Juvenile Justice Reform

This month, the Comprehensive Strategy Group released a detailed report on the juvenile justice system in Delaware. Entitled “The Little Engine that Could,” the report focuses on Delaware’s impressive progress overhauling its treatment of youth offenders over the past four years despite the state’s limited resources. From the report:
“More specifically, the primary goal of the restructuring effort is to create a responsive rehabilitative system where youth receive supervision based on objective assessments of their risk to re-offend and the severity of their offense, and are also matched with services based on their needs. The reasonable expectation is that, by ensuring that youth at risk of further delinquency involvement receive needed services early on, [the state] will be able to reduce recidivism while building and promoting life skills and other protective factors which will increase youth success.”
Recognizing a Troubled System
About 10 years ago, Delaware officials noticed a troubling trend following House Bill 210’s adoption:

“The initial stimulus [for reform] was a backlash against House Bill (HB) 210, 'get tough' legislation enacted in 2003 that resulted in the transfer of a large number of juvenile offenders to the criminal justice system. This, in turn, inadvertently resulted in significant overcrowding of juvenile detention facilities while hearings to transfer many of these youth back to the Family Court were pending.”

A New Structure

How do you bankrupt a brimming system of incarceration that is perversely incentivized to grow? According to New Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, “you have to go to the source, and whether the source is education or whether it’s legislation, you really have to go to the source.” Gusman provided an upstream suggestion at the Loyola University New Orleans’ event, Louisiana Incarcerated: An Evening with Cindy Chang on June 26, 2012. However, many of the panelists pointed specifically to job training and employment as essential parts of the solution.
The event was centered around an acclaimed 8-part Times-Picayune series titled “Louisiana Incarcerated,” by reporter Cindy Chang. For the series, Chang talked with the formerly incarcerated and criminal justice reformers to get a complete story of the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The town hall styled symposium provided opportunities for panelists to offer their thoughts on the sources of Louisiana’s incarceration problems as well as potential solutions.
Concurring with Gusman’s perspective of root causes, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana Jim Letten said, “the most important part of our jobs is education and prevention. I wouldn’t have told you that 13 years ago.” Letten iterated what several panelists expressed during the panel sessions, which took place over the course of two hours.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• High court ruling on juvenile life sentences means a chance at freedom (Orlando Sentenial)
  In more than two-dozen states, lawyers can now ask for new sentences. And judges will have discretion to look beyond the crime at other factors such as a prisoner's age at the time of the offense, the person's background and perhaps evidence that an inmate has changed while incarcerated.
• RExO Grants: Reduce Recidivism and Build Lives (Huffington Post)
  This month, the Department of Labor announced grants of nearly $50 million to 25 organizations under two different grant programs that serve juveniles under our Re-Integration of Ex-Offenders initiative.
• Juvenile Justice: A Move Away From Detention For Some (NorthEscambia.com)
  Florida law enforcement and criminal justice officials say the use of civil citations for troubled youth, rather than a lock-up, is slashing costs, and giving kids a better chance of a turn-around, and they want the practice to become more widespread.
• L.A. School Police, District Agree to Rethink Court Citations of Students (Juvenile Justice Information Exchange)
  In the wake of critical news reports, Los Angeles school police and administrators have agreed to rethink enforcement tactics that have led to thousands of court citations yearly for young students in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods.
• Officials: Mentally ill children who don't get help can end up in criminal justice system (CrownPointCommunity.com)
  To child welfare advocates, the plights of families with mentally ill children demonstrate the state's failure to protect its most vulnerable children. Parents, judges, prosecutors, and other officials in Indiana say there is a multi-agency failure to provide mental health services to the children who need it most.
• Juvenile justice changes cutting costs (Herald Tribune Politics)
  Florida law enforcement and criminal justice officials say the use of civil citations for troubled youth, rather than a lock-up, is slashing costs, and giving kids a better chance of a turn-around, and they want the practice to become more widespread.

As Professor Dan Filler (Drexel) points out so well in a recent post on Miller v. Alabama on the Faculty Lounge, the decision’s direct effect on those currently serving juvenile life-without-parole (JLWOP) may be less dramatic than first imagined. Sentencing rehearings during which mitigating evidence is considered could lead merely to a reimposition of LWOP or a lengthy term of years sentence (40, 50, 60 years) that is the practical equivalent of LWOP. This is not to diminish the value of giving these 2100 prisoners an opportunity for review, reduction of their sentences, and the possibility of eventual release., although as Professor Filler also observed, much will depend there on the quality of defense counsel.
Instead, as I wrote two years ago in regard to Graham v. Florida, which struck down the practice of JLWOP for non-homicides, the ultimate impact of Miller will be seen in its precedential effect:

The juvenile population in Arizona continues to rise, with projections from the Arizona Department of Economic Security suggesting as much as a 25% increase in the next 10 years. These numbers are in line with what Arizona has seen over the past 5 years--a 10% increase in the juvenile population since 2006.
Despite this increase in overall juvenile population, fewer of Arizona’s youth are entering probation and being sent to adult court. Between fiscal year 2010 and 2011, Arizona sent 15% less juveniles to adult court while the overall juvenile population increased by just over 2%. For the visual learners out there, take a look at this graph:

In a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) today ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of murder are unconstitutional. Justice Elena Kegan wrote the majority opinion, which focused on the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Writing at the SCOTUSblog, Tejinder Singh elaborates on the decision:

