Humane Exposures Blog

There is a tragedy in the making down in Louisiana. An impending crisis is facing the state’s youth.

State’s appropriations bill, HB 1, which allocates funding for all state services, would slash funding to The Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ). Next Monday The Senate Finance committee will vote on it and if it passes,  July 1, 2012 will mark a very sad day for juvenile justice.

What’s on the table is the termination of all OJJ contracts with community groups providing services for the Louisiana’s most at-risk youth. In New Orleans there are five organizations that provide these sort of services, and they would all lose state funding. At-risk young people in the state are about to be denied the sort of help that studies show is essential.

New Orleans based activist group Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans lay out exactly what is at stake (emphasis mine):

What does this mean for the youth of our state? It means that the 472 youth (132 who are from New Orleans) currently housed in secure OJJ facilities would eventually return to their communities without any re-entry and community support services. Additionally, due to the proposed cuts, all community-based support services for the 3,599 youth currently under OJJ supervision for probation and parole would be cut. It goes without saying, that the elimination of these educational, job-training, and other support services greatly increases the risk that these youth will re-offend. These cuts would impact the lives, safety, and well-being not just of at-risk youth, but of all of us.

Think about it. All the community based programs in the state are about to get their funding yanked. This is bad for us in both the long and the short term. Both sides of the political aisle have the data – rehabilitation is far more effective and much less costly over time than incarceration.

Of course the negative impact of private prisons is also a proven fact and yet Louisiana Gov. Jindal has been pursuing an aggressive program of privatizing the states penal system. The fact that both the evisceration of the OJJ and privatization of the prisons are happening in the state that has more incarcerated people per capita than anyplace on the planet should sound warning bells. (See my prior writing on that subject for more details.)

As a New Orleans native I’ll always step up to brag about our food and our music, but I am sad to say that our state’s approach to juvenile justice is draconian, outdated, and counterproductive to say the least.

Let us hope that HB 1 fails to make it out of committee. If it passes Louisiana will slip back into the dark ages when other states are moving into the future.

It looks like California Gov. Brown has had a change of heart about the fate of his state’s youthful offenders.

Brown has been busy slashing funds left and right as he attempts to get a handle on the state’s $15.7 billion budget shortfall, and for a while it looked like the Division of Juvenile Justice (formerly the California Youth Authority) was not long for this world. His proposed elimination of the agency elicited a hue and cry from the correctional officers’ union, various district attorneys and several law enforcement groups.

Despite the DJJ currently being under court oversight due to claims of systemic abuse and mistreatment of juvenile offenders, most groups agree that it has improved drastically from its sorry state in the 1990s. In those days roughly 10,000 kids were incarcerated there; today they number just over 1,000. Conditions and circumstances, while still often horrible, have also gotten better in that time.

So where do things stand if the DJJ has survived the chopping block? KKPC 89.3 brings us a look:

Under Brown’s revised proposal, juvenile parole operations will still be phased to county responsibility over the next two years. Furthermore, the jurisdictional age of the DJJ will go down to 23 from 25–meaning wards (other than those awaiting transfer to adult prison) will automatically be released from custody on their 23rd rather than 25th birthday.

The news was greeted with relief in numerous quarters:

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Spokesman Bill Sessa says the governor’s reversal was for good cause.

‘The youth we are serving, some of them, are from counties that don’t have treatment programs for violent youth,’ he says. Moreover, Sessa says the DJJ has made great strides in streamlining its budget, closing some facilities and laying off headquarters staff. ‘We’re focusing on serving our youth,’ he says.

Department of Finance Spokesman H.D. Palmer adds that counties are already dealing with adult prison realignment. ‘And we didn’t want to overburden that process, knowing that there’s a transition period we’re going through right now,’ he says.

In Los Angeles County, which has about 300 juveniles in the state system, more than any other county, Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers calls Brown’s change of heart ‘great news.’

Palmer’s observation on the overburdened state of the system is one that particularly resonates. Many of the counties involved do not have separate facilities for youth, a problem that is made far worse if the adult population is in chaos when the kids arrive.

