Ronald C. Laney

Delinquency History: Adjudicated delinquent for larceny, disorderly conduct (fighting), and drinking as a minor. Served a handful of sentences in juvenile detention, and spent close to a year at a State training school in Marianna, Florida.

The system was ready to write Ronald Laney off. He stood before a judge in criminal court who was ready to throw the book at him because of his delinquent past. Laney had previously been before a juvenile court judge for breaking into cars, stealing liquor from restaurants and picking fights with school kids and sailors. After serving 10 months in a Florida training school for boys, and after numerous stays in the local juvenile detention center, Laney was now facing adult time. At 17 he was old enough to be held in a Florida jail even though the law he was charged with violating, drinking as a minor, was not a serious offense.

"You better get something together," the judge told him. A police officer who had picked Laney up a number of times said, "you need to get out of here, kid, you need to get out and do something." Laney got the message. After the juvenile court judge, his probation officer and local police pleaded his case, the criminal court judge agreed to drop the charges. The juvenile court judge then washed his record clean. That cleared the way for Laney to enlist in the Marines. Within 30 days he was off to Paris Island and, eventually, to Vietnam.

Today, Laney, 53, directs the Child Protection Division for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a Justice Department program that coordinates research, training and technical assistance and grants to find the thousands of children who are reported missing in America each year. It was a tough journey from jail to earning a top Justice Department post. During the Vietnam War, where Laney served two tours "in country" as a Marine Staff Sergeant, he lost an eye, permanently injured his arm, and spent 14 months rehabilitating in a Naval hospital. But the decorated veteran, who proudly displays the Marine seal on the front of his desk, doesn't regret a moment.

"They don't take bad kids like me anymore," he says, lamenting the loss of the military as an option for delinquent youth. "I met lots of people in the military with similar backgrounds. They also had a choice: the military or jail. We've lost an opportunity to give youth a chance at a different life."

Born to a poor family in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Laney, his mother, and his four siblings were frequently abused by their father—an alcoholic.

"One time, a day after he got his paycheck and was drinking, my dad came home, and tried to kick my cat," Laney reports. "He missed and kicked the wall. Then he got angry and decided he would kick me, because it was my cat. He kicked me like you would kick a football, but that was pretty much routine." One day, when his father was out drinking, he, his mother, and siblings slipped away, fleeing to Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

Even though an older sister already lived there and was somewhat established, the move was traumatic.

"Coming from a very rural community, where religion was a big factor in our lifestyle, I suddenly was an urban kid," he says. "I got introduced to crime real quick." As soon as he arrived, Laney says he started to hang around with "the deviant" crowd. "We kind of rumbled on the beach, like, all the time," he says.

At 15, Laney was first picked up for fighting on the beach, earning him a day in juvenile detention. Next, he and two adults broke into a fancy French restaurant, and stole 28 bottles of liquor. When one of the adults was arrested and confessed to their burglary, the police came by Laney's eighth grade classroom and dragged him out of class. He was put in detention for ten days.

It wasn't long before Laney was on a first name basis with Judge Weinguard, the juvenile court judge, and Officer Starnes. One night, Laney was again arrested for fighting. He thought he was about to be thrown in the back of an empty police car, and taken in for another short stint in juvenile detention. Instead, he discovered that Judge Weinguard and his probation officer were sitting in the back of the police car, waiting to throw the book at him. He spent 30 more days in detention before he was shipped off to the State training school in Marianna, way up on the Florida Panhandle.

Laney was on a first name basis with Judge Weinguard, the juvenile court judge, and Officer Starnes.

It was an old-style reform school, complete with corporal punishment. The compound had a yellow building called "the white house" where beatings were doled out for transgressions. Laney was beaten with a leather barber's strap twice: once for smoking a Winston cigarette, and another time for fighting with another kid on the basketball court. "They were careful to hit you with your Levis on," he says. "It never left a scar." He says the beatings made less of an impression on him during his ten months at Marianna than did his experiences with the toughened kids. "I knew some of them had been in there three times, and were headed to prison. I just decided, this is not for me."

