Robert Daniel learned how brutal Ohio’s adult prison system can be on kids when he was a scrawny teenager.
Daniel – one of four people convicted in the 1994 slayings of two Fairfield County high school girls – ran into trouble shortly after beginning a life sentence when he was 16.
When a prison gang invited Daniel to join, the 120-pound teen declined. Soon after, Daniel said three men came into his cell and beat and raped him.
“I can still smell the sweat,” Daniel said during an interview from Chillicothe Correctional Institution, where, at 45, he continues to serve a life sentence.
Kids, Daniel said, don’t belong in adult prisons, even if they do deserve to be locked up for their crimes.
“All they’re doing is existing, getting worse or they’re becoming victims,” he said. “This is a bad, bad, bad idea.”
Ohio incarcerates a couple dozen kids age 17 and younger at any one time at the Correctional Reception Center south of Columbus in Pickaway County.
The teens are kept in a unit separate from adults, a change implemented after Daniel’s attack, when the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act became law in 2003.
But on the day those kids turn 18, they’re moved into the general prison population, housed alongside some adults who view them as prey.
This is a story about bindover, Ohio’s legal process of moving children who are disproportionately Black and brown out of a juvenile justice system aimed at reform and into an adult system built for punishment.
It’s also a story about how adult incarceration impacts kids, their families and all Ohioans, since kids who go to prison return to their communities older, with more criminal connections and with a felony record that makes it hard to find work.
[ Reporters with USA Today’s network of Ohio newspapers spent eight months investigating the state’s juvenile justice system. Consider supporting their work with a subscription. ]
Youth in adult prisons more likely to be sexually assaulted, commit suicide
Youth in adult facilities are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, eight times more likely to die by suicide, and nearly twice as likely to be beaten by staff or attacked with a weapon by another inmate, according to the Children’s Law Center, a national nonprofit legal center that works for kids’ rights.
Kids kept in separate units from adults face other challenges, including isolation for up to 23 hours a day, which creates or exacerbates mental health issues, the group said.
And, when they are released, children who have been incarcerated in adult prisons are 34 times more likely to commit a felony, the law center says.
Many juvenile advocates, justice advocacy groups, families and a small group of bipartisan Ohio lawmakers are questioning how Ohio law mandates that some children be adjudicated as adults.
They’re not only worried about child safety, but whether Ohio is creating new generations of criminals by incarcerating some kids in the adult system who may be better served through juvenile courts.
Brooke Burns, chief counsel of the juvenile department for the Ohio Public Defender’s office, said it’s a myth that all the kids charged as adults are the “worst of the worst.”
Most kids aren’t in adult prison for murder, she said. They’re incarcerated for other felonies, like aggravated robbery or using a gun while committing a crime.
Historically, Burns said, juvenile courts in Ohio handled these sorts of crimes, aiming to intervene in the child’s life with education, mentoring, counseling and other services designed to help the child become a law-abiding adult.
But that changed in the 1990s.
Ohio cracks down on juvenile offenders
Former Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic was one of the first elected Ohio officials to float what was then a radical idea: Strip juvenile judges of their discretion over how to handle kids who break serious laws. It was 1992 and there was a temporary spike in juvenile crime.
Some lawyers at the time expressed doubt, wondering how a prison system incapable of rehabilitating adults could help children. But lawmakers, including future Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery, pushed ahead.
”These kids are not the ‘Leave It to Beaver’ kids of the ’50s,” she told The Columbus Dispatch. ”You’ve chosen to do the adult crime, and now you must do the adult time.”
On Jan. 1, 1996, Ohio‘s new juvenile crime law took effect creating something called a “mandatory bindover.”
Until then, prosecutors could ask a juvenile court judge to send a child to adult court, but it was always up to the judge, who considered circumstances beyond evidence, including the child’s mental health, education, and family situation. Mandatory bindover stripped juvenile judges of that authority and gave prosecutors more power.
When prosecutors seek mandatory bindover in a case, Ohio juvenile judges are required to transfer children to adult court if they meet certain age criteria, are accused of certain crimes, and if prosecutors can show the judge there is probable cause to believe the crime happened.
Under the Ohio law, children as young as 14 can be bound over to common pleas courts for charges including murder, rape, felonious assault or other crimes involving guns, which is an increasingly common weapon among children, court observers say. Children can also face bindover to adult court if they’ve had a history of being found guilty of other crimes.
Ohio Public Defender Tim Young and others opposed to mandatory bindover say that one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work.
Many of the Ohio children facing mandatory bindover have already fallen through the social safety net. They often come from homes and neighborhoods torn apart by poverty, mental health issues, addiction and violence.
