Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/diversion/)
After decades of neglect, the youth justice field is awakening to the importance of diversion in lieu of arrest and formal court processing for many or most youth accused of delinquent behavior.
Despite a large drop in youth arrests, probation caseloads and confinement of young people in detention centers and youth prisons over the past 20 years, the punitive mindset in our justice system remains stuck in place. We’re spinning our wheels when court is our primary response to youth misbehavior.
Citing, among others, the case of a Black boy who first was incarcerated, at 14, for stealing candy and, at 16, died at a restrictive wilderness camp where he was sent for violating curfew and other parole violations, this new report from The Sentencing Project suggests that U.S. courts divert comparatively fewer minority youth into community-based service or other rehabilitation. And diversion, overall, is sought less often than it should be.
The day they came face-to-face with the teen who accidentally shot and killed their son, Brad and Meagan Hulett confirmed, in their minds, that prison was the last place the shooter should end up.
A stolen bike. A schoolyard tussle complete with shiners. A neighbor’s garage door graffitied. These seemingly minor incidents can start a young person down the road to delinquency. And once down that road, some young people will find themselves in the juvenile justice system.
The past couple of years have been some of the deadliest for many major U.S. cities. Murder rates have spiked and gun sales have surged.
We want the violence to stop. However, our chosen means of addressing violence prevention are shaped by who's leading that conversation. Too often, the results of those discussions have tended to be punitive in nature, resulting in over-policing and mass incarceration.
Recent surges in homicides and shootings have prompted some who are opposed to juvenile justice reforms to call for a return to tough-on-crime policies. Those approaches did not make the public safer. They did result in needlessly high incarceration rates for young people, particularly for Black and brown youth. Now is not the time to abandon smart-on-crime justice reforms of the last 20 years as part of yet another race to prove who can be the toughest. We should, instead, be doubling down on those smart reforms.
Juvenile offenders participating in a 30-year-old project diverting youth from detention to community-based programs were less likely to cycle back into incarceration than those not enrolled in such projects, according to an evaluation recently released by the San Francisco organization launching that pioneering program.
Juvenile justice reforms, including the growing use of youth diversion programs that offer alternatives to youth arrest and incarceration, have helped contribute to a substantial decrease in the number of young people who are involved in the justice system in recent years. Despite this overall decrease, such reforms have also corresponded with a troubling increase in the juvenile justice system’s inequitable burden on youth of color and Black youth in particular.
Often differing from one another in their theoretical framework, structure and implementation, the constellation of justice reform strategies referred to as youth diversion vary widely in their ability to improve outcomes for participating youth or meaningfully reduce justice system involvement. When implemented well, with a clear theory of change grounded in youth development, collaborative design and oversight and data-driven protections against widening the net of justice system involvement, youth diversion can be an important tool for equity, justice and overall public health. When implemented poorly, however, youth diversion efforts are in danger of unintentionally deepening inequity. Before turning to strategies and tools that help promote equity in youth diversion, let’s consider two hypothetical youth diversion programs: Program A, designed with equity in mind as an explicit priority that therefore develops a social-ecological and social justice framework, and Program B, designed based on a solely individual-level theory of change.
In Program B, well-meaning program staff may make decisions based on assumptions that their program is beneficial for any young person and may change or grow reactively — setting eligibility guidelines, program requirements or reporting requirements based only on what particular partners are comfortable with at the time, for example, or expanding geographically only where requested.
Admissions to juvenile detention facilities are down since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that fewer youth are being placed in secure out-of-home centers. The costs to maintain these facilities remain high, however.
Moving forward, states should consider a critical review of which detention centers to keep open. Closing these facilities will not diminish public safety, can help young people stay healthy and can save taxpayer dollars –– which will be badly needed to rebuild our damaged economy. While health care and social distance concerns were the catalyst for detaining fewer youth, the benefits of using detention sparingly are being demonstrated across the country.
A number of states are evaluating how to decrease the number of youths who are detained in juvenile justice facilities. New York and Utah, for instance, are no longer using detention as a punishment for young people who broke a rule outlined as part of their community supervision, often called a "technical violation."