While we advocate for rehabilitation over incarceration, there is a small percentage of youth offenders, often the excessively violent ones, who need to be put behind bars . We simply note that the overwhelming majority of youth offenders currently incarcerated can benefit from other programs, rather than simply being locked up.

“Often the ones going to DJJ are the most significant risk to public safety,” said Karen Pank, executive director of the Chief Probation Officers of California. The governor’s latest plan “is good for California as a whole, not just for probation departments or for counties. You need to ensure that there are all of the tools available for dealing with this population.”

When she heard this news our own Susan Lankford said “I like what Karen Pank has to say. We are definitely not set up in local counties to handle this population of young criminals. It sounds as though Sacramento has listened, at last!”

We are glad to see that Gov. Brown took a slightly longer-term view. Too often are short-term gains embraced despite grossly inflated long-term costs, particularly in politics.

The state of Maryland received some bad news recently. It seems that their most troubled youth detention centers have gotten worse over the past year. Scott Dance at The Baltimore Sun gives us some details:

Youth violence and staff uses of force spiked in 2011 at Maryland’s most troubled juvenile detention centers, according to an annual report by the state’s Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit, part of the attorney general’s office. The number of incident reports filed rose 25 percent from 2010 to 2011 across the state’s juvenile justice system to nearly 8,000, while some of the more violent categories of incidents increased even more.

Violent incidents noted in the report include:

• Systemwide, the number of melees and other large group disturbances doubled. (179 instances reported.)
• The Victor Cullen Center, a reform school in Frederick County, increased it’s use of handcuffs as restrains more than five times as often as in 2010. Youth-on-youth attacks there doubled, and assaults on staff members tripled.

Four particular hot spot facilities house roughly three quarters of the incarcerated youth population.

Cheltenham, Cullen, the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County and the Baltimore City Juvenile Detention Center — four centers highlighted in the report because of their size or rates of violence — hold about 350 youths at any given time.

Overall, there are typically about 450 youths in state detention centers at a time, while 900 are in rehabilitation programs and reform schools. There are 5,700 released on probation to the community.

Forty to fifty percent of the roughly 230 youths detained at Cheltenham and the Baltimore facility at any time are not sentenced to the facility. They are, instead, waiting to be placed in a group home, substance abuse program or other type of treatment plan.

Once placed in a detention center, a person’s interim stay telescopes. While meant as a temporary measure, there is severe overcrowding in other youth facilities as well. This means that a stay meant to only last a few weeks frequently becomes a much longer wait for an opening to occur somewhere else.

While in the detention centers overcrowding is also a factor. Thirty-six thousand youths were referred to the department by the courts during the 2011 fiscal year. Since the department is required by law to accommodate any youth a juvenile court orders to be placed there, the problem becomes obvious.

I will once again refer to Mr. Dance’s excellent examination of the subject:

Many of the facilities have been stretched well beyond their capacity. The Hickey School, designed for 72 youths, housed more than that for nearly seven months of 2011, hitting a high of 97, according to the report. At Cheltenham, two of the main housing structures double up youths in 24 rooms meant for single occupancy, filling the buildings as much as 85 percent beyond capacity.

So we have kids that are just in there while waiting for a space at a group home who are incarcerated with violent offenders. This creates an environment where violence is rapidly learned as a means of self defense. Youth that would never have taken that path find themselves walking it in such an environment. Not only that, but it also is often the first step on the path to recidivism.
 Image Source: Vectorportal, used under it’s Creative Commons license

As part of their continuing series of Weekend with Locals events, Warwick’s in La Jolla will be hosting Susan Madden Lankford, author of Born, Not Raised: Voices from Juvenile Hall this coming Saturday, April 21st at 12:00pm.

Come out and get your copy personalized!

Warwick’s 7812 Girard AveLa Jolla, California 92037 United States

Free Parking is available behind the store for customers while shopping at Warwick’s