National Initiative Keeping Youths Out Of Jail: Report
A national juvenile justice initiative is helping reduce the number of young offenders being jailed after arrest, according to a new report by the foundation that has backed the effort. Reported by the Washington Post.
Promoted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Justice Detention Alternatives Initiative is a 20-year-old effort to limit the number of juveniles locked up after they’ve been arrested. Officials and experts have said that detaining a juvenile, even for a few days, can have considerable long-term consequences and therefore should happen only when essential to public safety. The report released Wednesday by the Casey Foundation comes as juvenile justice officials are meeting in Washington to discuss the initiative. Judge William M. Jackson, who heads D.C. Family Court, said the initiative has been effective. “There’s a lot more that can be done, but I think we’ve made substantial progress in making sure that only those juveniles that need to be detained for community’s safety reasons are detained,” Jackson said. Vincent N. Schiraldi, who as director of the Youth Rehabilitative Services Department has championed the detention alternatives initiative, said support for the program was broad. “People have generally bought into it,” he said … [But] buy-in won’t be enough, Schiraldi said. “I think we need to redouble our efforts,” he said. For juvenile justice systems, which generally stress rehabilitation over punishment, recidivism is an important measure of success …Whether the program is curbing recidivism among juveniles nationwide is not clear from the report. Jurisdictions calculate recidivism differently, with some counting an arrest and others … counting only a conviction, all of which makes a broad comparison difficult, the report says. Still, the report praises the 20-year-old initiative that has been championed by the Casey Foundation and is in more than 110 jurisdictions nationwide … Shay Bilchik, who heads the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University, said that despite the limitations of the assessment by Casey, the report was a useful window on a promising program. “For what they’ve been able to do, I think you can draw some pretty good faith conclusions,” said Bilchik, who is a former director of the federal office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.
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