Delinquent: Read all the stories from Week 1. Cuyahoga County sends more kids to adult prison than any other county. Why?

CLEVELAND, Ohio – For Montori, life in the streets was a game of shoot to kill.

As boys growing up in Cleveland’s Collinwood-Nottingham neighborhood, he and his friends inherited a feud with rivals in adjacent Glenville. Eventually, fistfights turned into gun battles. Whenever he drew his weapon, Montori felt like a competitor in a Call of Duty video game, with points amassed by hitting targets.

“It’s all about who got the higher score,” he says now. “That’s how you get your clout.”

One night in 2018, the then-17-year-old grabbed two pistols and headed out the door. Acquiring guns was no problem for Montori, who stole them on the street and relied on a local woman for straw purchases. It had been less than a year since his release from a juvenile prison, with a rap sheet dating to age 13.

Earlier that night, Montori provoked his rivals on Instagram, and now, cruising the streets, he found himself on their turf. Spotting some young people in a parked car – enemies, he assumed – he made a U-turn. He crept along, window down, and gripped his gun.

Points on the board, he thought, taking aim.

Montori was among more than 50 juvenile offenders who spoke to The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com about their recent experiences within the Cuyahoga County juvenile justice system, which puts more children behind bars than any other county in Ohio.

SEE ALL STORIES FOR DELINQUENT: OUR SYSTEM, OUR KIDS

At the core of the juvenile justice system is society’s agreement that children who do wrong are both capable and deserving of rehabilitation in ways that adults often are not. It’s built upon an understanding that impressionable young people, with their strong wills and still-forming brains, are not only prone to errors in judgment, but also likely to learn from them. It’s a system oriented around second chances and interventions, course correction and compassion. It recognizes when a child’s terrible circumstances – exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, scarcity, housing insecurity – require as much attention as the behavioral problems they sometimes create.

For most kids, that system works.

When it doesn’t, however, youth can get stuck in a cycle. Eventually, their record grows so long, or they are accused of crimes so severe, that the law no longer recognizes them as juveniles. In those cases, they can be transferred to the adult system to face adult sanctions, including adult prison, surrounded by adult offenders. That process, called bindover, is complex and the subject of fierce debate, especially in Cuyahoga County, which binds over more juveniles than Franklin, Hamilton, Summit and Montgomery counties combined. More than 90% of them are Black.

Justice officials say those decisions are easy to explain: The youths did heinous things. They were beyond the juvenile system’s ability for reform, and only an adult prison sentence could have adequately protected the public. But therein lies the complexity: Research shows that not only are kids more hardened and harmed by time served in adult prisons than in the juvenile system, they are also more likely to re-offend once they get out.

In this special series – Delinquent: Our System, Our Kids – The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com have set out to explain how the juvenile justice system works in Cuyahoga County, through the eyes of the young people who go through it.

Over the next six weeks, we spotlight dozens of those youths – identified by middle name or pseudonym – who shared their stories in interviews spanning seven months. Most of them also granted our reporters access to their juvenile casefiles – documents that are not public record -- which yielded thousands of pages, illuminating their histories.

Reporters also attended court hearings and collected police reports, transcripts and other legal filings to better understand the influences that led these young people to crime, escalations from petty misdemeanors to violent acts and the barriers that delayed or blocked their rehabilitation, despite interventions.

Throughout these stories, we ask: If Cuyahoga County’s juvenile system is designed to rehabilitate and divert young offenders from crime, is it working? And, at what point did it potentially fail the kids who are in Ohio’s adult prisons today?

Kids like Montori.

Entering the system

In his younger years, Montori excelled athletically and academically. His home life was not as easy. His mother was jailed for several crimes including drug trafficking. Around 10, the boy began hanging out on corners, smoking pot and shooting dice.

When his mother was home, things got violent. Once, she was arrested for striking Montori’s face with a belt buckle – punishment for eating too much, he told police – swelling the 12-year-old’s eye socket. On another occasion, his mother’s boyfriend threw him into a wall, sending him to the hospital. He told police he’d continue running away because of the beatings. During one police encounter he asked officers to shoot him.

“Every kid wants to have a relationship with their parents,” Montori recalls, but “it was toxic in the house.”

Montori’s mother says he often disrespected her. “I don’t beat my kids, I whip their a--,” she says, suggesting there is a difference when a child needs discipline. “I was beating his a-- when he needed it beat. I wasn’t going to let him overrule me. I’m the parent.”

At 13, Montori was charged with domestic violence after an altercation with his mother, introducing him to the juvenile justice system. (Police details are unclear, but Montori says it was self-defense.) A string of petty crimes followed, like breaking windows and destroying his mom’s phone.

When he was 14, Montori says his mother kicked him out of the house. She says he left on his own. Regardless, he befriended teens with similar backgrounds, and together they started stealing cars and playing with guns. “I didn’t know how to aim, I was just shooting,” he says.

