Gov. Ridge recently described the prison - one of the first in the nation run by state corrections officials to house young offenders - as the latest "building block" in an effort to fight crime.
State officials decided to build Pine Grove, the state's 25th prison - and the ninth to open in the last decade - when violent juvenile crime was at its peak in Pennsylvania and across the country.
Between 1987 and 1993, the national juvenile arrest rate for murder nearly doubled, and the robbery arrest rate from 1988 to 1994 skyrocketed by 70 percent.
Researchers and child advocates were debating with politicians on how best to handle the situation, which by all accounts had spun out of control.
By 1995, Pennsylvania lawmakers had decided that a harder line needed to be taken with juvenile offenders, so they pushed through a series of tough-on-crime laws, many of which targeted the state's youngest criminals.
Included in the package was one law that required any juvenile 15 or older who committed a serious crime using a firearm or a "deadly weapon" to automatically be tried as an adult, unless a judge ruled that the case should be sent to the juvenile court.
Rather than housing the youngsters with older, veteran criminals, as would be the case in some states, Pennsylvania chose to build a prison in White Township, Indiana County, to handle the influx.
"If we mixed them with the adults, it would be more difficult to protect them from those older criminals who are more sophisticated," Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said. "And inmates that don't feel safe can't get involved in treatment programs."
Deborah Vargas, a policy analyst for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the state should be commended for removing the youth offenders from the adult population, but added that the $71 million for the prison was misused.
