JUDGING OUR CHILDREN

A NEW report issued by a state panel formed to investigate New York's juvenile detention centers has found that they "fail to keep their young people safe and secure, let alone meet their myriad service and treatment needs," and that "youth are subjected to shocking violence and abuse." This news, which comes on the heels of a federal study that also documented squalid conditions, makes plain to the world what many of us inside the state's justice system have been saying for years: we need a fundamental rethinking of how we respond to troubled young people.

 

A consensus is emerging among juvenile justice policymakers, including prosecutors, that New York must limit the number of young people sent to expensive prison-like residential facilities. The goal should be to create more community-based intervention programs, which have proved less expensive and more effective at reducing crime.

 

There will be no progress, however, until sentencing judges have confidence that the probation departments charged with supervising young people have adequate financing and can connect youths to the services they need. This requires a relatively simple but bold step: making the juvenile probation system an arm of the courts, rather than of the executive branch, as it is now.

 

It costs an estimated $210,000 per year to confine a juvenile in a state residential facility. The return on this investment — which is roughly 10 times the cost of the most expensive community-based intervention — is shockingly poor. The most recent estimates are that 89 percent of boys placed in these facilities go on to commit further crimes.

 

While many of the 1,600 young people sent to New York residential facilities each year are there for committing serious felony-level offenses, the majority are not. The sad truth is that a judge's decision to confine a young person often has much to do with the severity of the offense and more to do with whether the county is able to provide the services needed to deal with chaotic home situations, addictions and mental health problems.

 

New York's judges, however, have already shown that they can play an important role in connecting troubled individuals with needed services. Over the last decade, we have made it a priority to link nonviolent adult offenders — mostly those involved in drug cases — to community-based drug and mental health treatment instead of jailing them. By engaging judges in monitoring defendants in treatment, we have become a national model for reducing both substance abuse and recidivism.

 

Why not apply this model to juvenile probation? Each year, family court judges in New York sentence about 4,500 young people to probation. These sentences are administered by local juvenile probation departments, which are overburdened and underfinanced, in large part because the probation system has no strong advocate in Albany. Two decades ago, state dollars made up about 47 percent of county probation budgets; today that figure is below 20 percent.

 

If our goal is to reduce the number of young people behind bars, we will inevitably increase the number of them on juvenile probation. This will make it ever harder for financially ailing county probation departments to carry out a judge's sentence. But having the state judiciary assume oversight would not only ensure that judges could do a better job of holding young defendants accountable, but also give the juvenile probation system a champion in state government.

We have reached a crisis: the state agency overseeing juvenile facilities has asked New York's family court judges not to institutionalize young offenders unless they are a significant risk to public safety. But this is just a Band-Aid. A real solution requires a strategy for reducing incarceration and crime.

 

The experience of New York's adult drug courts indicates that it is possible to do both — if judges feel confident that alternative sanctions are meaningful and rigorous. Having the judicial branch itself oversee juvenile probation would be an important step in limiting the number of youths incarcerated, protecting public safety, closing unneeded residential facilities and saving money.