As his crimes escalated, so did court sanctions.

Montori, who’d never stepped foot in a high school, says he was sent to a trio of treatment facilities serving at-risk youth. He remembers sitting in groups, roleplaying anger management and victim awareness. He thought the programs were OK but had little value in his world.

Meanwhile, as he and his friends went through puberty, their beef with the Glenville crew intensified. “You couldn’t go to a gun fight thinking you were going to fight with fists,” Montori says. He was never told how the feud began; he just remembers older peers indoctrinating him.

After violating probation for a kidnapping charge, he was sent to Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility, one of three prisons run by the Ohio Department of Youth Services. For two years, he says, life was a blur of fighting.

After his release, the 17-year-old reunited with his crew, which was committing near-daily crimes. Montori was fueled by adrenaline, softened by Xanax and Ecstasy.

“We just did it for the thrill,” he recalls. “What could we lose?”

He’d soon find out, after rolling up on a car full of Glenville rivals.

‘A treacherous year’

As he aimed his gun through the window, 17-year-old Montori fired several times before it jammed. He grabbed his Glock and unleashed a few more rounds, then peeled away.

On the ride home, he listened to a police scanner app and was excited that an ambulance had been dispatched to the scene. That meant his bullets had hit a mark. OK, I scored, he thought. The next day he was bragging on Instagram.

It had been a “really treacherous” year for the warring crews, Montori recalls. He ticks off the names of friends who’ve been murdered, stopping at eight. He estimates he’d also been shot at more than 10 times over the years.

Meanwhile, his family’s house was shot up three times, his mother says, forcing her to flee. “I could have lost my life,” she says.

Montori’s drive-by shooting resulted in two hospitalizations – neither victim died – but Montori refused to lay low. One day he drove a stolen BMW to the East Cleveland high school and chatted up some girls. A state trooper spotted the car and called for backup.

Five minutes later, Montori was leading a high-speed chase. Eventually, he ditched the car and took off sprinting, but his legs gave out. Cops surrounded him and took him to the juvenile detention center.

Little did he know, the FBI was also investigating a string of bank robberies linked to his group.

A turning point

Authorities tagged the crew as the “Rack Gang” – a nod to a fallen member named Rackman – accusing it of a rash of armed robberies against innocent civilians. Montori would be charged in one of those robberies in an East Cleveland bank.

His juvenile record now reflected 18 offenses.

Free from street drama in jail, however, Montori developed a focus. He busied himself with books and earned a high school diploma so quickly that instructors began asking why he was locked up, he says. “It’s my environment, I’m a product of poverty,” he told them.

He started communicating regularly with his half-sister’s dad, a father figure since his youth. Together they prayed and chatted about the importance of smart decisions.

At some point he was transferred downtown to the adult jail. There, sitting in his cell, the now-18-year-old felt a strange emotion rush through his body. Something he’d never felt before. It was a tinge of remorse.

Now thankful no one died by his hand, he wondered if he could somehow use the experience to become a better man.

A few weeks later, something inexplicable happened: Jail authorities released Montori by accident. He fled, and a judge issued a warrant.

Then, something just as extraordinary happened: After two weeks, he turned himself in.

“The old me woulda ran,” he recalls. “But me being a changed person, taking the straight and narrow path, I said, ‘However much time God wants me to do, I’m going to do it righteously.’”

Montori was bound over to adult court, where he pleaded guilty to several felonies, including a bank robbery and his drive-by shooting. (He told a judge he was with another person when he shot his rivals but now says he drove solo.) At his 2019 sentencing, he read a letter expressing regret.

“I had a lot going on as a kid,” he told the court. He pledged to create a social platform to help troubled teens upon his release from prison.

Common Pleas Judge Daniel Gaul wasn’t moved. “There are a thousand guys that are sentenced out of Cuyahoga County jail in a year who are going to have the same program,” he told Montori.

Kids in the streets, born out of wedlock, are enamored with social media, Gaul, who has since been kicked off the bench for misconduct, lectured at the time. They broadcast their crimes “with the hip-hop music blaring in the background. And they’re so desirous of being famous, like maybe Kanye.”

Gaul handed down a 10-year sentence, toward the low end of the statutory range. Montori had “about a fifty-fifty chance” of straightening up, the judge declared.

‘Rocks at heaven’

Montori is now 23 and midway through his 10-year sentence. By outward appearances he’s doing well. He’s unfailingly upbeat on the phone and is pursuing an associate’s degree in business management. During one conversation, he spoke of his interest to one day work at an assisted living facility—maybe even run his own—though he didn’t realize the Ohio Department of Health bars people convicted with certain felonies from working at such facilities.

His progress hasn’t been linear. Entering prison with a gang tag, he got into fights and spent hours in a max-security facility staring at walls. But his journey of introspection never abated. He enjoyed meeting people from different backgrounds and making fellow prisoners smile.

