A juvenile corrections administrator with 33 years of experience was named today as superintendent of the 295-bed MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn. Reported by the Woodburn Independant.

Isidro “Sid” Thompson, superintendent of the 50-bed RiverBend facility in La Grande for the past two years, will start the new job Feb. 22. MacLaren serves male sex offenders, violent offenders, those with substance abuse issues, older male youth and the majority of the male Oregon Department of Corrections population committed to OYA facilities.

“Sid Thompson’s three decades of diverse responsibilities in juvenile corrections have made him an effective and respected leader,” said Colette S. Peters, OYA director. MacLaren youth and staff will benefit from the wealth of experience, knowledge and compassion he brings to the job.”

MacLaren, serving nearly a third of OYA youth in close-custody facilities, plays a major role in the agency’s mission to protect the public and reduce crime by holding youth offenders accountable and providing opportunities for reformation in safe environments.

Thompson joined the Oregon Youth Authority in February 2008 after a 31-year career with the Arkansas Division of Youth Services, where he was assistant director of residential operations. He also managed juvenile correctional facilities and residential treatment facilities in Arkansas and consulted with five states.

OYA will begin a recruitment for a permanent superintendent at RiverBend in approximately three months. Brian Blisard, treatment manager at RiverBend, will serve as interim superintendent of that facility.

At MacLaren, Thompson succeeds Mike Riggan, who resigned to accept a position with the Washington County Juvenile Department as juvenile division manager in charge of the Harkins House juvenile shelter in Hillsboro.

“Washington County has recruited a professional who has proved himself as an organizational leader who has the support of his staff and whose work benefits youth in OYA’s care and custody,” Peters said.

OYA has custody of approximately 900 youth offenders ages 12 to 24 in correctional and transitional facilities in Albany, Burns, Florence, Grants Pass, La Grande, Salem, Tillamook, Warrenton and Woodburn. The agency also supervises approximately 1,100 youth on parole and probation in communities throughout Oregon.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice, Oregon, Personnel Issues

Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s decision to halt construction of a new Great Falls Youth Transition Center will not have a major effect on the existing program, a corrections official said. News from the Great Falls Tribune.

Steve Gibson, administrator of the Montana Department of Corrections Youth Services Division, said the agency will continue to run the program out of the rented residential home that it has used for more than a decade.

Earlier this year the Legislature appropriated $1.31 million to upgrade the prerelease-style program for juvenile offenders. The current facility on 3rd Avenue South is a converted former private home, which the state leases for $36,500 per year.

Schweitzer announced late last month that he was ordering the agency to hold off on building the new facility as part of his plan to save the state money. However, because the new building was funded through the state’s long-range building program and not the state general fund, Schweitzer needs the Legislature’s approval before the savings can be transferred to the general fund.

During the last legislative session, agency officials told lawmakers that the current building doesn’t meet local and state building regulations and that it needs to be replaced. The plan for a new facility included replacing the 3,600-square-foot existing home with a 4,600-square-foot state-owned building.

Of the $1.31 million the Legislature appropriated for the project, about $60,000 already was spent on architects hired to design the new facility.

Gibson said the department temporarily reduced the number of individuals on probation using the facility and modified the existing house to meet some of the building code concerns. Still, the new building would be a better long-term option for the program, he said.

“It’s an older residential house that obviously does not ideally meet the needs of a facility of this nature,” Gibson said. “With the new facility, we would have had such things as cameras on the outside for security (and) an alarm system for the windows. It would have been more of a residential placement center that would be better designed to meet the needs for these kids.”

The Great Falls Youth Transition Center is the only program of its kind in the state. It serves as a stop-over for troubled youth who recently were released from one of the state’s two juvenile detention facilities.

“Initially, it was for kids who it was difficult to find other placements for when they came out of either Pine Hills or Riverside (youth correctional facilities),” Gibson said. “It kind of operated in the sense of a half-way house.”

He said the center recently has served more like a “short-term revocation center.” In that capacity, the center takes in youths who have “slipped up” while in placement elsewhere, Gibson said.