The Court’s opinion brings together two strands of precedent to hold that a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment. The first strand holds that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits punishments that enact a mismatch between the culpability of a class of offenders and the severity of the penalty. Citing, among cases, Roper and Graham, the Court explains that juveniles have always been regarded as less culpable because the distinctive attributes of youth diminish the penological justifications for imposing the harshest penalties on juvenile offenders, even when they commit severe crimes. The second line of precedent holds that life without parole shares key characteristics with the death penalty, and thus raises similar Eighth Amendment concerns, most notably that defendants are entitled to individualized consideration when facing such a severe sanction.
Weaving these two lines of precedent together, the Court held that mandatory life without parole violates the Eighth Amendment. Such sentencing regimes, the court explained, “preclude a sentence from taking account of an offender’s age and the wealth of characteristics and circumstances attendant to it,” including “immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” as well as the juvenile’s “family and home environment,” and the circumstances of the offense, including “the extent of his participation in the conduct and the way familial and peer pressures may have affected him.” By eliding these key factors, mandatory life without parole “poses too great a risk of disproportionate punishment.”

Juvenile Justice Reform

• $15 million complex 
to open in August, avoids jail-like setting (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)  The new facility is a reflection of a collaborative effort among police, schools and the court that has made Clayton a national model for keeping kids out of jail.
• Illinois lawmakers raise high school drop out age (wrex.com) Belvidere Superintendent Michael Houselog says he wants to see kids in schools, and that the district is working to accomplish that goal. Guilford High School rising senior Max James says students will pick school over breaking the law.
• At-risk youths achieve in San Angelo, Texas (gosanangelo.com)  A $154,000 grant was awarded to the Tom Green County Juvenile Justice Department earlier this year to address the needs of children ages 6 through 13. The goal was to identify problems in school or the household before students ended up on juvenile probation.

Over in The Atlantic Cities, Richard R. Buery Jr. of the Children's Aid Society has a very compelling piece about the importance of community-based rehabilitation centers in working with troubled youth.  
He explains:

Engaging the local community is vital to the rehabilitation process. For young offenders, receiving supportive services in their home communities, where they can remain connected to families and local institutions, offers the most reliable path for ensuring that they do not grow up to become lifelong criminals. For most children convicted of minor infractions, effective services can be provided while they live at home, avoiding the costs and negative impact of institutionalization. Yet for the past few decades we have failed troubled youth--the vast majority of them black and Latino (84 percent of all admissions in 2009) - by shipping them to juvenile detention facilities hundreds of miles away from home, often for minor infractions.
Cutting these children off from their communities threatens their often fragile family relationships. Worse, young people don't learn to become responsible adults at these facilities--on the contrary, they are often neglected and face abuse. And despite how ineffective and unsafe these facilities are, the city and state spend millions of dollars a year to keep them running. Compared to the alternative, the waste is astonishing. Holding a youth offender in a secure facility costs around $260,000 a year; alternative, community-based treatment programs can cost about $20,000 per child per year, and have better results.

The Federal Interagency Forum on Disconnected Youth recently put out a request for information on ways to improve outcomes for disconnected youth. Comments and suggestions submitted by July 5 will inform the Administration's development of the "Performance Partnership Pilots" program.
From the request:

This request for information offers States, tribal governments, local entities, community-based and other non-profit organizations, private-sector partners, philanthropic organizations, faith-based organizations, researchers, and other interested individuals and entities the opportunity to provide recommendations on effective approaches for improving outcomes for disconnected youth by working across programs and systems that provide relevant services to them. For the purposes of this RFI, “to improve outcomes for disconnected youth” means to increase the rate at which young people ages 14 to 24 who are homeless, in foster care, involved in the juvenile justice system, or are neither employed nor enrolled in an educational institution achieve success in meeting educational, employment, and other key lifelong development goals.
The public input provided in response to this notice will inform the deliberations of the Interagency Forum on Disconnected Youth about determining the best use of the authority requested in the President's FY 2013 budget for the Performance Partnership Pilots. If legislation provides this authority, these pilots would create innovative and comprehensive reengagement strategies that encourage additional academic and non-academic supports and support multiple pathways to prepare disconnected youth for college and career success. Responses to the RFI will also inform how the Department of Education (ED), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Labor (DOL) could deploy other resources for disconnected youth that have been requested in the FY 2013 budget. In addition, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are interested in how their programsserving disconnected youth could contribute to Performance Partnership Pilots and other efforts to improve outcomes for this population.

The U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division's recent investigation of the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County Tennessee is a "must read" for youth justice advocates, especially as it relates to racial and ethnic disparities and the prosecution of youth in adult criminal court.

The DOJ's extensive investigation, which began nearly three years ago, found a failure to provide adequate due process protections for children before transferring them to adult criminal court and racial disparities in the treatment of African-American children. The report shows that an African-American child is twice as likely as a white child to be recommended for transfer to adult court. Of the 390 transfers to adult court in 2010 in Tennessee, approximately one half were from Shelby County, and all but two of the total children transferred were African-American.

“This report is a step toward our goal of improving the juvenile court, increasing the public’s confidence in the juvenile justice system, and maintaining public safety,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at a press conference when the report was released. “Upholding the constitutional rights of children appearing before the court is necessary to achieve these ends. The department will work with Memphis leadership to create a comprehensive blueprint that will create sustainable reforms in the juvenile justice system.”