During a recent phone call, Montori had cause for excitement. Following a prison transfer, he was given a special cellmate: his older brother, who is serving a 28-year sentence for a murder he claims was self-defense. “I’ve been a little tied up remembering old times,” Montori says.

These days, it’s hard for Montori to reconcile with his teenage actions. “I can’t really grasp it, half the things I did,” he says. “I shot two people.”

Back then, his mindset was, “I’m just here,” he explains. His crimes were “pointless, but that was the only thing we knew.” With maturity, though, “Your eyes start to open, and everything changes.”

He admits that he needed to be removed from the community. “The path I was going, I was going to get killed,” he says. “I was throwing rocks at heaven.”

Still, if Montori is in a healthy place now, he’s not sure that adult lockup is the reason.

“I don’t think I needed prison,” he says. “I just needed some time to grow.”

Deon: A case of failed interventions

When Deon was 12, his bus driver caught him touching a girl’s buttocks. He claimed she was his girlfriend, but he was charged with sexual imposition and given probation.

When he was 13, his mother reported to the court that he frequently watched porn, groped girls, wrote sexual notes and made inappropriate sexual comments. A probation officer recommended Deon enroll in a sex-offense program. That never happened; the teen was busy with another therapeutic program run by Cuyahoga’s Division of Children & Family Services.

That year, he attacked his sister and mother over being asked to clean his room, resulting in domestic violence charges. “Youth has little regard or respect for women,” his probation officer wrote at the time.

The court sent Deon to Cleveland Christian Home, a residential treatment facility for at-risk youth. He says he appreciated the services, but staff continued to report “inappropriate sexual behaviors towards female staff and teachers,” according to his probation officer. Things got worse when, days before his scheduled release, his mother was arrested for murder.

The Cuyahoga Division of Children & Family Services took custody and sent him to foster homes in Canton and Akron. At 15, Deon assaulted a girl on the playground. A juvenile judge sentenced him to six months in a state lockup facility but suspended the term. Instead, he was sent to a treatment residence near Mansfield and ordered into sex-offender therapy. He wasn’t compliant with treatment.

Soon, he was dispatched to Glen Mills Schools, a Pennsylvania reform house that shut down in scandal for physical and sexual abuses. He recalls one occasion when guards forced him to the floor and ordered him to hug his knees for two hours. When he resisted, the men unleashed a flurry of body blows, as he begged for mercy, he says. Deon was later kicked out – he “appears to not respect authority figures, especially women,” a probation officer noted.

By the time Deon turned 17, he had been to at least seven treatment residences or behavioral programs. None succeeded, he says now.

“I felt like no one was listening,” he contends, referring to social workers, probation officers and therapists. “It was always, ‘You need to change, you need to do this to be better.’ But they never asked me what I needed help with, or how I felt about things.”

In 2019, prosecutors charged Deon with attacking a woman in a downtown Cleveland parking garage elevator, raping her, forcing her into her car and causing her to crash into a wall. A juvenile judge transferred his case to adult court, where he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 33 years in prison. (Deon now denies the rape, saying he was confused during plea negotiations.)

‘Are we creating a monster?’

Deon cycled through the juvenile justice system 19 times before being transferred to adult court for rape. Each touchpoint with the system, in theory, was a chance to rehabilitate him and prevent future crime. His story shows us that sometimes interventions fail. Some kids simply will not find their way out of the system before they end up in adult prison.

Deon’s story came to light through a Plain Dealer/cleveland.com analysis of raw data detailing the criminal histories of 259 juveniles who were bound over in Cuyahoga County between 2019 and 2022. The information, obtained through a public records request, revealed how many times each youth appeared before the court on charges before they were transferred to the adult system.

Deon’s list of charges was among the highest tally in the database, but he’s not an anomaly. At least 62% of kids who were bound over in that four-year period had at least five sets of charges; a third had more than 10.

Many of the youths argue they didn’t receive true opportunities for rehabilitation, and intervention services failed to address the effects of trauma, abuse or childhood poverty, leaving them cycling in the system. Some court officials, however, argue that such youths wasted the opportunities afforded them.

“You can take a horse to water but can’t make them drink,” Cuyahoga Juvenile Court Administrative Judge Thomas O’Malley says. Eventually, he adds, “we’re left with no choice” but to bind them over to adult court.

That happens more often in Cuyahoga County than elsewhere in the state.

Between 2019 and 2022, Cuyahoga transferred 259 youths to the adult system. In the same period, Franklin County transferred 74 juveniles, and Hamilton County transferred 62, according to a Plain Dealer/cleveland.com analysis of bindover data provided by each of the juvenile courts.

The disparity has prompted statewide debate.

“If something is happening more frequently in one area of the state than in other similarly populated areas, that should raise questions,” says Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly, speaking generally about statewide bindover rates, not Cuyahoga specifically.

It may be that Cuyahoga County youths commit more serious crimes than peers across the state, which could lead to more bindovers.