“We can place them in the Great Falls Youth Transition Center for a period of time with certain sanctions, more restrictions, more intense counseling and more checking as far as (urinary analysis), etc. If they continue to progress and the other placement is still available, then we can transition them out,” Gibson said.

The program has operated in Great Falls in one form or another since 1970, Gibson said, and will continue to do so, with or without the new building.

“The program will continue,” Gibson said. “Hopefully if things become better economically, this can still go forward.”

janchavarie Economic Issues, Juvenile Justice, Montana

The Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09 presents data from the 2008-09 National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), conducted in 195 juvenile confinement facilities between June 2008 and April 2009, with a sample of over 9,000 adjudicated youth. Complete report available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The report provides national-level and facility-level estimates of sexual victimization by type of activity, including youth-on-youth sexual contact, staff sexual misconduct, and level of coercion. It also includes an analysis of the experience of sexual victimization, characteristics of youth most at risk to victimization, where the incidents occur, time of day, characteristics of perpetrators, and nature of the injuries. Finally, it includes estimates of the sampling error for selected measures of sexual victimization and summary characteristics of victims and incidents.
The report and appendix tables provide a listing of results for sampled state and large locally or privately operated facilities, as required under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79). Facilities are listed alphabetically by state with estimated prevalence rates of sexual victimization as reported by youths during a personal interview and based on activity in the 12 months prior to the interview or since admission to the facility, if shorter.

Highlights include:

• This report presents findings from the first National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), representing 26,550 adjudicated youth held nationwide in state operated and large locally or privately operated juvenile facilities. Overall, 91% of youth in these facilities were male; 9% were female.
• About 12% of youth in state juvenile facilities and large non-state facilities (representing 3,220 youth nationwide) reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another youth or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission, if less than 12 months.

About 2.6% of youth (700 nationwide) reported an incident involving another youth and 10.3% reported an incident involving staff.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice

Gladys Carrión, New York’s reform-minded commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, has been calling on the state to close many of its remote, prison-style juvenile facilities and shift resources and children to therapeutic programs located in their communities. Her efforts have met fierce and predictably self-interested resistance from the unions representing workers in juvenile prisons and their allies in Albany. Editorial in the New York Times.

A recent series of damning reports have underscored the flaws in New York’s juvenile justice system and the urgent need to shut down these facilities. The governor and the State Legislature need to pay attention.

A report by a task force appointed by Gov. David Paterson describes a failing system that damages young people, fails to curb recidivism and eats up millions of tax dollars. Children should be confined only when they present a clear threat to public safety. But the most recent statistics show that 53 percent of the youths admitted to New York’s institutional facilities were placed there for minor nonviolent infractions.

The report also says that judges often send children to these facilities because local communities are unable to help them with mental problems or family issues. But once they are locked up, these young people rarely get the psychiatric care or special education they need because the institutions lack trained staff.

A report from the Justice Department, which has threatened to sue the state, documents the use of excessive and injury-causing force against children in juvenile facilities, often for minor offenses such as laughing too loudly or refusing to get dressed. And last week, the Legal Aid Society of New York City filed a class-action suit on behalf of youths in confinement, arguing that conditions in the system violate their constitutional rights.

Not surprisingly, these institutions do a terrible job of rehabilitation. According to a study of children released from custody between 1991 and 1995, 89 percent of the boys and 81 percent of the girls were eventually rearrested. New York’s facilities are so disastrous and inhumane that state officials recently asked the courts to refrain from sending children to them, except in cases in which they presented a clear danger to the public.

Mr. Paterson’s task force was rightly impressed with Missouri’s juvenile justice system. It has adopted smaller regional facilities that focus on rehabilitation and house troubled youths as close to home as possible in order to involve parents and community groups in the therapeutic process. Missouri also has cut recidivisim rates by smoothing re-entry and helping young people with drug treatment, education or job placement.

