4 Core and Seven Years Ago

Yep, I got the title right. I'm also giving an acronym warning. Government systems love their acronyms and those involved get pulled right in, like JDAI (Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative).

There are four core areas addressed by the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 1974 and most recently reauthorized in 2007. I'll address those in the next paragraph. Seven years ago in 2001, the Juvenile justice system was coming to the realization that the raving hoards of Juvenile Super Predators had not manifested and that a new approach needed to be looked at, particularly to address those four core aspects of the JJDPA. New detention centers were built in several counties with large detention capacities in anticipation of a burgeoning crime wave that never hit our shores.

The Four Cores of the JJDPA are:
1) Deinstitutionalization of Status Offenders (DSO). Prior to this act, states were detaining kids for ditching school, running away from home, staying out after curfew and for not obeying their parents. Any agency that takes federal money should not place status offenders in juvenile detention. In Pima County, that includes tobacco and alcohol possession violators.

2) Adult Jail and Lock-Up Removal. in some jurisdictions, children were placed in the same facilities as adults. Now, only children that are being prosecuted in the adult system can be housed with adults.

3) Sight and Sound Separation. For children that are being prosecuted as adults, contact with adults is prohibited to keep them safer. Children in adult facilities have a suicide rate eight times greater, are twice as likely to be assaulted by staff and are 50% more likely to be attacked with a weapon than kids in juvenile facilities.

4) Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC). Jurisdictions must address the disproportionality of minorities having contact with the justice system at all points, from arrest to sentencing to prison. You can Internet search the term and come up with reams of material to go through on this. The W. Haywood Burns Institute follows this issue closely and is working closely with several organizations to address DMC. In Tucson, Police Chief Miranda rightly brought the Burns Institute in to survey the department and find out what the beliefs of the rank and file were concerning DMC and how law enforcement and juvenile court interact. The Tucson Police Department is the first police agency in the country to actively address DMC. Congratulations to TPD for leading the way!

What does the JJDPA have to do with Detention Expediting? Well, the first area of getting children out of detention was removing the status offenders. When people started looking closely into why detention was bad for kids, they found that:

• Detention costs a lot of money and doesn't work as well as Alternatives to Detention (ATD). Detention costs around $50,000 per bed per year. For a facility of just 100 beds, that's around five million dollars being spent to keep kids locked up, and that's probably on the conservative side. We use a $155/day rate for our bed costs. We had an average rate of 118 last year, which puts the cost around $6,675,850 to detain those kids. Our good news is that in 2003, our average daily population was 176, which was a cost of $9,957,200. implementing the Juvenile Detentions Alternatives Initiative saved taxpayers more than three million just last year, and our crime rate per 100 k people has gone down, so it is not like those kids that were released generated a juvenile crime wave frenzy and compromised public safety.
• A key indicator of whether a kid is arrested again for a new crime is whether that child was detained. There are a number of factors surrounding this, but on a common sense basis, if you take kids who are not high risks to community safety and place them with kids who are dangerous, those low-risk youth start learning from the peers they meet in detention. Texas ran a study that showed that youth placed in alternatives to detention were 14% less likely to commit future crimes than kids that were locked up. Detention then becomes a self-defeating mechanism that does not change the behavior you want changed and introduces more negative influences into the life of the kid that gets detained.
• Detention effects the school and work paths for kids. Kids that are detained are more likely to fall behind in school, are less likely to complete their education and detention impairs the ability of kids to become employed. When a kid has a hard time completing school and maintaining a job, that kid is more likely to commit new crimes.
• Detention makes mental health disorders worse. Nationally, around two-thirds of kids in detention have a mental health diagnosis. Detention conditions, isolation from friends and family, not being able to share important events like Easter and the loss of liberty contribute to higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts for incarcerated youth.

This is my blog and not a research paper, so I'm not going to cite every research paper that lead to the above statements. However, if you would like to review the literature and research, all of the above items were pulled from a very well written document by ACT 4 Juvenile Justice, and that PDF can be accessed at: http://www.campaignforyouthjustice.org/Downloads/FedLaw/jjdpa_briefing_book.pdf

When people talk to me about how detention isn't bad for kids and how kids need that "tough love," I do enjoy having resources that I can pull out and refute any of the non-researched opinions they may have.

May God richly bless you this Easter!