PROVIDENCE — There are more gap kids than anyone imagined.

They are children from the city and the suburbs, first-time offenders and those with long criminal histories. They are charged with crimes such as alcohol possession, robbery, drug dealing, shoplifting and assault.

The gap kids are Rhode Island teenagers whose lives were touched by a state law that was in effect for only 131 days.

State lawmakers in May hoped to save money by changing the law to treat 17-year-olds as adults in criminal matters. They realized their mistake — that savings were questionable at best — soon after the law took effect. But in reversing it late last month, the General Assembly did not make the repeal retroactive.

The state attorney general’s office confirmed last week that there are 500 “gap kids” in all — 17-year-olds who have made their way, or will soon, through the adult criminal justice system simply because they were arrested between July 1 and Nov. 8. Many have spent time, or will spend it, in the state prison. Others will serve lesser sentences such as probation or community service, but will have criminal records for life.

The vast majority of 17-year-olds arrested before or after that four-month period will be tried as children in the Family Court. At worst, they will be sent to the Training School until age 19, a sentence that includes access to a host of social and educational programs.

But the gap kids face the same penalties as adults — up to life in the state prison and a permanent criminal record.

One of them is Ryan Greenberg, a Barrington 17-year-old charged in the July 17 death of his high school classmate. He faces more than 10 years in the state prison for reckless boating, death resulting, a charge that may be upgraded by the grand jury in the coming weeks.

Had Greenberg been arrested 18 days earlier, he probably would face a maximum of 22 months at the Training School.

By contrast, Julie E. Alfano was arrested five months before Greenberg. The Warren 17-year-old was sentenced to a year at the Training School in September after admitting to driving under the influence in the car crash that killed her high school classmate in February.

Less than five months separate the crimes of Greenberg and Alfano.

Alfano will be out of the Training School by her 19th birthday. She will not be a convicted felon.

Greenberg could spend the next decade of his life at the Adult Correctional Institutions if convicted of the charges he faces, which are technically less serious than those applied to Alfano.

“I don’t think that it is necessarily fair, but I don’t think it was a bright decision in the first place,” Attorney General Patrick Lynch said of the initial law change. “It is what it is. It’s the law.”

Public Defender John J. Hardiman isn’t as willing to accept the gap.

“You get a four-month window where kids who happened to get involved are treated differently, much more harshly. The repercussions are much greater than they would have been,” said Hardiman, whose office is involved with representing at least 300 of the 17-year-olds who fell into the gap.

Hardiman said he will file Superior Court motions this week to have all the pending cases of 17-year-olds transferred to Family Court. He said the gap violates his clients’ due-process and equal-protection rights as outlined in the Constitution.

Lynch, who lobbied for the gap in the days before the Assembly repealed the law, doesn’t agree.

THE GAP KIDS of Rhode Island have become a case study in uninformed policymaking on Smith Hill.

Lynch hasn’t been shy in his criticism of the initial policy to send 17-year-olds to the state prison, first suggested by the governor and subsequently adopted by the General Assembly in May. The law took effect July 1 and was repealed effective last Thursday.

Almost immediately after passing the law, lawmakers realized that the purported long-term savings were fictional. It is not cheaper on average to house the teens at the state prison. Had anyone consulted the head of the prison system before passing the law, they would have learned that teens at the ACI are kept in the costly “Super Max” unit of the prison for their own protection.

"The governor believed that the proposal had already been fully vetted by all the appropriate state departments. The Department of Corrections should have been consulted," the governor’s spokesman Jeff Neal said in September. “That said, the General Assembly had approximately five months to investigate the merits of this proposal and the potential cost savings."

Opposition to the initial law came from all directions, but generally not until it was passed.

“The governor made a woefully uninformed decision … based on information — I don’t know where he got it,” said Lynch, who joined Family Court judges, social advocates and the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing the law.

But Lynch was the leading voice in the argument to create a gap. It would be too difficult to make the repeal retroactive, he said, likening the move to trying to “unscramble eggs.” He submitted a letter to Assembly leadership the week before they voted to repeal the law. And he sent a top deputy to testify against a retroactive appeal at a special hearing hours before lawmakers were to vote.

“I most strongly suggest that the repeal be made effective upon passage, and that cases that have arisen since July 1, 2007, not be impacted by that repeal,” Lynch wrote.

Why such strong opposition?

“From a sheer logistical point of view, it would have thrown the gap cases into a further state of chaos,” Lynch said Friday. There’s also the issue of fairness. “Is it fair to rip a case out of the grand jury? Is it fair to the victims you’ve prepared for it?”

Lynch said his feelings have nothing to do with any one individual case.

The gap does, however, allow him to seek harsher penalties in the case of Barrington teen Greenberg than his office had ever sought in such a case.

State law allows the attorney general to petition the Family Court to waive the most serious youth defendants into adult court. In Lynch’s first four years in office, his office handled 12,753 juvenile cases. He sought to have just 60 — or less than half of 1 percent — waived into adult court.

Virtually all of those cases waived involved murder, attempted murder, armed robberies, or defendants with long, violent criminal histories, according to Lynch spokesman Michael Healey. None involved reckless driving, death resulting, or driving under the influence, death resulting.

Lynch wouldn’t say whether he would have sought to have Greenberg waived into adult court.

“Would I have contemplated it? Certainly. Would I have decided whether I would have? I don’t know,” he said.

IN THEIR REPEAL, lawmakers tried to shield the gap kids from lifelong criminal records.

Although they were treated as adults in the eyes of the law, a caveat in the repeal legislation requires all police records related to the cases to be sealed.

Court proceedings involving the 500 teens will continue to be open to the public, however. But the records of those public proceedings will eventually become sealed when the cases are concluded — after dismissal, a not-guilty verdict, or after a defendant’s sentence (including probation or parole) is completed.

Hardiman said the caveat doesn’t go far enough to protect the teens.

“Everybody says his records are sealed, but when he goes out and applies for a job or fills out a school application, what does the kid do? Does he say, ‘I’ve never been convicted’ because it’s sealed?”

Lynch’s office, meanwhile, said the Assembly went too far in trying to seal the records.

“Let’s say a gap kid has done something serious enough to land in jail for hard time, four or five years. Our reading of the law is that the records are open until end of probation or parole? It just doesn’t really compute,” Healey said. “It’s almost like they’ve decided to expunge the records. … Employers, co-workers and people in your neighborhood should know if you’ve committed a felony.”

State lawmakers have pledged to review the repeal law in the coming legislative session. But there are immediate concerns for teens arrested in Rhode Island.

While the repeal was supposed to be effective as of 12:01 a.m. Thursday, the state prison has admitted at least six 17-year-olds since then, according to data provided by the state Department of Corrections.

The attorney general’s office was charged with notifying police departments across the state of the repeal.

“The police departments that have charged 17-year-olds as adults since yesterday have, to put it bluntly, mischarged these cases,” Healey said Friday. “The law now says 17-year-olds are juveniles again, not adults. So, the police need to recharge them. What this gets back to, however, again, is how short-sighted it was to change the law in the first place. All it’s caused is procedural chaos.”

speoples@projo.com