New York clearly needs to follow Ms. Carrión’s advice and adopt a Missouri-style system. That means the Legislature will finally have to put the needs of the state’s children ahead of the politically powerful unions and upstate lawmakers who want to preserve jobs — and the disastrous status quo — at all costs.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice, New York

As many as 150,000 children are sent to adult jails in this country every year — often in connection with nonviolent offenses or arrests that do not lead to conviction. That places them at risk of being raped or battered and increases the chance they will end up as career criminals. Editorial from the NY Times.

To fix this problem, Congress needs to properly reauthorize the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974, under which states agreed to humanize juvenile justice policies in exchange for more federal aid. This act was largely bypassed in the 1990s when unfounded fears of an adolescent crime wave reached hysterical levels.

When it reauthorizes the law — it is already three years late — Congress should make it illegal for states to place children in adult prisons, perhaps with the exception of truly heinous criminals.

The House has yet to introduce a new bill; in the Senate, an updated version has yet to be voted out of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate bill is less than ideal, but it does encourage the states to de-emphasize the practice of detaining children in adult jails before trial and requires them to better protect young people who end up there. Several states have begun to reform their systems: housing young people in juvenile facilities — where they are better protected and can get mental health treatment — even if they have been convicted in adult courts. The current version of the law threatens states with loss of federal aid if they make that decision. The Senate bill would do away with that language.

The bill also would require states to phase out policies under which children are detained in either juvenile or adult facilities for offenses like violating curfew or smoking. These children should be dealt with through community-based counseling or family intervention programs, which are better for the child and for taxpayers.

In addition, the bill increases financing for mentoring, drug treatment, mental health care and other programs that have been shown to keep children out of custody in the first place. And it would require states to closely monitor — and address — racial inequities in their system. Studies show that black and Hispanic children get harsher treatment at all levels of the juvenile justice system than white children.

The Senate bill is not perfect. But it represents a welcome step away from the cruel and self-defeating policies that subject children to irreparable harm at the hands of the state and puts them on a path that too often leads to a lifetime spent behind bars.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice

The Dutchess County Office of Probation and Community Corrections has expanded its Juvenile Pre-Trial Services with Curfew Monitoring, a program where probation officers perform home visits at random for juvenile offenders to ensure they are where they are supposed to be. Reported by the Mid-Hudson News.

The program helps prevent a juvenile offender from violating the terms of probation and potentially winding up in juvenile detention, said county spokeswoman Betsy Brockway.

“Research tells us two things: one, you get better outcomes for young people if they don’t go off to detention, and two,  there is a great cost for the local taxpayers to pay for those detention beds without good outcomes,” she said. “The more likely a young person is involved in the juvenile criminal justice system, the more likely they will end up in the adult system.”

The Curfew Monitoring program can be court mandated, or it can be requested by parents or probation officers if they believe the youth is at risk for violating the terms of their probation.

The program is funded through a $70,000 state grant, which will run for one year and start in January. Brockway said the program will save local taxpayers $200,000.

janchavarie Community Corrections, Juvenile Justice, NY Dutchess County

The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned. This editorial in the New York Times.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

The rush to try more and more children as adults began in the 1980s when the country was gripped by hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. Joe Sullivan, the petitioner in Sullivan v. Florida, was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 — when he was just 13 — after a questionable sexual battery conviction. His two older accomplices testified against the younger, mentally impaired boy. They received short sentences, one of them as a juvenile.

The case of Terrance Graham has similar contours. A learning disabled child — born to crack-addicted parents — Mr. Graham was on probation in connection with a burglary committed when he was 16 when he participated in a home invasion. He, too, had older accomplices. He was never convicted of the actual crime but was given life without parole for violating the conditions of his probation.

These were two very troubled children in need of adult supervision and perhaps even time behind bars. But it is insupportable to conclude, as the courts did, that children who committed crimes when they were so young were beyond rehabilitation. The laws under which they were convicted violate current human rights standards and the Constitution.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice

State Prison officer-in-charge, Patrick Nawa has expressed concern over the detention of juveniles facing various bailable offences in Zambia.