A comparison of charging numbers across 10 serious felonies, including murder, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary and rape, shows Cuyahoga files these charges nearly four times as often as Hamilton County and more than twice as often as Franklin County. (Because numbers are reported by charge, not case, it’s impossible to tell whether they reflect unique crimes or stacked charges. A youth, for example, may be charged in the same case with multiple levels of homicide offenses, ranging from aggravated murder to manslaughter.)

Yet, other factors could be driving the disparity, too.

For example, Hamilton County considered bindover in a similar number of cases as Cuyahoga, but in the end, far fewer of those were granted. That could be because of philosophical differences among county prosecutors about which cases should be left to the discretion of juvenile judges or when it’s appropriate to negotiate plea deals.

In Franklin County, when a youth’s charges qualify for bindover, “We’re going to file it every time,” says Christopher Clark, chief of counsel for the prosecutor’s juvenile division. But that “doesn’t mean we’re gung-ho on bindover,” he says. Decisions are made after weighing the severity of the crime, reviewing the kid’s court history and conferring with the victims.

“We’re really only trying to bind over kids with serious crimes and serious records,” Clark says.

Others in the state would agree.

Anissa Modarelli, a senior assistant prosecuting attorney who handles bindover cases for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown, says she tries to avoid bindover when she can. Her first obligation is to protect public safety, she explains. But that doesn’t always mean sending youth to adult prison, where they might learn more criminal behavior from the “worst of the worst,” raising questions about long-term benefits to society.

“I don’t know how much rehabilitation is going to happen when you send a 16-year-old to (adult prison) for 10 years,” she says. “What are the chances of that kid not coming out broken? What are we doing? Are we creating a monster?”

Missed opportunities

Deon has faced adversity since he was born – before even. He hadn’t left the womb yet when his father went on the run for manslaughter charges. His mother faced her own criminal troubles and was soon on probation for arson and riot.

Amid the turmoil in his home in Cleveland’s Union-Miles neighborhood, Deon would lash out with fists, beating on younger siblings and destroying family property. He cycled through five schools in two years and was kicked off his football team after swiping a coach’s laptop.

Then, when Deon was 13, his mother was arrested for murder. With no other guardian to care for him, he entered a four-year carousel of foster placements and detention.

At one residency, he racked up six charges for assault and disorderly conduct and caused $4,000 in damages to an employee’s car. Back in juvenile jail, he was charged with aggravated riot and assault. For a second time, a judge ordered a six-month sentence in a state juvenile lockup facility but suspended it.

During one turn through jail, Deon told staff his mother had hanged herself in prison. It took officials several days to figure out he’d falsified the story. The episode mirrored an earlier incident in which he’d falsely reported his brother had been killed.

“It appears that (Deon) enjoys manipulating people and playing games, especially with adults and authority figures,” his probation officer reported, adding, “he will need to continue to work through the trauma related in his life before he will be able to return to the community safely.”

When Deon was 16, a Cuyahoga County psychologist said the most appropriate place for him was a youth prison or lockup facility. Instead, he was ferried to an unsecured Columbus youth shelter, from which he AWOLed and returned to Cleveland.

“I felt like Cuyahoga County was just sending me places, just to get me off their hands,” Deon recalls.

After another arrest and escape, he panhandled downtown, slept on buses and sometimes wandered the city all night. Soon he was shoplifting and breaking into cars. Then he was charged with rape, bound over and sentenced to adult prison.

Now 22, Deon is struggling. He claims his sex offender status puts a target on his back in prison. In March, following his complaints that therapy requests were ignored, he says the state transferred him to a new facility and placed him on a mental health block.

He wishes he had had a chance at juvenile prison reform before things spiraled. Maybe then his life would have turned out differently, he says.

“The system was made to rehabilitate me and prevent me from coming to adult prison,” he says, “and all it did was send me to adult prison.”

Cameron: For most kids, the system works

Cameron spent his 10th birthday in a cemetery, burying his grandfather.

Things got bad, after that.

He watched his mother’s boyfriend punch her so hard it left tooth-shaped wounds inside her cheek, police reported. As the new “man of the house,” Cameron told police he tried to defend her, but the boyfriend easily tossed him aside.

He started arguing with his mother more and disappearing from their Broadway-Slavic Village home for days at a time. While out walking the streets, he once called police after being beaten up by an armed teenager. When he did return home, his family was threatened with eviction.

Cameron remembers being so desperate for food one night that he walked into a local grocery store and stole a package of meat for him and his younger brother. Theft soon became a habit for survival, a justification he later applied to selling weed.

“I really didn’t care about life,” Cameron recalls of that time.

Many of the kids who enter the criminal justice system, like Cameron, started dabbling in crime in response to trauma, abuse, neglect or poverty. For them, crime became a way of life, and sometimes a justified means of survival. But that doesn’t mean they’re beyond the reach of intervention. Beyond hope.

With the right support, kids can change, Cameron says. He lived it.

