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Transforming
America's Juvenile
Justice System
By
Bart Lubow and Vincent Schiraldi
Over
the past five years, public scandals about the way young people
are treated in America's juvenile justice facilities have
erupted in state after state.
This year, two teenage boys incarcerated in the same cell
in a California youth institution were found hanged, in apparent
suicides. A month later, experts retained by the state found
that juveniles were incarcerated in abominable conditions,
with youths attending classes while confined in cages, feces
spread on the walls of some youths' cells and extraordinarily
high levels of violence.
In Maryland, the U.S. Justice Department strongly criticized
conditions in the state's juvenile justice facilities, citing
beatings of youth by staff, along with inadequate mental health
care and educational programming and chronic overcrowding
in antiquated facilities. The in-custody death of youths in
Florida, Louisiana and South Dakota have all precipitated
calls for reform in those states and, in some cases, have
resulted in facilities closing.
For those of us with years of experience in juvenile justice,
these short-lived periods of concern are all too familiar.
Too often, institutional cycles are characterized by scandal,
earnest cries for reform, temporary concern over conditions,
gradual entropy and, once again, scandal.
There have been exceptions. In the 1970s, all of the large,
locked facilities in Massachusetts were closed under the leadership
of Department of Youth Services Commissioner Jerome Miller,
and the youth were funneled into community-based programs.
Follow-up studies by Harvard University and the National Council
on Crime and Delinquency found that graduates of Miller's
community-based system were half as likely to matriculate
into adult prisons as were youth who went through the previous,
institution-based system.
Juvenile justice watchers were disappointed, however, when
a model that produced such outcomes failed to spread far and
wide.
Likewise, in the 1980s Missouri closed its large training
school, relying instead on small, home-like facilities for
youth who needed to be held in secure confinement, and on
a network of day-treatment programs for youth who could safely
be placed in the community. The results of the "Missouri
model," promoted under the leadership of Youth Services
Director Mark Steward, are impressive. Only 8 percent of youth
released from Missouri's facilities in 1999 were sentenced
to adult incarceration within three years of release. The
figure for Maryland is 30 percent.
Moreover, recent visitors to Missouri from other states have
marveled at the differences between these sites and their
states' facilities: how the youth are engaged, alert and interactive,
compared with the sullen, frightened personas common among
their institutional populations.
Which once again raises the question: Why isn't this model
being replicated throughout the country?
One reason is that juvenile justice policy-making is still
suffering from the effects of the demonization of young people
during the 1990s, when Princeton University Professor John
DiIulio captured the prevailing political mood by warning
about a wave of "superpredator" adolescents. The
racial and socioeconomic makeup of America's incarcerated
youth surely also helps those in power ignore juvenile justice
generally, or, when confronted with a public scandal, enact
piecemeal solutions to endemic problems. These factors, coupled
with the belief that kids in my state are irrevocably different
from Missouri youth, hinders the widespread adoption of juvenile
justice reforms that make sense by any standard of measurement.
Finally, most policy-makers and youth correctional officials
have simply never seen a juvenile justice system that is not
dominated by the 19th century training school model. Since
the Annie E. Casey Foundation began funding Missouri as a
"model" youth corrections site two years ago, numerous
delegations of elected officials and juvenile justice practitioners
have toured the state's system. Following one such tour, the
Maryland Legislature passed a bill requiring that all facilities
in Maryland be reduced to no larger than 48 beds. Policy-makers
in Louisiana and California are discussing "Missouri-style"
reforms in their states.
As elected officials from California to Maryland, from Louisiana
to South Dakota and points between endeavor to reform their
state's juvenile justice systems, they should avoid cosmetic
fixes designed merely to get them past today's embarrassing
headlines. Instead, they should confidently set a course that
rids their states of harmful youth prisons, replacing their
systems with community programs for those who don't need to
be locked up, and small, rehabilitative facilities for those
who do.
Bart Lubow (blubow@aecf.org) is a
senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Vincent
Schiraldi (vschiraldi@justicepolicy.org) is executive director
of the Justice Policy Institute.
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