not impartial—that’s something the judge and the judge alone has to be; our role is to recommend the rehabilitative measure that will be most beneficial for the offender. It is not our role to deliver justice, either, even in cases which may shock us, as human beings or as citizens.”
Could you give us an example of a case that left you shaken?
“There was one case in which a sex crime was committed against a member of the family.”
What were your recommendations?
“I can’t recommend a criminal sentence—it’s a condition of our service. So I wrote a report recommending that the perpetrator be kept under supervision by our service for two years. Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be followed—it was obvious what the sentence was going to be, because the offender couldn’t continue to live under the same roof with the victim, especially since the latter was still a young child. That person has gone on to amass the worst possible criminal record: trafficking migrants, pimping, human trafficking and armed robbery. He’s an adult now and I’m his parole officer. I’m pretty sure he’ll mess up big time and end up being sentenced to life imprisonment and murdered in prison.”
Does that mean that society has tragically failed to help a child live the life they should have lived?
“All the support structures have failed, that’s for sure, and first and foremost the family. It’s very common for us to have the father doing community service following their conviction for a crime against property, and then a year or two later for the son to wind up a defendant in the Juvenile Court—in which case, the father accompanies the son to his hearing, and I already know him. Other times, with children who have never attended school, we just set up Greek lessons for them, so they know how to read and write. It’s not enough to wag a finger at them and say “Don’t do it again, my boy!” And because each case is unique, we have the luxury of seeing it with fresh eyes—we don’t deal with standardized approaches, and we’re not expected to blindly apply a specific modus operandi based on a protocol; each case is different and is dealt with differently. As long as they show up—I need to stress that: they need to show.”
What case have you been working on lately?
“I’ll tell you about Kostas. He’s a teenager with roots in the area. We know his father, too, who has a history of repeated delinquent behavior. He’s coming to us, because he committed a sexual offense against a minor. After we started, we found out he has a history of systematic delinquent behavior at school, a challenging family environment—his father is permanently in prison, his mother has been absent since he was three, and his grandfather is a guy who used to settle disputes in the village by threatening others with weapons. So this kid comes to the department accused of having sexual intercourse with a girl the prosecutor deemed to lack the mental maturity required for consent. But then a larger web of anti-social and delinquent behavior began to appear around Kostas. We have been dealing with his case for a year and a half, we’re in constant touch with the school, we’ve sent him to the mental health center for sessions. He’s already changed school once, because no one wanted him there and the other parents were complaining, so he is experiencing powerful social exclusion, which is logical to a certain extent. Well, we have been trying for a year and a half now to save Kostas.”
Did he plead guilty?
“No, he admits nothing. Generally speaking, they’ll deny if repeatedly, but if a juvenile won’t admit they committed the act before the court, they can’t be sent for rehabilitation. I’d say they deny it in one out of every two cases.”
If they admit it, is there usually remorse on the part of the perpetrator, or forgiveness on the part of the victim?
“In one case of a successful reformative intervention, in this case conciliation, the victim’s description of how she was vilified and socially isolated after a classmate with whom she had previously had a relationship uploaded her naked photos onto the Web was shocking. This has become an extremely common crime over the last couple of years, and many times we end up with girls being accused of possessing and distributing child pornography. Another big issue here is that children do not know that, even if they were not involved in its production, keeping a photo on a mobile phone is a criminal offense, which brings them to the attention of the e-crime unit. So this was a case in which the whole system worked and the perpetrator realized his mistake, was remorseful and apologized to the victim. Overall, the reforms are moving in the right direction, although they often do not work, either because of a lack of infrastructure or of understaffing, or because of practical difficulties or reluctance on the part of those involved. But where they are implemented, we can hope they’ll lead to something good.”