The early years

To escape from his chaotic home life, Cameron bonded with a group of neighborhood friends with similar backgrounds and was pulled into a sort of fight club, where he was expected to punch on command. Those fights “got rougher and more dangerous,” Cameron says, but it felt good to hurt others to mask his own pain. He learned not to ask questions.

He liked feeling on top again. He was smoking weed, drinking and staying out all night. His mother would file numerous missing persons reports before eventually kicking him out of the house, but he didn’t care.

“I wanted to have fun and do what the older kids were doing,” he recalls.

At 16, he and a friend followed another youth off a public bus and threatened to beat the kid up if he didn’t hand over his phone. When the kid tried to run, Cameron pulled out a six-inch blade. The robbery was spontaneous, he says now.

Noticing his troubling behavior, his mother tried to intervene. She reached out to Big Brothers, Big Sisters to get him a mentor, but there was a long wait and his friends pulled him back into the lifestyle. Two months later, he beat up a different kid and stole his BEATS earbuds.

That time, Cameron spent over two months in the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center before a judge ruled him delinquent of aggravated robbery and several other felonies between his two cases. A jail fight tacked on a misdemeanor assault charge.

It was Cameron’s first time being in trouble. That was all the wake-up call he needed, Cameron says.

He’d gone from feeling on top of the world to rock bottom in a cell. He faced threats from other detained youth. He lost weight because of lousy food. And he resented missing out on so much. He only got to call his mother twice a week, he missed his younger brother’s entire football season, and he turned 17 behind bars without celebration.

He realized that to turn his life around, he needed better role models. He felt his community had been failing him since boyhood.

“There was no way for me to go down the right path growing up because I wasn’t seeing the right path,” Cameron says. “It took me going to jail to stop doing what I was doing.”

Change

Most kids who touch juvenile court are like Cameron. They do wrong – sometimes the infractions are minor, sometimes grave – receive intervention services and never get in trouble again. That’s how the system is designed to work.

Juvenile courts were created in the early 1900s to put greater focus on rehabilitating youths, rather than punishing them. The thinking was that youth should be granted some grace to make mistakes, while still being held accountable through age-appropriate interventions to give them a better chance of becoming law-abiding adults. The philosophy is even built into the court’s language, where juveniles are adjudicated “delinquent,” rather than the adult term “guilty.”

Cuyahoga County was at the forefront of that movement, becoming the second in the nation behind Chicago to create a separate juvenile system in 1902. The court’s mission is, “To administer justice, rehabilitate juveniles, support and strengthen families, and promote public safety.”

The county’s juvenile court started with one judge but has since grown to support six judges and 27 magistrates, overseeing more than 3,000 delinquency cases a year. That work now happens in a towering edifice on Cleveland’s East side, off a boulevard named, perhaps aptly, Opportunity Corridor.

Today, a large portion of the juveniles who are charged each year never go before a judge. Court records show that about 40% of cases filed each year are either dismissed or sent to diversion, where kids receive services, and their charges are then sealed, erasing their criminal record. A recent study commissioned by the court shows that in about 93% of those diversion cases, juveniles had not reoffended a year later.

And while the court doesn’t track outcomes for every kid who touches the system, it does follow the ones who receive services, and that data shows high rates of success. Over 80% of those kids successfully complete their court programs, and less than 25% reoffend within the year after.

However, for the small number of kids who end up committing another crime, bindover to adult court is a looming threat.

Youth can be bound over when they’re accused of high-level felonies involving serious harm to victims. That’s especially true if the crime involved guns, which have proliferated. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office makes the charging decisions or files the motions that can trigger those bindovers.

Since 2017, O’Malley’s second year in office, the number of kids bound over has experienced a marked uptick, peaking at 88 in 2019, a Plain Dealer and cleveland.com analysis found. Numbers fell to 60 in 2021, but they ticked up again last year. In 2023, the prosecutor’s office reported 72 youths being transferred to the adult system.

Though Cameron faced numerous high-level felonies, including aggravated robbery, he didn’t meet the requirements for automatic bindover because he’d never gone to juvenile prison and none of his charges involved a gun. Prosecutors could have requested a different type of transfer that would have required a judge’s approval, following a review of his crime and life circumstances, but they didn’t.

Cameron’s case stayed in juvenile court, where he was ultimately sentenced to probation, but given a suspended youth prison sentence that would kick in if he reoffended. On probation, he was required to maintain a job and complete 25 hours of community service.

Months later, in March 2023, he dressed in a tuxedo to attend his final court hearing, where a magistrate terminated his probation and closed the case. Cameron says the outfit was a gesture of respect.

“I wanted to show him that a kid can actually change their life around, if they’re led down the right path,” Cameron, now 18, says.

Cameron could have faced bindover in his crime. Had he used a different weapon, bindover might have been automatic. Instead, he was given opportunities for rehabilitation in the juvenile system – and it worked. His story raises questions about whether other children have been bound over before they were given similar opportunities for reform.