Some are homeless or abused.
“Not all 14-year-olds are the same. Not all 16-year-olds are the same,” Young said. “Mandatory bindover throws all of that out of the window. It says, ‘We don’t care about you as a human being.'”
Mandatory bindover in action
The Vietnam war veteran on the 911 call June 1 was so shaken that it is difficult to understand what he was saying.
But he finally tells a dispatcher that two young men walked into his Akron house with a gun and tried to rob him.
“They said ‘where’s the money?’ and I didn’t know anything about money,” the veteran said. “They almost shot me.”
Summit County prosecutors played the tape for Juvenile Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio Aug. 9 during a mandatory bindover hearing for a 16-year-old boy with no prior juvenile court history.
Police arrested two people, a 19-year-old who was in adult court, and the 16-year-old.
Prosecutors initially intended to charge the 16-year-old as a serious youthful offender, an Ohio legal designation for children as young as 10 who are held responsible for felony-level crimes.
The designation is a bridge between juvenile and adult court that allows a judge to impose a blended sentence that includes a juvenile court mandate, like a stay at a Department of Youth Services facility, along with an adult sentence that could include adult prison time.
If a child completes the juvenile portion of a sentence without any new trouble, the adult portion of the sentence may not be imposed.
But prosecutors in this boy’s case changed their minds shortly before the hearing, saying they couldn’t guarantee the boy would be held long enough at a youth facility.
To make their case, a prosecutor played the veteran’s entire 911 call for help and then called two police officers who responded as witnesses. No shots were fired. No one was hurt in the incident. Nothing was taken. But police said a loaded gun was involved.
Attorney Brian Ashton, who represents the 16-year-old, told the judge his client was not there and was misidentified. But the prosecution said someone from the boy’s own family saw the teen running out of the veteran’s house, recognizing his distinctive red dreadlocks.
Teodosio had heard enough. Prosecutors, the judge determined, had shown probable cause that boy was involved in the crime.
Probable cause is the standard prosecutors in adult court must meet to bring charges in the first place, a much lower standard of evidence than the beyond a reasonable doubt required to secure a conviction.
Teodosio said because of the boy’s age and the crime he was charged with, he was “required by law to be transferred to adult” court. The 16-year-old boy – not old enough to legally vote or drink a beer – left the court as an adult, at least as far as Ohio’s criminal courts were concerned.
Is locking up kids the solution for gun violence?
In communities rattled by gun violence, so many kids carry guns now that there is likely not room in the system for all of them, several people who work with juveniles said.
“In general, a lot of my youth are messing with these firearms and doing really stupid stuff, like taking a kid’s lunch money or shoes or petty theft and they find themselves very surprised about the level of trouble they are in,” said Ashton, the attorney representing the Akron 16-year-old bound over in the Vietnam veteran’s case.
“They don’t have the thought process and don’t understand the charges they might face,” Ashton said.
Ashton’s experience in court mirrors what scientists have discovered about the human brain over the past 20 years. Adolescent brains, even brains of people into their early 20s, don’t work like adult brains.
Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University, said scientists didn’t discover until the early 2000s – years after Ohio’s new bindover law went into effect – that adolescent human brains continued to mature until people are in their 20s.
The prefrontal cortex of the brain, Steinberg said, is the last part of the brain to fully operate. This particular area of the brain allows people to control behavior, thoughts and emotions.
At the same time, the brain’s system that drives emotional behavior is already mature. That creates a sort of mismatch that explains why young people often do irresponsible things. So people with developing brains are especially vulnerable to peer pressure and acting without considering potential consequences, Steinberg said.
“Do they know right from wrong? My dog knows right from wrong, but he still does stuff that’s wrong because he can’t help himself,” Steinberg said.
That doesn’t mean children aren’t responsible for their actions, he said. “Yet if we know that adolescents are less mature than adults … they are inherently less culpable for what they do,” Steinberg said.
In the U.S., adult court systems already punish people less harshly for impulsive crimes – like a homicide in the heat of the moment versus a planned, premeditated killing, he said. The same standard should apply to juveniles because we know they are acting on impulse, he said.
Moreover, Steinberg said, only about 10% of juvenile offenders go on to commit crimes as adults, Steinberg said.
“Most age out of crime as they mature,” he said, so prison isn’t where they belong.
The U.S. legal system has started to evolve to match the brain science.
Since 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled at least four times that the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires individuals younger than age 18 to be sentenced differently from adults, with rare exceptions.
