Multnomah County, Ore., is forming a task force to assess the county juvenile justice system.
The action came after a recent report criticized the system, based on the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The report was written by John Foote, district attorney of Clackamas County, Ore., and Charles French, a retired deputy D.A. from Multnomah County.
A foundation official reacted in the op-ed below.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
Nate Balis, director, Juvenile Justice Strategy Group.
In recent months, some voices have emerged to suggest that Multnomah County and Oregon return to the old days of juvenile justice, when officials were locking up a greater number of young people who got into trouble. But before we travel too far down memory lane with fuzzy recollections, let's examine what things were really like before Multnomah County reformed its system.
In 1992, young people were detained arbitrarily in an overcrowded and dangerous facility, with no screening instrument to determine which were dangerous and which simply made us angry. There were no meaningful alternatives to incarceration. The system had no timely, accurate data to assess itself, and it was largely unaccountable for results.
Things were so bad that a federal lawsuit was filed against Multnomah County, pinpointing overcrowding and unsafe conditions in the local detention center. The suit resulted in a consent decree and highlighted flaws in a system that was failing to meet fundamental obligations to children.
Fortunately for Multnomah County, some forward-thinking leaders, including judges, prosecutors and probation, took on the challenge 22 years ago and dedicated themselves to improving juvenile detention. Their aim: Make sure that detention was used only when kids posed substantial public safety risks or were unlikely to appear in court. The county decided to participate in the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), an effort launched nationally by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and co-chaired locally by then-Oregonian publisher Fred Stickel and then-county board chair Gladys McCoy. The initiative resulted in numerous changes that were desperately needed.
Among the improvements: a screening instrument that measures whether children threatened public safety was developed to guide admission decisions to ensure that young people who didn't need to be locked up were not detained; a structured method was adopted to guide probation violation responses; new alternatives to detention were developed, including specialized foster care and a home detention program; and new practices expedited cases so children did not languish behind bars before appearing in court.
In addition, a pre-court interagency meeting was implemented so system officials could review detained cases scheduled for a court appearance to determine what circumstances might facilitate release. These meetings resulted in high levels of agreement among all parties, including prosecutors, enabling them to recommend release plans that were then embraced by the court.
In short, the arbitrariness and guesswork of the old days were replaced by science, research and collaboration that have improved the administration of juvenile justice and rightly distinguished Multnomah County as a national learning laboratory for places facing similar challenges.
The former system put young people arrested for nonviolent crimes in danger of being victimized or hardened as criminals. It also was ineffective, wasteful and obsolete. In contrast, the county currently focuses greater attention on serving high-risk young people with the worst odds of successful transitions to adulthood. On an aggregate level, Multnomah County has reduced detentions significantly since the outset of JDAI, and the low rates of detention have been accompanied by dramatic improvements in public safety.
The Casey Foundation is just one part of a local and national bipartisan movement that recognizes the need for a research-based approach to working with young people who break the law. A groundswell of research and national studies support the use of many of the reforms JDAI has been on the frontlines of initiating. This is embodied perhaps most significantly in the National Academy of Sciences report Reforming Juvenile Justice, which endorses reforms based on a scientific understanding of adolescent development and promotes rehabilitation and public safety.
The plethora of research that suggests confinement be used only as a last resort has been heralded by politicians on both sides of the aisles, including U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., who propose measures to prevent children from going into the adult criminal justice system and sealing or expunging records of children who commit nonviolent crimes, and from Right on Crime, a de-incarceration movement of conservative leaders.
The voices that yearn for the past may have forgotten the scenarios of young people routinely stuffed in inhumane conditions that did more harm than good. Multnomah County and hundreds of other JDAI communities across the country deserve credit for using a research-based approach that is putting children on the right track.
Nate Balis is director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.