Mr Nawa said he had noted with regret that a lot of juveniles were languishing in prison when they were facing bailable offences. He said it was sad that juveniles were in prison when they were facing bailable offences and wondered why they had not been released on bail or police bonds. He said this in the Kitwe High Court yesterday during the opening of criminal sessions before Judge Catherine Makungu. Mr Nawa said he was concerned that Chingola prison had 16 juveniles facing bailable offences but were remanded in custody.

He said Copperbelt Province had 3,253 inmates with Kamfinsa prison having the highest with 1,522 inmates followed by Chingola prison with 411 inmates, Kansenshi with 358 inmates. Others are Luanshya prison with 323 inmates, Ndola remand prison with 252, Mufulira, 247 inmates with Chondwe prison having the lowest with 214 inmates. He described the situation at the prisons in the regions as calm with enough food stocks and that sick inmates were being taken care of.

Justice Makungu said she had also noted that there were a number of juveniles especially at Chingola prison who were facing various bailable offences but were still in prison. She said she would work with the judiciary and other relevant authorities to ensure that the juveniles facing bailable offences were helped. Justice Makungu said she was happy that the prison had enough food and that the situation at the prison was calm.

jakking Africa, INTERNATIONAL, Juvenile Justice, Zambia

Jackson, Mississippi will be the site for the Thirteenth National Workshop on Adult and Juvenile Female Offenders which will bring together leaders in the fields of adult corrections, social work, law enforcement, juvenile corrections, mental health and education for a comprehensive overview of this rapidly expanding area of corrections.   The conference, hosted by the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), will be held in Jackson, Mississippi from October 10 -14, 2009 at the Jackson Marriott, 200 Amite Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

“The Mississippi Department of Corrections is proud to host this important conference and has worked hard to provide participants with a program full of informative meetings, interesting speakers, and educational training activities,” said MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps.  “We realize that working with the female population is a specialized field and with the training offered at this conference, we hope participants leave more informed, more inspired, and more engaged than when they arrived.”

The conference will cover topics relevant to the female inmate population, including breaking criminal behavior cycles, rebuilding lives through discharge planning and re-entry coordination, assisting inmate patients receiving psychiatric services and addressing the changing needs of adolescent females in the juvenile system.

Featured speakers include Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, Mary Leftridge Byrd, Federal Security Director, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Dr. Stephanie Covington, Co-Director, Center for Gender and Justice, La Jolla, CA, and MDOC Commissioner Chris Epps.

jakking Female Inmates, Juvenile Justice, Mississippi

The state is closing California’s largest youth prison as the population of juvenile delinquents in state custody continues to decline, corrections officials have announced.  Reported by LA Now.

The facility, the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, will be converted into an adult prison. Officials said the move is part of a plan to “right-size” staff at the Department of Juvenile Justice, which is downsizing its workforce by 400 employees this year in an effort to save the state up to $40 million. The plan also is geared toward reducing treatment costs for youth inmates from $252,000 per person to $175,000, state officials said.

The Chino facility opened in 1959 and now houses less than 400 juvenile inmates. They will be redirected to other facilities. An exact date by which the closure will be completed has not yet been determined. The number of juvenile offenders in state custody has dropped over the last 10 years from a peak of nearly 10,000 to approximately 1,700, the result of legislation that now puts most young inmates in county jails.

jakking California, Economic Issues, Juvenile Justice

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders.  Story from the New York Times.

About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.   Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

In California’s state system, one of the most violent and poorly managed juvenile systems in the country, according to federal investigators, three dozen youth offenders seriously injured themselves or attempted suicide in the last year — a sign, state juvenile justice experts say, of neglect and poor safety protocols.  In Ohio, where Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, approved a 34 percent reduction in community-based mental health services to reduce a budget deficit, Thomas J. Stickrath, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said continuing cuts would swell his youth offender population.   “I’m hearing from a lot of judges saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m sending so-and-so to you, but at least I know that he’ll get the treatment he can’t get in his community,’ ” Mr. Stickrath said …

According to a Government Accountability Office report, in 2001, families relinquished custody of 9,000 children to juvenile justice systems so they could receive mental health services … [However,] Lawsuits and federal civil rights investigations in Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and Texas have criticized juvenile corrections systems for failing to meet their obligation to prohibit cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners.