Back home, he faces many of the same challenges he says led him to crime in the first place. They all stem from poverty. In the house he shares with his mother and 16-year-old brother, there are a few folding chairs and a humble TV on the floor. Neither son has a bed. Cameron’s sick of eating pizza, a cheap meal they turn to often.

Life is still hard, Cameron acknowledges, but he’s happier. His younger brother notes his change in attitude. He describes Cameron’s past behavior as violent and destructive but says, “now, nobody has to tell him to calm down.”

Cameron is finishing high school – which he considers a source of free meals, but also a point of pride. “I didn’t want no GED, I wanted a diploma with my name on it,” he says. He’s also taking commercial driver license classes to plan for his future. He is currently looking for a job.

For a while, before he was laid off in April, he worked at a grocery store. There he’d see kids lingering near the door asking strangers for money or, he suspects, plotting to steal things. In those moments, he’d reach for his wallet and ask what they need.

“When I see them, I see myself,” Cameron says. “I don’t want them to go down the path I went down.”

Reese: Inside an adolescent’s developing brain

Reese strolled into a Cleveland Save A Lot, trying to look casual. He grabbed a handcart and loaded up on food items: chicken, bread, eggs and seasoning – a meal for his family.

Instead of approaching the register, however, he neared the front door. Then he bolted without paying.

He was 7.

Shoplifting was routine for Reese after his father was convicted for federal drug crimes. When the boy started noticing an empty refrigerator in his home in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood, he was confused. Eventually he and his two siblings understood.

“My mom was always getting high, getting drunk, spending social security checks on weed and liquor,” he says now. “It hurt me ‘cause we needed food. We needed clothes and shoes.”

Reese, 20, is housed in a southwest Ohio prison, following a bindover and conviction for a carjacking spree, committed at 17. He’ll be at least 32 when he’s released.

He often fixates on the harsh realities of prison life, like the yellow sink water or “four different species of roaches” in his cell, he says. But on occasion, his mind drifts beyond prison, to the Atlantic Ocean, where he envisions dipping his toes in the surf.

“My faith and hope is there’s something better than this in my life,” Reese says.

Although today, Reese considers his criminal record a reflection of immaturity, after his carjacking spree at 17, the court no longer recognized him as a child when it bound him over as an adult. His case highlights the gap between how the justice system seeks accountability for juveniles and what research tells us about the developing brains of kids, who act on impulse, thinking little of the consequences.

Reese’s path into crime was forged by childhood poverty. Girls at school made fun of his sneakers, so undersized that his toes formed bulges at the tips. He learned to steal bikes to get around.

At home, his relationship with his mother deteriorated. When she was high, Reese recalls, she flew into rages and kicked him out of the house, leaving him confused and tearful. By age 10, he was sleeping in abandoned homes and eventually running away on his own.

At 12, he started smoking pot. That year a woman accused Reese of pilfering her phone at church. Later, at a community festival, police caught him stealing from someone’s purse. By 14 he was boosting cars.

Following one car theft, witnesses spotted Reese doing donuts and tossing the owner’s mail from the window. After another, the teen waved a gun at a woman taking out the trash. Police charged him with menacing. Other charges included receiving stolen property, trespassing and unauthorized use of a car.

“I was a kid,” Reese says in retrospect. “I had no guidance. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t using my brain. I was so childish. I thought it was fun, stealing cars.”

The research

Impulsivity is not uncommon for teenagers, and even for people in their early twenties. The brain is still developing at that age, specifically the prefrontal cortex – the seat of decision making and self-control, numerous scientific studies have found. In fact, the brain doesn’t fully mature until around age 25.

It’s one of the reasons why the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that juveniles should not be treated the same as adults. It also bars juveniles from facing the death penalty or being sentenced to life without parole, unless for a homicide crime. Even then, a child cannot receive a mandatory life sentence.

Ohio doubled down in 2021, barring all youth life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In most cases, youth also mature out of criminal behavior naturally, according to research cited in at least two U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

That, alone, gives them a unique capacity for change, argues BJ Casey, a Barnard College neurologist and one of the nation’s leading experts on adolescents. What’s more, “with targeted interventions, we could get an even bigger decline,” she advocated in a seminar hosted last year by Harvard University.

Cuyahoga County’s juvenile court offers a menu of intervention programs that acknowledge teens’ developing brains, and a lot of them boast success. Yet many kids, like Reese, still slip through those safeguards and reoffend, raising questions about what might close the gap.

‘Ruthless, arrogant, untrustworthy’

In 2020, Reese and two others pulled up to a motorist on her way to work in Cleveland’s University neighborhood. One forced her out at gunpoint and sped away in her Jeep, which carried her phone and purse. A half hour later, the group pistol-whipped a woman in scrubs at a Cleveland Heights bus stop and fled with her wallet and phone.

