Pennsylvania has created what may be the first state prison in the country dedicated to children.
The state's newest prison, located along rural Route 286 on the site of a former Christmas tree nursery in Indiana County, was conceived by the state Legislature in 1995 when it passed a law sending juveniles 15 and older directly to criminal court for trial if they were charged with committing certain serious felonies.
Nearly every state in the nation has adopted what is referred to as 'adult time for adult crime' legislation in the past decade. But no other state has built a prison specifically for those children, according to Barry Johnson, superintendent of the new prison, the State Correctional Institution Pine Grove.
James Turpin, legislative liaison for the American Correctional Association, said yesterday he thought Johnson was right. Most other states, he said, house the adult-time teens in prisons with adults.
He said the association promotes separating children from the adults for management purposes. 
Pennsylvania's prosecutors and other advocates of its adult-time law predicted that it would send hundreds of teen-agers to prison each year, which would justify spending $71 million on a 250-cell facility capable of housing 500 of them.
But now, as construction at Pine Grove is wrapping up, there is doubt about whether it will be able to fill all its beds, because far fewer juveniles have been tried as adults than originally predicted.
The first teen-age prisoners will be transferred to SCI Pine Grove in January.
They will be moved in phases from the State Correctional Institution Houtzdale, Clearfield County, where all 178 of them live now in a special 'youthful offender' unit, separate from adult prisoners. They will fill little more than a third of the 500 beds at SCI Pine Grove, and that does not count an additional 96 restrictive housing cells at the prison.
Johnson said recently more juveniles would be sentenced there if crime rose. He acknowledged, however, that juvenile crime has dropped in the past two years. In fact, it has dropped every year since 1994.
Johnson also said the prison would fill if its opening prompted judges to refuse more requests from teens charged under the adult-time law to be sent to the juvenile system for trial. Currently, judges are pulling about half of those cases out of criminal court and sending them to juvenile court for trial instead.
Children found delinquent in juvenile court go to reform schools, not prisons.
Douglas Russell, a spokesman for SCI Pine Grove, said the facility may also increase its population by accepting some young adults. These would be men who were 18 when they committed their crimes but who are very immature or small.