Humane Exposures Blog

Richmond community organizer Da’Quon Beaver

Missouri’s juvenile justice system has some of the lowest rates in the country for escape, suicide and return to crime. Missouri’s facilities are regional, giving youth the opportunity to be near their families and support networks. The centers are also much smaller, 30 beds on average, than the facility proposed for Chesapeake. Missouri’s facilities are staffed almost entirely by professionals who work directly with youth in addition to providing security, making them less expensive to operate.

The Missouri model is working for young people because it is not based on the outdated prison model. The new proposed facility in Chesapeake is based on the prison model, and so we are unlikely to see the changes we need. Virginia’s Juvenile prisons are failing all of us. The young people coming out of these prisons are worse off for the time they spent there. Their families are stressed and broken by the separation from their children and the financial burden of having to pay child support to the state for their incarcerated child. The communities to which these youth return are less safe.

Da’Quon Beaver, community organizer in Richmond with JustChildren, a program of the Legal Aid Justice Center, says:

I have seen these failures firsthand. I grew up in the juvenile prisons in Virginia after being convicted as an adult for a crime that I committed at the age of 14. I have seen my friends and peers incarcerated for years without visits from their families. I have seen my friends and peers languish in these prisons, receiving inadequate education and therapeutic services. I have seen my friends and peers, upon their return home, struggle to find jobs and make ends meet. I have also seen them end up in the adult prison system or, far worse, dead.

In his budget proposals this year, Gov. Terry McAuliffe promised a new approach to juvenile justice in Virginia. The governor and the General Assembly should be commended for investing in community-based alternatives to incarceration as a part of their budget. However, the governor and House Appropriations leaders have just reached a deal to build a new, 112-bed juvenile prison in Chesapeake, with 64 beds for teens committed to the state and 48 beds for locally detained youth. The General Assembly will vote soon on whether to approve the deal.

Unfortunately, this plan is just more of the same: more prisons for youth in Virginia, not a transformation of the juvenile justice system. Promises of natural light and more therapy cannot change the fact that the facility to be built, at a cost of nearly $40 million to Virginia taxpayers, will still be a prison. Children cannot grow and learn to be good employees, competent parents and productive community members in prisons. Prisons are an ineffective model for juvenile justice. We know there’s a better way.

Beaver continues:

Many of the young people in Virginia’s youth prisons could be better served by remaining in the community. In Roanoke, the Youth Advocate Program is working with high-risk youth and their families outside of correctional facilities. YAP works directly with the family to provide intensive, individualized, holistic care planning and management. An independent evaluation of YAP found that 86 percent of youth remained arrest-free while participating, and 93 percent continued living at home.

I congratulate the General Assembly for choosing to pay for the development of community-based alternatives like YAP in this year’s budget. The fruits of this investment should be realized before committing to build a new prison that may become unnecessary a couple of years down the road.

I am glad that building a new Virginia juvenile justice system is a priority. Investing in community-based alternatives to incarceration could truly be transformational for Virginia’s youth and our communities. However, providing money in the budget for construction of a new prison is a step in the wrong direction. It wastes an opportunity to change the lives of young people and their families and to make neighborhoods safer. Virginia should give the new community-based programs a chance before spending that money.