Explainer: By the Numbers, Connecticut’s Experience With Juvenile Justice Reforms

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Photo by Justice Policy Institute
One of the greatest obstacles to reforming the juvenile justice system is the fear that “going soft” on juvenile crime will pose a threat to public safety, either by setting youthful marauders loose upon a defenseless public or by removing the supposed deterrent effect of harsh and mandatory punishments. A second obstacle is the belief that any alternative to the current system of punishment and confinement will cost more, a particularly unwelcome proposition at a time when many states and communities are experiencing severe budget shortfalls. A new report from the Justice Policy Institute, a national nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., and funded by the Tow Foundation, provides evidence contradicting the assumptions behind both objections to reform. “Juvenile Justice Reform in Connecticut: How Collaboration and Commitment Have Improved Public Safety and Outcomes for Youth” details a series of reforms in the Connecticut juvenile justice system since the 1990s, and the positive changes observed in the state since those reforms were instituted. In the report, author Richard Mendel states that the Connecticut juvenile justice system today is “far and away more successful, more humane, and more cost-effective than it was 10 or 20 years ago” and attributes these changes largely to the state’s willingness to re-invent its system, based on “the growing body of knowledge about youth development, adolescent brain research and delinquency.”

The most significant of these changes include ending the criminalization of status offenses (e.g., truancy, running away), ceasing to treat 16- and 17-year-old offenders as adults, building a system of community alternatives to confinement and sharply reducing the number of juveniles sentenced to confinement. Connecticut also developed programs to address the specific needs of girls in confinement, to address racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, and to reduce school-based arrests and out-of-school detentions.

Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission Report Advises Raising State Felony Age to 18

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The Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission(IJJC) recently released a report urging state policymakers to reclassify 17-year-olds as juveniles within the state’s legal system. While a 2010 General Assembly act shifted the state’s 17-year-old misdemeanants to juvenile court jurisdictions, young people of the same age who commit felonies are automatically transferred to Illinois’ adult system. “To promote a juvenile justice system focused on public safety, youth rehabilitation, fairness and fiscal responsibility,” the report reads, “Illinois should immediately adopt legislation expanding the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to include 17-year-olds charged with felonies.”

The IJJC suggested the state alter its policies and raise the adult court jurisdictional age to 18 for both misdemeanor and felony offenses. “It’s a really well-researched, well-documented and well-substantiated report,” said Commission member and Children and Family Justice Center Director Julie Biehl. “It would be a positive effect to bring those young people who are charged with felonies back to juvenile court jurisdiction.”

Not only must criminal courts in Illinois hear all felony cases involving 17-year-olds, according to the report, the state’s criminal courts remain “categorically unable” to take age into account in felony cases.

Analysis: The Numbers Behind the Dramatic Drop in Youth Incarceration

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Anyone concerned about the incarceration of young people in the nation will find both good news and bad news in “Reducing Youth Incarceration in the United States,” a new KIDS COUNT data snapshot from the Annie E Casey Foundation. The best news is that the youth incarceration rate in the nation dropped 37 percent from 1995 to 2010. In 1995, 107,637 young people were held in correctional facilities on a single reference day, while in 2010, this number had dropped to 70,792, the lowest in 35 years. The rate of youth in confinement dropped from 381 per 100,000 to 225 per 100,000 over the same period. Also good news is the fact that the youth incarceration rate fell in the District of Columbia and 44 of 50 states, and also fell in all of the five largest racial groups (non-Hispanic White, African American, Hispanic, American Indian, and Asian/Pacific Islander).

Report Credits Political Courage, Advocacy for Improving Connecticut’s Juvenile Justice System

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BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — On the third floor of a Romanesque church in Bridgeport there is a shabby office with unreliable electrical wiring and a collection of banged up folding chairs. It’s where Family ReEntry, a social service agency, operates its mentoring programs for at-risk youth. And it’s also where Tina Banas is about to supervise an experimental pilot program for children on probation connecting them to a network of services she could not imagine having existed when she started working as a social worker in the state 30 years ago. “There were a lot of frustrating times” she said, looking back on her career.

