Original LinkLosing juvenile jails aids justice, some sayAlternatives sought for young offendersTimes-Picauyne
April 08, 2007
By Katy Reckdahl, Staff writer
Every weekday morning before Katrina, a string of white vans would stop behind Orleans Parish Juvenile Court and unload dozens of youths in handcuffs.
Today, those youths barely fill a car, much less a van. Sometimes there's one lone child, escorted into court.
In the view of critics of the parish's long-standing approach to juvenile justice, that's a sign of reform -- reform, kick-started by Katrina.
Before the storm, those handcuffed youths, age 10 to 16, came to Juvenile Court from two locked detention centers, city-run facilities that mainly held arrestees awaiting trial. The Youth Study Center on Milton Street in the Gentilly area held up to 82. Another 50 were housed in the Conchetta Youth Center at Orleans Parish Prison.
The floods that followed Katrina wiped out both detention facilities in their entirety -- all 132 beds.
The crisis was viewed as an opportunity, not only by civilian youth advocates but by many police who had come to see juvenile lockup as a breeding ground as likely to turn delinquents into hardened criminals as to scare them back onto the straight and narrow.
In search of an alternative, Juvenile Court judges began meeting with the New Orleans Police Department, local agencies that serve youths, and the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national nonprofit that has sponsored numerous community renewal efforts in New Orleans.
The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, or JDAI, is also working with Jefferson Parish, but that parish did not lose bed capacity during Katrina and so far detention rates at the Rivarde Juvenile Detention Center in Harvey remain steady. On average, 39 juveniles are housed in the 50-bed facility on any given day.
In Orleans, the consortium of officials and youth advocates decided against rebuilding the juvenile jails, seeing them as part of a flawed system that relied too heavily on detention and offered few alternative programs.
Under the new system, violent offenders are still detained, but most arrested children are released to their parents and ordered to appear in court at a later date.
Among law-and-order types, there was reason to wonder if delinquent juveniles wouldn't scoff at the new arrangement and fail to show up for their court date, a concern heightened by the resurgence of street killings as the city regained population. But so far the change has gone smoothly, officials said.
Nonviolent offenders are kept under supervision through electronic monitoring and surprise drop-in visits by court staff -- at a cost that is less than a 10th the cost of detention, according to juvenile court officials. Typically, about two-thirds of the juveniles arrested are accused of a nonviolent offense, mostly petty crimes, officials said.
Of course, the uptick in murders has thrown every aspect of law enforcement under harsh review, including the new regimen for handling delinquent juveniles. The national media has played up the rash of violence. "Frightened citizens now see their city as a stalking ground, roamed with impunity by teenagers with handguns -- an image that may not be far off the mark, experts here say," the New York Times reported in a recent story about New Orleans.
In fact, those under 18 made up only 10 percent of last year's 161 victims and 15 percent of those arrested in murders. And those under the purview of the Juvenile Court, which ends at age 17, were far fewer still -- 2 percent of alleged gunmen and 6 percent of victims, about the same percentages as among people in their 50s.
"We're always quick to blame kids for violence," said Bart Lubow, who heads JDAI, "but the data shows that kids are not driving this violence."
New approach
New Orleans is not alone in pursuing the revised approach to juvenile detention. During the past 15 years, JDAI has helped to implement juvenile-detention reform in 75 jurisdictions, from big cities such as Chicago to smaller ones such as Portland, Ore., which reduced its locked detention by 65 percent without a corresponding rise in juvenile crime. An effort in Lake Charles has resulted in a substantial reduction in juvenile detention.
Still, changes can easily be derailed. One high-profile juvenile crime can prompt calls for zero tolerance of delinquent teenagers. The political will for reform can also disappear, as many say it did in New York City when Rudy Giuliani, now a presidential contender, took office as mayor. In other cities, reform stalled when key stakeholders -- judges, law enforcement and youth agencies -- disagreed.
Reform in Orleans Parish is still very new and very fragile, experts say. "So far, no one is saying, 'This is ridiculous, this is stupid; we're not going to do it,' " said James Bell, a leading figure in national juvenile justice reform and a consultant to JDAI's effort in Louisiana. "But does New Orleans have the will to stay the course? We'll see."
Whatever the long-term effect of the alternative, no one seems to miss the 100-plus detention beds washed away by Katrina. Even with the reduced capacity, there's no waiting list: On average, out of the 20 available beds, only 14 are filled.