Four days after that, Reese’s group drove onto Case Western Reserve University’s campus. Reese pistol-whipped a student sitting in his car, police said. The group stole the car and crashed it during a police pursuit.

By the time of his arrest, Reese had 15 sets of charges on his record, and he’d rack up five assault charges in juvenile jail. Following his bindover, an adult judge sentenced him to 15 to 20 years in prison.

Reese was initially indifferent about the seriousness of his crimes, but later, “it hit me for real,” he says. Looking back, he describes his childhood self as “ruthless, arrogant, untrustworthy.”

He regrets his actions. To his victims, “With all my heart, I apologize,” he says.

Asked when his criminal path could have been interrupted, he thinks for a moment, then suggests age 12. That happens to be when a child’s brain becomes better at abstract thinking and solving problems. It also happens to be when the brain is awash in puberty hormones that have a way of intensifying nearly every emotion of adolescence.

Perhaps a mentor could have stepped in – “older dudes related to my dad, or even my cousins, who could’ve been like, ‘Spend the night with me this weekend, we’re gonna chill,’ or ‘Stay in school,’” he says.

From his own painful past, his long-buried adolescent sense of longing, Reese identified something that social researchers have affirmed after decades of study: Mentorship during kids’ formative years helps them manage life’s challenges, regulate behavior and impulsivity and develop core qualities, like empathy.

It’s just one of many interventions that might have helped Reese make better choices. Perhaps other kids in the system will find hope he didn’t have, along a path he didn’t get to take.

Nowadays, Reese has limited engagement with the outside world. His mother switched phone numbers and hasn’t been in contact, and his father reneged on a promise to deposit money into his commissary account, he says. Last he heard, his brother was in jail.

In March, inside a prison staffer’s office, he was allowed a face-to-face interview, his only visitor in four years. He arrived in grimy, shredded attire; his clean clothes were stolen from the laundry room, he explains.

But he was cheerful, playful even. He was excited about his upcoming 21st birthday, though he could still pass for a high schooler. He boasted about plans for reentering society in 11 years: investing in businesses and opening a highway restaurant serving fresh fish and meat.

“I will be somebody,” Reese vows.

His biggest dream is joining a record label, and he offered to croon a song he wrote. The first verse describes his mother kicking him out of the house on a rainy day instead of giving him a hug.

Perched behind Reese was a wall photo of a glistening beach, the word “love” etched in the sand. Sometimes, when he’s feeling low in his cell, he’ll think about a similar view in the Bahamas, a place he’s wanted to visit since he once watched a video of a lobster harvest.

“I’m free,” he says of those moments lost in thought. “I can be there looking at rays and feeling the sun beating on my face, instead of being in here in this prison.”

Nathan: When trauma takes root

In 2017, during a summer outing at an area creek, 12-year-old Nathan watched a friend drown.

He says he was offered therapy then, to address his grief, but declined it, thinking he was too tough. Then the victim’s family blamed Nathan and his brothers for the drowning, and he started getting death threats, which contributed to his distress.

“Honestly, it hurt me,” Nathan says of the accusation. He considered the kid a friend.

Two years later, Nathan was having dinner at a housing complex near Cleveland’s North-Broadway neighborhood when he heard the familiar pop of gunfire. He instinctively wrapped his arms around his mother, pulling her to the kitchen floor. Scanning the room afterward, he realized his oldest brother wasn’t there.

He later found the 18-year-old bleeding out in the grass. Nathan, who was 15 at the time, held his brother’s hand as he uttered his final words: “It’s hard for me to breathe.” The shooting remains unsolved.

Nathan was devasted. His father had been in and out of his childhood, so his oldest brother was the surrogate. Now he was gone, too.

“After my brother died, everything fell apart,” Nathan says.

For many kids, like Nathan, the pathway into crime begins with a traumatic experience. They act out, sometimes violently, as they try to make sense of their pain in ways that aren’t always healthy or safe. The trauma festers; bad behavior escalates. Kids -- seeking comfort, connection and belonging -- find themselves entangled with the wrong people, and eventually, with the juvenile justice system.

That’s when interventions are supposed to click into place, to redirect the child’s behavior and help heal the trauma beneath it all. But programs and services fail sometimes, or youth resist them. And the cycle continues, with young people who are even more likely to endanger the public – or find themselves, one day, bound over to adult court.

“Trauma is the story,” argues David Crampton, a Case Western Reserve University social work professor and Cuyahoga Division of Children and Family Services advisory board member. “We can put these kids in juvenile detention, or residential care, but if they don’t get help with their trauma, they’re not going to get better.”

‘I was moving off emotions’

Nathan had been on a destructive path even before his brother’s death.

He grew up with four siblings in a Garfield Heights neighborhood where crime was common, and his family was well known to police. His mother worked long hours as a nurse’s aide, eking out a living that could barely support her growing teens. Nathan remembers going to bed hungry many nights. Sometimes the family stretched pasta or hotdogs over several days, he says.

