From an editorial published in the Fayetteville Observer on Jan. 21:

Goaded by the occasional advisory commission and study panel, North Carolina lawmakers are slowly coming to realize that routinely trying defendants aged 16 and 17 as adults is a bad policy that gets bad results: more pressure on jails and prisons, lost productivity.

Prime candidates for diversion programs, nonviolent young people who could be punished and then recycled through the classroom and the workplace, are instead packed off to crime university or branded with felony records and returned to the streets without incomes or prospects.

"Where do we have the best recruitment for gangs in North Carolina?" asks Mark Galloway, chief District Court judge for Caswell and Person counties. "In prison."

It's not as if there would be anything revolutionary or dangerous about raising the age for trial in adult court to 18. And goodness knows there are plenty of models for change. Only New York and North Carolina still do it this way. In fact, with a judge's consent, even a 13-year-old can be tried as an adult in this state. And under the proposed reform, traffic cases involving those 16 and 17 would still be tried in adult court.

The key word is "routinely." Many other states reserve the authority to try defendants under 18 for atrocious crimes. But they don't automatically route young offenders barely old enough to drive into the adult system.

Unfortunately, as Fayetteville Police Chief Tom Bergamine observed, "It all leads back to money." Trying more cases in juvenile court would cost $50 million at a time when almost every literate person has read, repeatedly, that the legislature is facing a budget shortfall of more than $3 billion. What money is available should be used to strengthen juvenile court, he reasons, not to add to its case load.

Eventually, North Carolina must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time; but for now, Bergamine is right.

In the meantime, suggests Eddie Caldwell, executive vice president of the N.C. Sheriffs Association, no huge outlays are needed to expunge the criminal records of carefully selected, nonviolent offenders who want to leave their youthful indiscretions in the past and make futures for themselves among the law-abiding.

That isn't what most needs doing, but it's one thing that we can do.