He studied hard, working most of his way towards his high school diploma, spending the rest of the time picking up medical skills as a nursing assistant in the school's clinic. He was planning to pull his life together when he got out, but when he returned to Jacksonville Beach, he quickly fell back in with the same crowd, and was arrested for drinking on the beach. Judge Weinguard and Officer Starnes stepped in, pleading with the criminal court judge to give Laney the option of joining the Marines. "They knew, and I knew, I had to get out of there," he says. They saw something in Laney that was worth saving.

"They [the Marines] don't take bad kids like me anymore. I met a lot of people in the military with similar backgrounds, and we've lost an opportunity to give youth a chance at a different life."

Staff Sergeant Laney had a stellar seven year career in the Marines. He had stints in Hawaii, served as an instructor at Quantico, Virginia, and worked at the Navy/Marine prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During that time, he earned a GED, three presidential unit citations, several personal citations, and a Purple Heart. He served two tours in Vietnam, but was badly injured when during a fire fight, he was hit by a rocket. The explosion took off part of his shoulder and blinded him in the right eye. He spent 14 months in a hospital and was medically discharged from the Marines in October, 1970.

Laney says he was drawn towards criminology when he resumed academic life at a junior college. He was interested in helping kids like himself. While working towards an advanced degree in criminology, he worked part-time as a juvenile probation officer. He says he had a special affinity for the kids he worked with.

"I dealt with hardened delinquents," Laney says. "The social worker would look at a kid I worked with and say: They're easily aggravated and can't put a complete sentence together. And the kids would come to me and say: Could you talk to us in street language and cut the therapy stuff. Without saying anything, they knew I had been there, and they knew I cared. They also knew my military background and not to mess around with me."

"The adult system is a failure at rehabilitation, with high recidivism. Why would we want to put a troubled kid into a system that doesn't give him a chance to succeed? It doesn't make any sense."

Laney joined the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) in 1979, quickly working his way up through the ranks by developing juvenile training programs for law enforcement. Once, the Chief of Police came from Jacksonville Beach to attend one of Laney's trainings.

"He remembered me," Laney says with a sly smile. "He said he could not believe it was me."

In 1994, Laney was appointed Director of the Missing and Exploited Children's Program, the Division in OJJDP that coordinates and trains local officials and practitioners on how to deal with child abduction and exploitation.

"When I started working on these issues, they weren't in the paper every day," he says. "Now, people expect, rightly so, that society has an obligation to protect children by responding effectively to missing and exploited children cases."

The office works to quickly get information out on missing children, trains law enforcement on how to coordinate a search for an abducted child, and how to respond to child abuse and exploitation.

"What you see today that you didn't see ten years ago is that law enforcement has a plan," he says. "When children are reported missing, they know it is important to move quickly to start the search. Law enforcement is also learning the link between child abuse and juvenile violence and the dangers of the Internet."

From the vantage of his busy Justice Department office, Laney wishes he could have saved his mother the grief of watching his slide towards delinquency and thinks parents like his need help. "If I was changing the system, I would add more programs to help people like her." He also thinks that some form of mandatory service, if not an outright military draft, would give kids like him an important option. "What we do now is, stick them in a boot camp and then put them right back into the same environment where they ran into trouble with no support system. What's the sense of that?"

He is particularly concerned with the trend towards passing new laws to blend the criminal and juvenile justice systems. In October 1998, the reauthorization of his program was tied to Senate juvenile justice legislation that would have mandated lowering the age by which kids could be tried, and imprisoned, as adults. Laney shakes his head in disgust.

"First, in criminal court, what you have done is extend the time that they can commit petty acts without sanction, and lock them up as criminals, when they do something serious," he says. "Second, let's face it, the adult system is a failure at rehabilitation, with high recidivism. Why would we want to put a troubled kid into a system that doesn't give him a chance to succeed? It doesn't make any sense."