Several states – including Kentucky, Kansas, Illinois, Georgia, and Florida – that passed laws in the 1990s similar to Ohio’s mandatory bindover provision have since abolished those statutes which have disproportionately impacted Black and brown youth.
Between 2015 and 2020, about 80% of kids bound over to adult courts were Black, according to the Children’s Law Center.
In Cuyahoga County, which binds over more kids to adult court than Hamilton, Franklin and Summit counties combined, more than 90% of children moved into the adult system during fiscal year 2020 were Black.
Ohio nearly did away with mandatory bindover a few years ago after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that mandatory bindover violated due legal process for juveniles.
But six months later, after an election and a change of the court makeup, the court reversed itself, saying the previous decision failed to consider that the state constitution grants the Ohio General Assembly exclusive authority to define the jurisdiction of common pleas courts.
That means Ohio lawmakers must make any change to juvenile bindover law. And now, there’s a push to make that happen in the Ohio House of Representatives.
State Reps. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, and Brian Lampton, R-Beavercreek, co-sponsored a bill last legislative session to eliminate mandatory juvenile bindovers and return the power to juvenile judges. The bill did not advance, but Stewart said he plans to reintroduce it soon.
In testimony, Stewart and Lampton made part of their case for eliminating mandatory bindover by explaining the details of the case the Ohio Supreme Court flip-flopped on: The short life of Matthew Aalim.
Family says teen ‘fed to the sharks’ in adult prison
Aalim was 16 years old in 2013 when police say he used a loaded handgun to rob two women of their mobile phones in Montgomery County.
Until then, Aalim had “been a good student in school, but he grew up in a very rough neighborhood, and fell in with a group of friends that were a bad influence,” lawmakers testified.
After Aalim took responsibility for his crime, a juvenile judge favored sentencing Aalim in the juvenile system, but under mandatory bindover, Aalim was sentenced to four years in adult prison instead.
Aalim, like all juveniles in the adult system, started off at Orient. But when he turned 18, he was moved into adult prison with other inmates. During visits and video calls, Aalim’s family could see injuries Aalim suffered due to beatings from other inmates.
“As a result, (Aalim) felt that he had no choice but to join a prison gang for his own protection,” the testimony said.
When Aalim was released from prison, he got a job, started to make money, and was working toward going to college.
“But the gang connections he made in prison followed him to the outside, and the gang began making demands on Matthew as a free man,” the testimony said. “When Matthew refused to cooperate, the members of his own gang murdered him over a video game system.”
Aalim, the lawmakers said, is a single example of the many children forever changed by Ohio’s mandatory bindover law.
“The vulnerability of these inmates is the state’s responsibility,” the lawmakers said. We “sentence offenders to serve their time in prison, we do not sentence them to be raped in prison.”
Keeping some kids out of adult prison has implications for society, too, the lawmakers said, because children bound over to the adult system are 34% more likely to reoffend than the ones kept in the juvenile court system.
If passed into law, some children would still be bound over to the adult systems, but juvenile judges would make those decisions, using a list of factors set out under Ohio law.
How juvenile judges decide bindover
A 17-year-old Hamilton County boy sat in a juvenile courtroom Sept. 26 accused of rape. He also faced an unrelated charge of trying to steal a rifle from a police car.
This was not a mandatory bindover case.
Prosecutors thought the teen should be bound over to adult court, but they were leaving that decision up to Juvenile Court Judge Kari Bloom.
Bloom and other Ohio juvenile judges in discretionary bindover cases like this one listen to prosecutors and defense attorneys make their cases and consider nine factors to determine which kids should be tried in adult courts.
Among the factors: Whether the victim suffered physical or psychological ham; whether that harm was made worse by the victim’s age or another vulnerability; whether a gun was involved; and whether the defendant is emotionally, physically or psychologically mature enough to go into the adult system.
Several factors in this boy’s case were clear, but others were murky.
Prosecutors told the judge the boy had a history of mental illness had been on medication since he was 5, and in therapy for nearly all of his life. The boy, prosecutors said, was a “serious, grave” threat to the community and that staff at his school feared him.
Special Report:Ohio’s juvenile justice system struggles with injuries, neglect
A defense attorney countered that there were competing psychological evaluations and said there was still time to rehabilitate the teen in juvenile court in a residential treatment program.
The lawyer also pointed to research showing there is low recidivism for youth sex offenders who receive treatment.
If the 17-year-old went to prison, he would receive no treatment and would only be “hardened by the system,” the defense attorney said.
Judge Bloom said this case was heart-wrenching, but noted there appeared to be an “escalation of behaviors.”