Despite downsizing to about 1,650 juvenile inmates from about 10,000 youth offenders in 1996, California’s state system remains under a 2004 federal mandate to improve conditions, including mental health services — the result of a class-action lawsuit that documented the systematic physical and sexual abuse of wards.   Under a plan to reduce the state juvenile inmate population, many youths who once would have been held by the state are now detained by the Los Angeles County juvenile detention system. Los Angeles County is also under a federal mandate to improve psychiatric services for juvenile inmates, especially at the six camps at its Challenger Memorial Youth Center, which holds most of the county’s medium- and high-risk offenders and most of its mentally ill ones.

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,” wrote federal civil rights investigators in a 2008 report to county authorities, referring to oleoresin capsicum, known as pepper spray. “One supervisor told us that he believed that allowing staff to carry and use O.C. spray made sense given the ‘mental health population.’ ” …

In the 1960s and ’70s, the increasing availability of antipsychotic medications coincided with a national movement to close public mental hospitals. Many private hospitals barred psychotic patients, including juveniles. By the 1980s, juvenile justice systems had become the primary providers of residential psychiatric care for mentally ill youths.  But as cutbacks have worsened, the debate has intensified over what constitutes adequate mental health care. Often juvenile justice systems have very little to go on when attempting a diagnosis. “Often Daddy is nowhere to be found, Mommy might be in jail,” said Daniel Connor, a psychiatrist for the Connecticut juvenile corrections system. “The home phone is cut off. The parent speaks another language, so it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s going on with each kid.”

School records often do not arrive with arrested youths, nor do files often come from other corrections institutions. The lack of information is particularly problematic when psychiatrists try to prescribe medications. Joseph Parks, medical director for the Missouri Department of Mental Health and a national expert on pharmaceutical drug use in corrections facilities, said many juvenile offenders are prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs as they move from mental health clinics to detention halls to juvenile prisons.  A decade ago, it was rare to find juvenile offenders on two psychotropic drugs at once, Dr. Parks said. Now, many take three or four at a time, often for nonprescribed uses like helping the youths sleep.  “If you just give a kid a pill, the prison administration doesn’t have to do anything differently,” he said. “The staff doesn’t have to do anything differently. The guards don’t have to get more training.”

Census studies of child mental health professionals show chronic shortages. A 2006 study estimated that for every 100,000 youths, there were fewer than nine child psychiatrists. Dr. Penn of Texas said the state youth prison system there recently instituted a system of telepsychiatry sessions, conducting videoconferences between mental health professionals and youths being detained hundreds of miles away.   Inadequate mental health services increases recidivism.

jakking California, Juvenile Justice, Mental Health Issues, Missouri, Ohio

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.

jakking Juvenile Justice, Recidivism

Records show that Florida has handed out more life sentences to juveniles for non-murder crimes than have all other states combined.  Report from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Florida has sentenced 77 young men to spend their lives in prison, without any chance of release, based on non-homicide crimes they committed when they were 17 years old or younger, according to a preliminary study by Florida State University researchers. Six of those prisoners were 13 or 14 at the time of their crimes.  A Herald-Tribune review of state records shows that some juveniles were given life without parole for as few as one or two convictions of non-homicide crimes.

Florida’s stance has generated protests from human rights groups and a lawsuit heading to the U.S. Supreme Court, which contends such sentences violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.  But the state shows little sign of stopping judges from imposing life sentences on juveniles or providing a path to freedom for those already in prison. Lawmakers rejected a bill last spring that would have allowed juveniles in some non-homicide cases to eventually become eligible for parole.

The controversy in Florida stands out because it differs so greatly from policies elsewhere. Florida prisoners represent 69 percent of the 111 inmates reported nationally to be serving life without parole for their non-homicide juvenile crimes. Thirty-six states have no non-homicide juvenile lifers. Researchers are still awaiting data from six states, but they do not expect Florida’s standing to change.   Other findings:

• Only Florida has sent juvenile criminals away for life for burglary, battery and carjacking.

