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Second of three parts

Nicholas Marino never thought much about what he was doing.

That’s not to say he didn’t have a plan. It included: Don’t take out the gun and wave it around inside a store — you may cause hysteria. And, divert the focus of people lying on the floor so they don’t zero in on any one person. And, wear gloves when driving stolen getaway cars.

But that’s almost as far as it went. Only when he was picked up for the bank job that unraveled his crime spree did he see the big picture, the one police pieced together with a stack of blue-dyed bills he left behind as he sprinted from the stolen getaway car in a panic.

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VIEW: Multimedia on Crime & Consequences

DAY ONE
READ: Felonious juveniles in Lucas County often avoid serious jail time
READ: Inmate now wishes court had been strict earlier
READ: Youth diversion allows judges a range of options

As the police stormed his mother’s Swanton home three weeks after his trip to the Key Bank on Broadway, it hit him: “I couldn’t believe I threw all this away for the little stuff we got out of robbing these places. Cash, we spent it: Clothes, jewelry, drugs, partying.”

Marino was 16 when he and his friends began their brief careers as armed robbers. He was a teenager committing adult crimes. Now he’s doing adult time at the Toledo Correctional Institution.

Marino was tried and convicted of eight armed robberies, as were Eugene Craig, 19 at the time, and Matthew Keiser, then 17.

Despite the nature of his crimes, in many ways Marino’s story bears all the hallmarks of adolescent thinking: an attraction to risk, a disregard for consequences, and impulse run riot, especially in the presence of peers.

Research during the last 10 years reveals that adolescent brains are in a unique state of development, one that may open the door to trouble — including criminal activity — in the wrong circumstances.

From one perspective, the vulnerability of adolescence makes no sense. By so many measures, teenagers are the cream of the crop, the best of us.

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Their reaction times are fastest. Their immune systems function at peak performance. Beginning around age 15, their reasoning capacity is as good as any adult’s. Their memories are best.

“Measures of most abilities indicate adolescence is the healthiest and most resilient period of the life span,” writes Dr. Ronald Dahl, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

Yet, he writes, “overall morbidity and mortality rates increase 200 to 300 percent from childhood to late adolescence.”

Of the approximately 13,000 adolescent deaths annually recorded by the National Center for Health Statistics, some 70 percent are violent: vehicle crashes, homicide, and suicide. Data from the 2005 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey show adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior, including drunken driving, driving without a seat belt, carrying a weapon, using drugs, and engaging in unprotected sex.

Adolescence also is when psychological problems, such as schizophrenia and mood disorders, emerge, said Beatriz Luna, director of the Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development at the University of Pittsburgh.

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“Something very special is going on in adolescence that wasn’t occurring before that, and that doesn’t occur later,” she said.

In some respects, during adolescence, the brain appears almost out of sync with itself.

B.J. Casey, director of the Cornell University Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology in New York City, says that while most of the brain is developing gradually and consistently through childhood, in adolescence, parts of the brain responsible for emotion shoot ahead of the pack.

That changes things.

“What is salient to an adolescent is different than what’s important for adult considerations,” she said. “This is driven by the earlier development of the emotional system.”

At the same time, the part of the brain responsible for keeping emotions in check, for long-term planning, for the weighing of risk and reward hasn’t reached its peak.

It’s called the prefrontal cortex.

Research shows that while the prefrontal cortex functions better in teenagers than it does in children, its operations are less efficient in teens than in adults, and the connections between it and the rest of the brain aren’t as quick as they’ll eventually become. So just when adolescents need its executive functions most, it’s not quite ready.

And therein lies the problem, many researchers believe.

“What happens is an imbalance between these emotional regions ... and the prefrontal systems, so they are banging during adolescence,” Ms. Casey said.

Research involving a task called “go/no go” illustrates this. Subjects are told to press a button when they see one cue, but to hold back at the sight of a different cue.

“You build up a tendency to respond. If you get green light, green light, green light, then red light, it’s very hard to stop yourself. Children have a real difficult time stopping,” Ms. Casey said.

But adolescents can do this perfectly. That is, until the cues have emotional content.

When the cues are fearful faces and happy faces, teen perfection vanishes. If the teen is told not to press the button for the happy face — the “no go” command — he’ll make more errors than if he’s given the “go” command for a happy face.

If the “go” cue is a fearful face, response time slows down.

“Happy faces are very hard for adolescents not to press, even though you tell them not to. They’re much slower to respond to fearful faces,” Ms. Casey said.

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2002 crime spree

It was an emotional face that produced Marino’s one moment of regret in his 2002 crime spree. They were robbing a Burger King in South Toledo.

“We went in there masked up,” he said. He happened to notice a big guy near the back.

“He kind of hit the ground and started crawling away. But I remember the look that he had on his face. It looked like he was completely in fear, like the only thing he wanted to do was to get away, was to get out of complete sight of us. It was the first time I contemplated, ‘Man, we’re really doing something wrong here.’”

But the effect was fleeting, seconds, he said.

“At the same time, I’m thinking, ‘We’re not really hurting anybody.’ ... I never really knew the mental scar that I was putting on people while we’re doing this. I said, ‘Yeah, you might be scared for a little bit, but you know, they’ll live and they’ll be all right.’”

And the spree continued. It seemed worth the risk.

“The brain of the adolescent is geared to go after risk,” said Dr. Monique Ernst, who studies brain development at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.

Research shows teens judge right from wrong well — until they are with peers, as Nicholas Marino was during his 2002 crimes.
( THE BLADE/ANDY MORRISON )

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Wheel of fortune

Dr. Ernst demonstrated the biological basis for risk taking with a task called the wheel of fortune. In the task, individuals can either bet on a big reward they have a low probability of winning, or a small reward with a high probability of winning.