Without supervision, Nathan and his brothers got into mischief, and all but the youngest sibling would eventually touch the justice system.

When he was 9, police accused Nathan of shoplifting a pellet gun. At 10, they said he passed a counterfeit $20 bill at school. At 13, he put a gun to a woman’s face and demanded $5 for bus fare to get himself home. At 14, he was charged in a string of crimes, including possession of stolen car keys and beating up two kids. Not long after, he bloodied a man’s lip during a cellphone robbery and brought a BB gun to school.

The court sent him to a 12-week behavioral program, where he excelled under guidance. The manager later dubbed him her favorite youth. Such praise was echoed in the boy’s juvenile file, where his probation officer described him as polite, repentant and capable of reform.

Then his brother died and he “didn’t care about anything,” Nathan recalls. “My brother had just passed. Then another friend passed. It felt like things were happening chain after chain, so it was like, f--- everything.”

A month later, Nathan was caught with a loaded gun at school. He told authorities he needed it for protection—that the people involved in his brother’s killing might be coming after him. He was getting death threats at the time, he says now. “He believed he could handle this situation,” his probation officer wrote in court records.

Still, the probation officer continued to see Nathan’s potential for reform, noting that while he “does seem to find himself involved in criminal situations” he “does not express criminal sentiments.” The court again sent Nathan to behavioral treatment and therapy to address his PTSD.

A couple of months later, however, Nathan, then 15 years old, was arrested for aggravated murder. Prosecutors said he shot a 17-year-old in the back of the head, then dumped his body in the street in a plot to avenge his brother’s homicide. Nathan had suspected the peer was involved in the killing, the office said.

“I was moving off emotions,” he recalls of that period in his life, though he denies the shooting. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Research suggests that childhood trauma puts adolescents at greater risk for delinquent behavior. Up to 90% of justice-involved youth nationally have experienced a traumatic event, including loss, maltreatment, or other issues that sometimes lead them to the welfare system or foster care.

Cuyahoga County youth are especially vulnerable.

A recent study from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that more than two-thirds of Cuyahoga County youth who touch the juvenile justice system also have experienced child welfare.

Additional research by Case Western Reserve University found that at least 30% of Cuyahoga youth sent to foster care after age 9 have at least one juvenile court filing. That compares to 17% in New York and 12% in Chicago.

What’s more, homicides in Cleveland are consistently higher than elsewhere in Ohio, and many youths report knowing victims, sometimes more than one.

Experts have been warning about the correlation between trauma and violence locally since at least 2016. That year, a study of 467 at-risk youth who were undergoing behavioral treatment in Cuyahoga County showed that 96% of them had been exposed to violence in the previous year. At least 87% of them reported two exposures. The more times a child had been a victim of violence, the more likely they were to be violent themselves, the authors concluded.

‘All they do is punish’

After the shooting, Nathan was transferred to adult court, where he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 18 years to life. He’ll be 34 by the time he’s eligible for release.

Nathan now says he’s innocent, though he declines to talk about the details of his case. He also rejects any speculation that the shooting was motivated by retaliation, although he says the victim was present when his brother was killed.

Prior to the shooting, though, he says court-ordered programs were already failing him. He tried many, but says it felt like staff were trying to force him through a superficial checklist, rather than focus on what he actually needed, like therapy and a mentor.

“I’m like, ‘You’re not helping me, you’re just telling me to do stuff,’” he recalls. “All they do is punish, punish, punish; they don’t realize that sometimes that person just needs someone to talk to, to vent to.”

The system is still failing him, he says.

At sentencing, his judge told him to use his time in adult prison to reform, but so far, he says he’s been denied job opportunities, education programs, counseling and recreational pastimes. Those resources, he’s told, are reserved for inmates who are getting out sooner.

Instead, he spends 23 hours a day reading or watching TV alone in a locked cell in a maximum-security facility. Inmates are typically sent there following behavioral issues. It’s unclear if he’s receiving any services now to address his trauma, or other issues.

Nathan can’t say yet whether he’ll return home better after serving his time. But he sometimes sees a silver lining, knowing how many others from his neighborhood didn’t live to get any type of second chance.

“I’m not going to say I’m happy for being in prison,” Nathan says, “but I’m happy I’m away from the violence.”

(Coming Monday: Cuyahoga County transfers more youth to adult prison than any other county in Ohio. Sometimes that process, called bindover, is discretionary, occurring after careful examination of a youth’s crime and prospects for rehabilitation. Other times it’s mandatory, based on a youth’s charges alone.

Prosecutors decide the charges, which can dictate a youth’s fate – a juggling act between public safety and rehabilitation that sometimes feels out of balance. Take 17-year-old Efrain, for example. He was charged with serious crimes in a non-fatal shooting, resulting in automatic bindover. He didn’t pull the trigger, and he’d never been charged with a crime before. Should he have been bound over?)

Data Editor Rich Exner and data reporter Zachary Smith contributed to this report.

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