• Forty-six juveniles in Florida were given life for armed robbery.

“Florida’s practice of sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole for non-homicide cases is unique among American states,” said the preliminary research report directed by Paolo Annino, an FSU law professor who heads the school’s Public Interest Law Center. “It stands alone in its willingness to condemn young people for non-homicide offenses to life in prison, without a chance of a reassessment of their lives in some future time,” the report said.

The Florida juveniles have been caught in two converging criminal justice trends.   The state has made it easier to try juveniles as adults at the same time it has increased the potential penalties for many crimes. Currently, Florida judges have the power to impose a life sentence without parole for more than 50 crimes.  Many of the changes came in the 1990s, when Florida was hit with a highly publicized crime wave, including the killings of nine tourists in 1992 and 1993. A British tourist was killed by a group of juveniles at an Interstate 10 rest stop in 1993 in a robbery that drew international press attention.   Since that time, Florida has sentenced 65 of the 77 non-homicide juvenile criminals to life without parole, according to the FSU researchers.

Other states are sending more juveniles into the adult prison system, too, although none of them have embraced the use of life without parole for non-homicide juvenile offenses as aggressively as Florida.  “It’s a national problem that has just taken on very dramatic examples in Florida,” said Bryan Stevenson, the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal aid group based in Montgomery, Ala., and a lawyer for one of the juvenile offenders in the court case.    But Stevenson said the imposition of a sentence that should be reserved for unredeemable criminals is highly inappropriate for many minors given the large body of scientific evidence showing that young people are developmentally different from adults. “Our argument is not that these kids can’t be punished, can’t be sent to prison for a very long time,” Stevenson said. “But to make a judgment that their sentences can never be reviewed for possible release is inconsistent with how we deal with kids in virtually every other context.”

Florida’s stance against young criminals has become the focal point of a potentially landmark U.S. Supreme Court case.  In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional and that opinion — which underscored the physical and psychological differences between a juvenile and an adult — has provided much of the legal basis for the challenge of Florida’s life-without-parole sentences for juveniles.  Florida’s harsh sentencing for juvenile crimes has drawn criticism from a wide spectrum of groups, including the American Bar Association, Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Psychiatric Association, which have all filed briefs in the case.   A group of former juvenile criminals, including an actor, writers, a former federal prosecutor, a business executive and former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., have joined the appeal, pointing out that they were able to rehabilitate their lives despite committing serious crimes as teenagers.

jakking Florida, Juvenile Justice

12 and in Prison – as reported in the New York Times.

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.

The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment — including life sentences — to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Congress can help to correct these practices by amending the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. To get a share of delinquency prevention money, the law requires the states and localities to meet minimum federal protections for youths in the justice system. These protections are intended to keep as many youths as possible out of adult jails and prisons, and to segregate those that are sent to those places from the adult criminal population.

The case for tougher legislative action is laid out in an alarming new study of children 13 and under in the adult criminal justice system, the lead author of which is the juvenile justice scholar, Michele Deitch, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the study, every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit preadolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

This is terrible public policy. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders — and to return to an adult jail later on — than children tried in the juvenile justice system.

Despite these well-known risks, policy makers across the country do not have reliable data on just how many children are being shunted into the adult system by state statutes or prosecutors, who have the discretion to file cases in the adult courts.

But there is reasonably reliable data showing juvenile court judges send about 80 children ages 13 and under into the adult courts each year. These statistics explode the myth that those children have committed especially heinous acts.

The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people. As has been shown in previous studies, minority defendants are more likely to get adult treatment than their white counterparts who commit comparable offenses.

The study’s authors rightly call on lawmakers to enact laws that discourage harsh sentencing for preadolescent children and that enable them to be transferred back into the juvenile system. Beyond that, Congress should amend the juvenile justice act to require the states to simply end these inhumane practices to be eligible for federal juvenile justice funds.

The complete From Time Out To Hard Time study is available online.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice, Sentencing

MN – According to a 2008 report, some young offenders could be placed with local services for better and more cost-effective treatment. Complete story in the Star Tribune.