As subjects made their bets, researchers watched their brains, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

In teenage brains, Dr. Ernst saw lots of activity in a structure associated with reward called the ventral striatum. But she saw very little activity in a part of the brain associated with punishment called the amygdala, a place very active in adult brains in this test.

“This [amygdala] structure is less engaged by adolescents than by adults when it comes to negative outcome,” she said.

So in addition to the slower development of the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s reasonable executive, rational judge, and controller of impulses — the teenage brain is extra reward- sensitive and less sensitive to emotional consequence.

“When it comes to receiving feedback, positive feedback, you have more activation of the [reward regions.] And when it comes to negative feedback, you have less modulation of the avoidance system.

“I call it imbalance ... It’s normal for adolescence, but it’s like a unique equilibrium specific to adolescence,” Dr. Ernst said. “Maybe it’s more fragile. It makes keeping behavior within the normal range more difficult to control.”

It is not that teenagers cannot judge right from wrong. They perform as well as adults do at such tasks — until you get them with friends.

Marino remembers his first robbery. It was a Wendy’s.

‘I was scared’

“I was scared out of my mind,” he said. “We sat in a side street for a half hour contemplating when’s the best time to go in and this and that. Finally Matthew [Keiser] got mad. He jumped out of the car with the bag and the gun in his waistband, with the bandana around his neck.

“Once he jumped out of the car and did it, Eugene [Craig] couldn’t leave. He had to follow. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if I wanted to do this or not.”

But he did it. He and his buddies. Again and again.

Any discussion about teenage decision-making eventually gets around to a study conducted by Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, and research he conducted with a computer driving game called Chicken. It looks at risky driving.

In Chicken, participants watch a car move across a screen. When a yellow light appears, they’re to move the car as far as possible without running a red light and smashing into a wall.

The amount of time between the yellow and red lights varies between trials.

Although teenagers ages 13 through 16 exhibited the riskiest driving in the Chicken game, their driving became several times riskier when they played with the help of two peers coaching than when they played alone. Young adults ages 18 through 22, and adults 24 and older, also made riskier decisions when they played the game with friends. But the peer effect, especially among the oldest group, was far less marked.

“The risk-taking just goes up dramatically in early adolescence if you’ve got them with somebody else,” said Linda Spear, a behavioral neuroscientist at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Ms. Spear studies adolescent behavior in animals. The increased sociability that plays a role in peer influence also is found in rats.

One way to know if an animal enjoyed something is to see if it wants to be where it had the experience. Rats given cocaine in one side of a two-cage setup will prefer to hang out in the cocaine cage even when there’s no drug available.

“If you give adolescent animals social stimulation on one side with a same-sex, same-age peer, and nothing on the other side, they show a preference for the socially stimulating side,” she said, even when their friends are gone.

In fact, many of the tendencies of human adolescence show up in animals, Ms. Spear said.

There’s risk-taking: Adolescent animals given opportunities to poke their heads through holes and explore will do so far more than adults, she said.

Adolescent animals will spend more time in the center of an open area, where they’re more exposed to predators, something an adult would avoid.

Higher mortality cited

And there’s higher mortality: “Even in wild animals, rodents, primates ... you see high death rates during adolescence,” she said.

Also, human adolescents experience changing sleep patterns because of a shift in circadian rhythm that keeps them up later and sleeping in more.

Not everyone, though, is a firm believer in studies linking brain development and adolescent activity.

Robert Epstein is one researcher who buys little of this. He says many of the conclusions drawn from brain imaging studies are logical leaps, with researchers claiming correlations between brain structure and adolescent behavior, without ever proving an actual causal link. He also dismisses much of the animal literature. Mr. Epstein is a contributing editor for Scientific American and founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, Mass.

“Years ago, I was an animal researcher myself,” he said. “It’s easy to extrapolate just about any animal behavior to humans,” he said. “It’s pretty much a guessing game.”

The main influence on adolescent behavior isn’t brain development, he said, but the dominance of peer culture in the lives of American teenagers.

“You don’t know what’s causing what,” Mr. Epstein said. “Is the way we treat teens, is that what’s causing them to behave in certain ways? Is that also having an impact on the way their brains work?”

Any adolescent misbehavior may simply be a response to “the very peculiar subculture in which [teens] live,” he said.

“We’re talking about teens in our country having contact with peers 70 hours a week, having virtually no meaningful contact with adults at all — a half an hour with their fathers, 15 minutes of which is spent watching television. We know absolutely that this affects how they interpret [things].”

Turmoil not necessary

“Adolescents are infantilized by our culture, and kept in isolation from adults. Teen turmoil is not necessary, and it’s certainly not programmed by some developmental neural phenomena,” Mr. Epstein said.

It’s not that there is nothing unique about adolescence.

“I think it is reasonable that there should be some extra degree of risk-taking and exploration. That makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. On the other hand, thinking about this in evolutionary terms, the most obvious prediction we can make of teen years is that teens should be highly, highly competent.” And intelligence tests, memory tests, and reaction tests all show this, he said.

The “powerful and simple solution” to adolescent turmoil, is “allowing young people to join the adult world in as many ways as they show they can do so.”

“This is about a certain way of looking at young people, looking at them based on their capability, and nurturing their capability,” he said.

Entering the adult world is not an opportunity many teens get.

Nicholas Marino, the fourth of eight kids, lost his father at age 13. Nicholas found his own way into adult culture, one of the few readily available to a determined teenager: Commit adult crimes and do adult time.

Contact Jenni Laidman at: jenni@theblade.com or 419-724-6507.

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