Number of Kids Behind Bars Reaches 35-Year Low

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There were fewer kids behind bars in 2010 than there have been in 35 years, demonstrating what one foundation called a “sea change” in American attitudes toward juvenile justice, according to a trio of new reports out today based on U.S. Census data. Although the United States still locks up young people at a far higher rate any other industrialized nation, that number has been steadily falling over the past decade and reached its lowest point in 35 years in 2010, the most recent year data is available, according to “Reducing Youth Incarceration in the United States,” a KIDS COUNT data snapshot released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Most of these changes have taken place idiosyncratically in individual states and counties, but collectively, in the aggregate, they represent an extraordinary trend that we haven’t seen in the U.S.,” said Bart Lubow, who directs the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s program for high-risk youth and who has worked in criminal justice for nearly 40 years. “I don’t know if we’ve ever seen it.”

More and more jurisdictions are taking on innovative approaches to reducing juvenile delinquency and relying less on punitive responses to juvenile crime, resulting in cost savings for the public and providing hope for better outcomes for youth, the Foundation’s report said. The KIDS COUNT report came out in conjunction with a pair of reports by the Justice Policy Institute, which detailed youth incarceration declines in specific states and outlined the lessons learned from reforms in those states’ juvenile justice systems.

Reducing the confinement of young people is usually couched in terms of reducing government costs, but it’s probably just one factor in the shift that is taking place socially and politically across the country, Lubow said in an interview with the JJIE.

Back Home in South Carolina, Cornell Law Professors Fight Legal Battle for Juvenile Lifers

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NEW YORK -- Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June in the Miller v. Alabama case, John Blume, a professor at Cornell Law School, started worrying about his home state of South Carolina. Blume knew the Miller decision -- which ruled that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment -- would create a great need for legal work in South Carolina. The legal limbo created by the Miller decision is not unique to South Carolina, however. Advocates for juvenile sentencing reform estimate there are 2,500 prisoners in nearly 30 states across the country who are serving life sentences without parole, including some 2,100 who were given mandatory sentences. In fact, other states across the country contending with the same confusion have more inmates than the 36 Blume and his team found in need of new remedies to meet the standards of the Miller decision.

Georgetown’s LEAD Conference focuses on Juvenile Justice

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A conference this week at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. focused on the work of the school’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR). The Leadership, Evidence, Analysis, Debate or LEAD Conference, put on by the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, brought together representatives of various stakeholder groups, including activists, judges, experts, students and researchers. The inaugural conference, titled Positive Outcomes for At–Risk Children and Youth: Improving Lives Through Practice and System Reform, centered around the work of the CJJR and featured a number of speakers in the filed. Sonja Sohn, an actress best known for her role in HBO’s The Wire was the opening speaker. Sohn started Rewired for Change, a nonprofit focused on assisting underserved youth and their communities, in 2008 after coming into contact with impoverished communities through her television work.

White House Taps Juvenile Justice Advocates for Expertise on Gun Violence

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Representatives from a group of more than 300 juvenile justice and delinquency prevention organizations at the national, state and local level have met with White House staff and Congressional minority leaders at their invitation in recent weeks to provide evidence-based expertise on ways to reduce gun violence in the country, a coalition leader said. As tasked by President Barack Obama in the wake of mass shootings at an elementary school last month, Vice-President Joe Biden and his staff have spent the last few weeks meeting with gun-control advocates, pro-gun rights groups and dozens of concerned organizations in preparation for the release of the vice-president’s recommendations for the prevention of gun violence. According to Politico, Biden indicated today that the president could use an executive order to act on some of his recommendations, which are expected to be made public next week. On Jan. 4, representatives from the National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition and other advocates met with aides to the president and vice-president, including Tonya Robinson, a special assistant to the President on the White House Domestic Policy Council; Evan Ryan, an assistant to Biden; and Mary Lou Leary, the acting director of the Office of Justice Programs, said Nancy Gannon Hornberger, a coalition leader who was present at the meeting.

Report Finds That Reasonable Video Visitation Policies in Prisons Benefit Children

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The jail in Washington, D.C., recently began to allow family members to visit inmates by video conference. The problem is, in-person meetings are no longer permitted. The only way families can see each other now is by sitting in front of a computer screen several blocks apart. Correctional facilities in more than 20 states currently have or plan to have video technology in place, according to a report released by the research and advocacy organization The Sentencing Project. Video technology’s popularity in facilities is driven by a desire to cut staff costs, to reduce security risks created by in-person visits, and in some cases, to raise revenue.