David Domenici: Educators Can and Should Break the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Speaking at the New Schools - Aspen Institute Summit 2012 last week, David Domenici challenged educators to embrace troubled (and often challenging) students and to keep them in school, instead of calling the police.
(watch David's short talk at the 29:45 mark)
He listed 4 focus areas:
Reclaiming Futures: Leadership at All Levels
Although I grew up in North Carolina, over the last 4 months I have had the opportunity to travel to parts of the state I had never seen. I have met so many incredible leaders along the way who have welcomed and helped orient me to Reclaiming Futures.
Leadership is a critical component of the Reclaiming Futures model, at the state level in the form of the State Champions Advisory group, the national program office and at the local level.
Each Reclaiming Futures site has a change team of five key leaders (or Fellows) who work to make the project successful. Many more leaders are participating in the local efforts to get court-involved youth screened, engaged in treatment and connected with long-term community supports.
The local fellowships include:
Project Directors—They help guide the change team to plan and implement the model.
Judicial Fellows—Judges help influence the substance abuse treatment that teens receive.
Juvenile Justice Fellows—Court counselors and ad- ministrators help guide youths and their families through the system.
Treatment Fellows—Providers help youths get the treatment they need to overcome drug and alcohol problems.
Community Fellows–Community agencies or organizations connect youth with positive supports in their community to ensure ongoing services after completion of treatment and probation.
Breaking the Cycle of Drugs, Alcohol and Crime
We know how to break the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime, writes National Executive Director Susan Richardson at Join Together. And now is an important time to do so.
She explains:
Almost two million American youth need treatment for alcohol and other drug use or abuse. But only 1 in 20 will receive treatment.
Research shows that teens with substance abuse problems are more likely to break the law, behave violently or drop out of school. In fact, 4 out of 5 young people in the juvenile justice system commit crimes while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Young people need to be held accountable when they break the law. Unless they receive treatment for a substance abuse problem that helped them get in trouble in the first place, they will often find themselves back in juvenile court again and again.
Mentoring: Best Practices for High Risk Youth
As Reclaiming Futures sites look for ways to connect youth with long-term supports, many of them turn to one-on-one mentoring programs. Several sites are utilizing law students from local universities as their sources for these mentors, while other sites try to build up connections with the natural helpers in a youth‘s life, such as a parent or relative.
Mentoring has been shown to be an effective intervention for working with high-risk youth. An evaluation of the Big Brothers/ Big Sisters mentoring program by Public/ Private Ventures (P/PV) demonstrated that mentored youth were:
- 46% less likely than controls to initiate drug use
- 27% less likely to initiate alcohol use than controls
These findings were even more significant for minority participants who were 70% less likely to initiate drug use and 50% less likely to initiate alcohol use.
So what makes certain mentoring programs more successful than others?
A New Approach to School Discipline in Walla Walla, Washington
The first time that principal Jim Sporleder tried the New Approach to Student Discipline at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, he was blown away. Because it worked. In fact, it worked so well that he never went back to the Old Approach to Student Discipline. This is how it went down:
A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly:
“Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?”
The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness. The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: “My dad’s an alcoholic. He’s promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises.” The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: “I shouldn’t have blown up at the teacher.”
Whoa.
And then he goes back to the teacher and apologizes. Without prompting from Sporleder.
“The kid still got a consequence,” explains Sporleder – but he wasn’t sent home, a place where there wasn’t anyone who cares much about what he does or doesn’t do. He went to ISS — in-school suspension, a quiet, comforting room where he can talk about anything with the attending teacher, catch up on his homework, or just sit and think about how maybe he could do things differently next time.
Before the words “namby-pamby”, “weenie”, or “not the way they did things in my day” start flowing across your lips, take a look at these numbers:
2009-2010 (Before new approach)
798 suspensions (days students were out of school)
50 expulsions
600 written referrals
2010-2011 (After new approach)135 suspensions (days students were out of school)
30 expulsions
320 written referrals
“It sounds simple,” says Sporleder about the new approach. “Just by asking kids what’s going on with them, they just started talking. It made a believer out of me right away.”