A few years ago, when Hennepin County Commissioner Mark Stenglein questioned the growing expense of residential treatment programs for young offenders, a juvenile court judge told him that it was the judge’s job to place young people for treatment and the county’s job to pay the bill.

Stenglein’s recounting of that story Thursday at a Hennepin County Board briefing drew snorts of disbelief from community corrections officials and the presiding judge of Hennepin County juvenile court.

After years of frustration over the cost and success rate of out-of-home placement programs for juvenile offenders, county officials believe they are finally moving toward a more cost-effective system that they hope also will put more troubled youth back on the straight and narrow.

New out-of-home placement programs for young offenders should be in place this fall after a year of planning by juvenile judges, corrections officials and other experts, county board members were told. The board approved the new direction last fall after years of exasperation with a system that to commissioners seemed bloated, with out-of-control costs.

According to a 2008 report, out-of-home correctional placements for juveniles cost the county $31 million a year, with $12.5 million of that spent on the Hennepin County Home School in Minnetonka. An average of $62,753 was spent on each of the 494 youths who were placed in 68 residential programs inside and outside of Minnesota in 2007. About one-fifth of those young people were not classified as high-risk and could have received cheaper community-based services, the report said.

The new plan will not necessarily save money, but county officials hope it will achieve better results.

Complete story in the Star Tribune.

janchavarie Juvenile Justice, MN Hennepin County

A year after the director of the Oregon Youth Authority resigned under fire, Gov. Ted Kulongski on Monday announced the appointment of a new chief for the state’s juvenile corrections agency.  Story from Oregon Live.

Colette Peters, former inspector general of the Oregon Department of Corrections between 2005 and 2008, will take the helm of the agency this summer pending state senate confirmation in the fall.   Peters succeeds interim director Bobby Mink, who is returning to retirement.  Mink repaced Robert Jester, the former director of the agency, who stepped down last summer after an internal report raised concerns about managerial oversight at the RiverBend youth facility.

jakking Juvenile Justice

Learning about different cultures and upbringings would be one way to address the overrepresentation of minorities in the juvenile justice system and to address gang violence, presenters said Monday at the 10th annual Governor’s Conference on Juvenile Justice.  Reported by the Wichita Eagle.

Or as Mark Masterson with Sedgwick County’s Department of Corrections said on a video clip: “Diversity is a business imperative, not an option.”

More than 500 corrections industry professionals gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Wichita for the conference … Topics include things like access to records, preparing young people to make the transition from incarceration back to the community, and dealing with bullying.

Masterson’s session outlined how Sedgwick County is working to reduce the disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities in its system. The disproportion, he said, is particularly high at the arrest point.  In 2008, 78 of every 1,000 black youths were arrested for minor crimes compared with nearly 43 of every 1,000 Hispanic youths and 18 of every 1,000 white youths, according to presentation data.  Hiring diverse staff to better mirror the clients the system serves and holding staff trainings that consider race and ethnicity, social status, poverty, gender and other identifiers have helped the system become more culturally competent.

Understanding culture is also helpful when dealing with gangs, said Ruben Salamanca, of the Topeka Police Department, who is president of the Kansas Gang Investigators Association. Salamanca said Hispanic gangs are often territorial, and identify with certain geographic areas or neighborhoods, while black gangs are often motivated by money. White gangs, he said, are often motivated by feelings of racial superiority. In Kansas, he said, it’s not uncommon to see mixed-race gangs, too.  He discussed the importance of law enforcement understanding gang history dating back decades.  “People need to be more culturally competent about who they are and what they’re about,” Salamanca said.

jakking Gangs (STGs), Juvenile Justice, KS Sedgewick County, Kansas

A new rehabilitation program has been launched at the California State Prison in Solana.  It is a program that could

“revolutionize the way we provide rehabilitation in this state’s prisons,” says Sol Irving,  Correction Counselor III. The first class of 50 long-term inmates, most of them “lifers,” will soon complete the Offender Mentor Certification (OMC) Program. Those  who pass a national exam in June will be certified as alcohol and drug counselors by the California Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors (CAADAC), and assist fellow inmates with recovery. California is believed to be the first state in the nation to launch an in-prison substance abuse counselor certification program.