As she ticked through the nine factors, she paused at the one that asks if a child is ready for prison.
“The court is not sure anyone is emotionally, physically or psychologically mature enough for prison,” she said.
In the end, the judge said the factors in favor of bindover outweighed the factors to keep the teen in juvenile court.
When Bloom said the boy would be tried as an adult, the teen’s mother dropped her head into her hands and cried.
Everything that grows, changes
Robert Daniel, who said he was raped in prison as a teen, thought he would die in prison.
But in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “children are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing.” Ohio also abolished life without parole sentences for children and retroactively granted parole eligibility for people like Daniel.
Daniel −who said he’s never driven a car, never gone to a football game and never been in love − has his first parole hearing next summer, and doesn’t know if he’ll be released.“
But I’m not the same person,” he said.
Tasmone Taylor, a 44-year-old Cleveland man, who was bound over as an adult at 15, echoes the idea that people change, particularly children.
Taylor caught his first case in the 1990s when he was 12 or 13. He traded $20 worth of cocaine to a drug user so he could drive the man’s car for two hours. Taylor could hardly see over the steering wheel.
When time was up, the drug user wanted more drugs. Taylor refused, so the drug user called the cops saying Taylor stole his car.
Taylor bounced in and out of juvenile detention and the Department of Youth Services after that until the system decided he might do better in foster care. They moved him out of his poor and often violent St. Clair-Superior neighborhood and dropped him into the rural home of a middle-class family in neighboring Geauga County.
“I felt like I was living in ‘90210,'” he said of the new home, where he’d go out daily and talk to one of the family’s horses.
Away from his troubles, Taylor started excelling at school and returned to organized sports. He was doing so well that the foster family wanted him to stay permanently, offering to pay for college.
Taylor, then 15, hoped his mom would see the benefit and agree. But she left it up to Taylor. “Everything in me wanted to stay, but I didn’t want my mom to think I was turning my back on her.”
Taylor returned to Cleveland.
A couple months later, in September 1994, Taylor went to a 7-Eleven with a friend, Anthony Hunt, 16. Taylor said he walked to the back of the store, grabbed a bottle of Tahitian Treat, and was surprised to see Hunt standing at the counter with a gun drawn, robbing the store.
The 7-Eleven clerk couldn’t open the register fast enough and Hunt fatally shot her.
It took months for police to make an arrest, but Hunt eventually confided in a state trooper that he pulled the trigger.
Both Taylor and Hunt were bound over to adult court. Taylor was sentenced to 15 years to life. Hunt, who cooperated with prosecutors, received 40 years.
“You learn quick there are only two types of people in prison – predator and prey,” Taylor said. “It’s no place for juveniles.”
Taylor said he ended up in solitary confinement for many 15-, 30- and 45-day stints. He said Hunt hanged himself at Warren Correctional Institution.
Taylor’s first chance at parole came up 13.5 years after going inside, but his request was denied.
When Taylor told a hearing officer he didn’t know if he could go on, “She told me that someone lost their life, and you still have yours.”
Around the same time, Ronald Crosby – an organizer with Building Freedom Ohio, a group that works to restore rights of formerly incarcerated people – was watching Taylor play football at Lake Erie Correctional Institution.
Crosby approached Taylor one day and handed him a mirror. He told Taylor to look at himself and, if he liked what he saw, Crosby wouldn’t ask him anything else. But if Taylor was unhappy with his reflection, Crosby wanted to know how Taylor was going to change.
Taylor said he decided to change. He joined a group called “Responsibilities as a Man,” which made him think about questions no one had asked him before, like how he would introduce himself to the father of a girl he was dating.
He joined the public speaking organization Toastmasters and started mentoring other inmates with his newfound skills.
It was the first time since going into prison as a child that he felt hope.
Taylor was released a couple years ago and now works with Crosby and others trying to help other kids. “They’re going to go through adversity that they don’t even know exists,” Taylor said.
“Their bodies are growing, but when it comes to their minds, it’s like you’re putting a cap on it,” he said. “Young offenders just become entrenched in a prison lifestyle and that carries over when they’re released.”
If Taylor were in charge, he said he’d expand juvenile court up to age 25 and evaluate the children – their home, their neighborhood, their school – before they serve any time so they get the help they need.
He’d also repeatedly evaluate incarcerated kids as time passes, he said, because they don’t think the same way from year to year.
“Everything in life that grows, changes and those kids change,” Taylor said. “But when you take them and put them in that facility for a long time, sometimes you keep those children past the point of rehabilitation.”
“That,” Taylor said, “is what you call creating a monster.”
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