Cutting Youth Incarceration Doesn’t Cut Public Safety, says Bart Lubow
Bart Lubow, who has been working for more than 20 years to reduce the number of youth being sent to detention centers, told a gathering of approximately 700 conference attendees last week that now “may prove to be a unique moment in juvenile justice history, a time when, as a nation, we shed some of the system’s worst baggage—including our unnecessary and often inappropriate reliance on secure confinement” of youth.
The conference attendees were in Houston for the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative conference, which as its name implies is working to reduce the number of youth sent into detention and instead aims to provide community-centered alternatives. The conference is hosted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Apparently the 19-year quest is working. Lubow, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Casey Foundation, told the gathering that “JDAI sites have reduced reliance on secure detention overall by 42 percent, with numerous jurisdictions posting reductions in excess of 50 percent.” All of this happening without compromising public safety, he said.
The quest in the end means, in Lubow’s words, “We need to detain the right kids, but only the right kids.”
Covering the Juvenile Justice System: Kids Behind Bars, the Role of the Media and More
Our friends at the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE) spent this week at the Kids Behind Bars: Where's the Justice in America's Juvenile Justice System? conference in New York, discussing the juvenile justice system and the role of the media in reporting facts (good) and sensationalizing stories (bad).
Their takeaways are relevant for journalists and bloggers but also for readers of this blog, many of whom work with(in) the juvenile system. During day 1 of the John Jay Symposium, speakers discussed:
- the now discounted superpredator theory from the 1990s and the role of the press in perpetuating it
- research findings showing that the human brain does not reach full maturity until the mid-20s
- the importance of mentoring
- disproportionate minority contact
- school discipline policies
- juvenile justice reform efforts
School Discipline: When Should Law Enforcement Step In?
This week, several schools and districts are grappling with the issue of when—if ever—it is appropriate for police officers to get involved with school discipline issues.
The Albuquerque school district, for example, is currently the defendant in a class action lawsuit over referring students to law enforcement for allegedly minor offenses. When a student was talking to her friend and refused to return to her seat, her teacher called the police.
In contrast, a Georgia six-year-old throwing a violent tantrum—which included destruction of property and assault, according to published reports—was arrested and taken away in a police cruiser. She was also put in handcuffs while in the cruiser, according to standard department policy, but to the outrage of many.
Funding Opportunity: Improve Treatment for Youth Involved with the Juvenile Justice System
In case you missed it: The Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention are looking for communities interested in implementing the Reclaiming Futures model. And they have $1.325 million (over 4 years) in funding to give away.
From the request for proposals:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is pleased to announce that it is seeking applications for funding under the FY 2012 Juvenile Drug Courts/Reclaiming Futures program. This program furthers the Department’s mission by building the capacity of states, state and local courts, units of local government, and Indian tribal governments to develop and establish juvenile drug courts for substance abusing juvenile offenders.
The deadline is May 16, 2012, so apply today! We look forward to working with you!
Florida: Transferring Teens from Juvenile Court to Adult Court Isn't Reducing Violent Crime Rates
According to recent figures from the Department of Justice, national youth violence rates are currently half what they were in the 90s. In Florida in particular, rates of violent youth crime dropped 57% between 1995 and 2010. And Florida transfers more young offenders to adult criminal court than any other state in the nation.
However, it's important to note that Florida's falling rates of violent juvenile crime are NOT caused by transferring kids to the adult criminal system.
Dr. Jeffrey Butts has a must-read op-ed in today's Orlando Sentinel, detailing why transferring troubled kids to adult court does not actually reduce violent crime rates. He writes:
If Florida prosecutors were correct [in their belief that trying youth in adult courts has decreased violent crime rates], these variations in the falling rate of juvenile violence would follow a pattern. Namely, we would see the largest crime declines in the states that transferred the most juveniles to criminal court.
Florida's use of transfer (approximately 165 transfers per 100,000 youth population) is nearly double that of its closest competitors, Oregon and Arizona (96 and 84 per 100,000, respectively). Yet, both of those states beat Florida in the crime drop.
In fact, the state with the lowest use of transfer was Ohio at 20 per 100,000, but Ohio's crime decline of 74 percent was the steepest of all six states.
If Florida transfers far more juveniles to criminal court than any other state and yet the state's crime decline is about average, then it is simply wrong to credit criminal-court transfer for recent reductions in youth violence.
