Youth prisons don't reform, they damage: Column
Community-based alternatives offer juveniles a better chance of making it on the outside.
On any given day, more than 50,000 young offenders are locked away from their families in juvenile detention facilities.
We expect these kids, most of whom have few positive relationships with adults or meaningful connections to education or jobs, to emerge equipped for success.
Instead, recidivism rates (which vary from state to state) range from nearly 50% to 75% within three years of release for juvenile offenders in many areas of the country. Across America, we need a watershed shift in youth justice that protects public safety and is more informed by what works.
Cosmetic improvements aren't enough
The most viable solution is to close youth prisons and replace them with a network of community-based alternatives and smaller facilities closer to where young people involved in these programs live. Early adopters include large states such as Texas and California — which have closed eight youth prisons each — as well as Missouri, Virginia and Ohio. Those states, along with localities such as New York City, are trying alternative approaches and showing us the way to more developmentally appropriate, more humane and more community-based care. Campaigns are underway from Kansas to Connecticut to shut down notorious youth prisons and support a new model of justice in their states.
America’s youth prisons are based on the adult correctional model of incarceration: control and coercion with a few reform programs sprinkled in. Sometimes the names attempt to camouflage the nature of the facility, but whether they are called “training schools” or “youth centers,” nearly all these facilities are prisons and almost every state has at least one.
Decades of research and experience prove these youth prisons do more harm than good. Whether weighed on a scale of public dollars, community safety or young people’s futures, youth prisons are damaging the very people they are supposed to help and have been for generations. Their consistent failure — along with stubborn resistance to transformation — argues for replacement, rather than temporary, cosmetic improvements.
Give judges more options
To reorient the system, we need to take four steps — reduce, reform, replace and reinvest.
We can safely reduce the pipeline into youth prisons by at least half by limiting intake to those who have committed serious offenses and pose clear risks to public safety. In 2013, only about a third of young offenders (37%) had committed violations against other people. The majority of offenses were non-violent ones, including drug and status offenses and property violations, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This is doable. Places such as New York City have significantly reduced incarceration rates without increasing crime. It reduced the number of youth it confined and transferred nearly all city youth from distant, upstate facilities to smaller, local facilities. Youth incarceration in the city fell by 53%, and youth arrests declined by half, officials said. The state of Texas achieved similar results.
We can and must reform the culture of our juvenile justice systems. This means expanding community-based programs that have proved to work, which gives judges better options for matching the juvenile with the appropriate degree of guidance and supervision.
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When secure confinement is necessary, we should replace juvenile facilities with much smaller programs that are close to the juvenile's community and that focus on turning lives around. These places must have something invisible but powerful at their core: positive connections to the families of youth as well as staff; education, and a culture that considers these relationships central to the success of each young person.
Implementing the first three strategies — reduce, reform, replace — makes the fourth “r” possible: reinvest. As systems use more effective but less costly approaches, the dollars saved can be invested in young people and families. The American public supports this kind of reinvestment. In a national poll commissioned by Youth First, 83% of Americans surveyed supported investments in alternatives to juvenile detention, including job training and education.
Seldom in American policy are incentives and imperatives aligned so closely. Youth development, fiscal prudence and community safety would be far better served if states closed every last youth prison and replaced these factories of failure with pathways to success.
Patrick McCarthy is president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Vincent Schiraldi is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. They co-authored the paper “The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model.”