“Delinquent: Our System, Our Kids” is a special series examining Cuyahoga County's juvenile justice system through the eyes of the kids who go through it. We kicked off the series this week with five parts touching on why juvenile court was created and how it's working for youth today.
Delinquent : Read all the stories from Week 1. Cuyahoga County sends more kids to adult prison than any other county. Why? Delinquent : Our System, Our Kids is a special project of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer examining the juvenile justice system through the eyes of the people who have been through it.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.
Delinquent: Cuyahoga’s juvenile system is supposed to rehabilitate youth when they offend. Most of the time it works – Cameron is one example 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.
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.” 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.
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. 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.
“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. 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.
If interventions fail to disrupt patterns of violence or address issues of neglect, trauma, abuse, mental health or childhood poverty, it can leave youth cycling through the juvenile justice system.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.
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.
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 cycled through the juvenile justice system 19 times before being transferred to adult court for rape.
“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.Bindovers that were not granted were either withdrawn or dismissed by the respective prosecutor’s office or denied by a juvenile court judge. Youth can be bound over in multiple cases, which is why the number of bindovers granted is higher than the number of juveniles.
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.
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.
“I felt like Cuyahoga County was just sending me places, just to get me off their hands,” Deon recalls. “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 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.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.
He realized that to turn his life around, he needed better role models. He felt his community had been failing him since boyhood. 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.
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.
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. 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.”
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. 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.
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. From his own painful past, his long-buried adolescent sense of longing, Reese identified something that social researchers have affirmed after: Mentorship during kids’ formative years helps them manage life’s challenges, regulate behavior and impulsivity and develop core qualities, like empathy.
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.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.
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.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.
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.
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. 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.
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