Melvin Watt: “for the first time in this House I am going to speak from the Republican side, because I want to remind my Republican…”

“for the first time in this House I am going to speak from the Republican side, because I want to remind my Republican friends of a few things. Mr. Chairman, let me put this bill in historical perspective. Go back through the whole history of America. At the Federal level, we have never, ever had a Federal juvenile judge. Never have we had a Federal juvenile probation officer. Never have we had a Federal juvenile facility. The reason for that is that all throughout our history, juvenile justice has been a matter of State and local law. Yet, my conservative Republican colleagues all of a sudden have decided that we are going to federalize juvenile justice in this country. We do not even do a good job of criminal justice for adults, yet we are going to federalize and tell the States what they are going to do in the arena of juvenile justice. Mr. Chairman, something is wrong with that. Something is also wrong with the fact that only 11 States, at most, will be eligible for any kind of grant under this bill. My State, where one-fifth of the juveniles have been tried and convicted and incarcerated as adults, in the whole United States the State of North Carolina still will not be eligible for funds under this bill. Why? Because we do not have open juvenile records; because our judges decide who gets prosecuted as an adult if they are a juvenile, not our prosecutors deciding it.”