Some OMC program graduates will be transferred to work in other prisons in the state.  Program graduates who are eventually released can use the certification to obtain a job. The program is administered by the Orange County Department of Education, which provides
certified alcohol and drug counselors to facilitate the program workshops, under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

This “extremely innovative, cutting-edge program” is “a major innovation in criminal justice rehabilitation,” says Terence T. Gorski, an internationally recognized expert on substance abuse, violence and crime, and among the top experts in the recovery field who are teaching Solano’s first OMC class. “It is a way to bring a sense of meaning and purpose into the lives of long-term offenders and also to expand by multiples the availability of addiction treatment within correctional facilities without increasing costs,” he says. He predicts that the program will make “a tremendous difference” in reducing recidivism.

There is a great deal of detail in the special edition of the CDCR Rehabilitation News.

jakking California, Drug Treatment & Diversion, Inmate Programs, Juvenile Justice

Budget cuts that would close prisons and eliminate some creative ways of dealing with crime moved a step closer to reality Thursday.  Report from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

House budget writers unveiled a series of proposals for cuts in the justice system, the latest piece in their attempt to deal with a more than $4 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes. They proposed closing eight prisons, including Haywood Correctional Center, which would shut down by Oct. 1 under the plan. Other cuts would end or reduce funding for programs to keep youths and adults from heading to prison, or deal with them in ways other than locking them up. Camp Woodson in Buncombe County and other wilderness camps for troubled youths would shut down …

Another cut would end funding in the corrections budget for the BRIDGE program. The program sends young prison inmates to the mountains to fight forest fires. They do other work, too. Inmates headed out to Madison County on Thursday to repair a footbridge that had washed away in the recent heavy rains, closing off access to an elderly couple’s property, said Keith Suttles, assistant camp director with the state forest service. “People don’t realize that resource won’t be there to do those things,” Suttles said …

Another program that offers troubled youths the chance at wilderness adventures, Spruce Pine-based Project Challenge, would lose $40,000, 25 percent of its annual state funding for administrative costs. The nonprofit takes youths in 34 counties into the woods and into communities to serve at places like churches, food pantries and hospitals.

These are just extracts from a much longer article in the Asheville Citizen-Times.

jakking Community Corrections, Economic Issues, Inmate Labor, Inmate Programs, Juvenile Justice, North Carolina

The President’s Department of Justice (DOJ) budget will likely lead to growing incarceration rates, according to an analysis by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a Washington, D.C.-based public policy organization.

JPI’s analysis of the budgets released by the Administration late last week points to increases in spending for law enforcement and decreases in juvenile justice expenditures … “Police serve an important role in the United States, but overpolicing can be just as problematic as underpolicing,” said Tracy Velazquez, executive director of JPI. “What we have seen is that the more money spent on law enforcement, the more people are arrested for nonviolent drug offenses. This results in millions of dollars in incarceration costs for states, with little impact on public safety or, for that matter, rates of illicit drug use” …

Velazquez indicated that the lack of investment in juvenile justice programs was especially troubling.   “Back in 2002 we spent over $546 million on programs to prevent and address youth delinquency. Unfortunately, this Administration is choosing to keep juvenile justice funding at the levels of the last eight years — their 2010 budget is less than 60 percent of the 2002 budget, not even taking inflation into account. Getting and keeping kids on the right track is a proven way to improve public safety, and it means more kids going on to become responsible adults that contribute to their communities and the economy” …

“We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with little to no evidence that these increasing rates are improving public safety,” said Velazquez. “We can’t arrest and incarcerate our way to public safety. We hope the Administration takes a harder look at where they want to spend their money. While politicians may think that ratcheting up law enforcement spending is politically popular, it may not be the best investment if the goal is to build safer, healthier communities rather than more prisons.”

jakking Economic Issues, Federal Systems, Juvenile Justice