That wasn't the case in the months immediately after the storm. As people -- and crime -- returned to New Orleans, the city rented about a dozen juvenile beds in Harahan and at the state's Bridge City youth facility. The rented beds were quickly filled.
Then, in July 2006, the city reopened 12 beds at the Youth Study Center, and those beds filled immediately as well.
Orleans Parish Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell, not related to James Bell, put a temporary stop to it and ordered review of the willy-nilly return to detention. "Let's see who's using these beds," he recalled saying.
New Orleans, like other cities, had filled most of its juvenile beds with youths arrested for probation violation or minor first offenses: disturbing the peace, loitering, running away from home, shoplifting, playing basketball in the schoolyard.
"If we had the bed, the assumption was it needed to be used," Bell said. His conclusions matched what JDAI has found nationally: Generally, if there are beds available, they'll be filled.
So, last summer, the judges, officers, advocates and social workers sat down and pounded out their new approach. Truants would no longer be held in detention but would instead be closely monitored with ankle bracelets and court personnel. The group also looked at other arrests and determined whether detention was warranted.
Driven initially by the sheer lack of space, implementation of the new guidelines had the effect of prompting officials at each step of the process to review the reasons behind arrests and court appearances.
Arrested youths are now taken to NOPD's juvenile division intake, where a screener assesses the child's situation to determine whether detention is necessary. If not, the child is released to parents or guardians.
Guided by the new philosophy, arrests have plummeted, from about 5,000 in the eight months of 2005 before Katrina to 843 during all of 2006. Fresh court cases have also declined, from 1,500 in pre-Katrina 2005 to 347 during 2006.
Levels of risk
Detention was never meant to be punitive. As with adults, juveniles are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven guilty in court. But in fact, before the hurricane, detention was often used as a way of punishing children. They would spend a night in detention for making an adult mad: sassing a parent or cop, missing a court appearance, said Bell, Juvenile Court's chief judge.
"We had acknowledged this pre-Katrina," Bell said. "But we weren't able to pull together reform."
Under the new dispensation, youths are automatically detained if they're arrested for committing a crime against a person, carrying a handgun or dealing drugs. Those arrested for lesser charges such as possession of marijuana -- the most common offense, according to NOPD statistics -- are held only if they have a lengthy criminal history or another cause for concern, such as strife in the home.
Youths are assigned a color, based on the risk they pose. Those in the white category have been charged with misdemeanor offenses such as criminal trespass, skateboarding in the schoolyard after hours, or tap-dancing for tips on French Quarter sidewalks. Juveniles in the gray category are considered medium risk. If they're "very gray," they're assigned a youth advocate, who visits randomly between three and five times each day. Those in the black category are deemed a risk to public safety, based on the charge or their past arrests. All assessments are then conveyed to the on-duty Juvenile Court judge, who gets a call from police before any child is detained.
Under the JDAI process, these arrests and screenings all must be recorded and analyzed. Using that data, officials can identify patterns of delinquent behavior and also track the effectiveness of their post-arrest programming.
"Orleans, like most jurisdictions, doesn't run its system on data," said consultant James Bell, who said that hunches and personal judgment are no substitute for hard numbers. Bell is working on youth detention issues in Caddo, Calcasieu and East Baton Rouge parishes, as well as in Orleans and Jefferson.
Until recently, Orleans Parish Juvenile Court lacked ankle bracelets and adequate programming. When trying to figure out how to handle a delinquent child, judges often had to ask, "What do we have?"
But, compared with detention, monitoring is money-saving, Bell said. Detaining a child costs the city between $130 and $150 a day. Attaching an electronic monitor to his ankle is $12 a day, tracking him through a cell-phone monitor is about $4 a day. Assigning a youth advocate runs between $20 and $50 a day, according to Bell.
There's been no overall assessment to determine savings. "But there's no doubt we're using money more wisely," Bell said.
Gang of children
The 10-year-old who turned up in Bell's court was small, and so young that he still sticks in the judge's memory, even years later. "He didn't know his birth date, his address, couldn't spell his name," Bell said. But he'd gotten an education -- the wrong kind.
While the 10-year-old was being held in a detention center for breaking a window, he had met up with an older boy, a 12-year-old nicknamed Soulja Black. "The two bonded," Bell said.
That's not uncommon, said Sgt. Melvin Gilbert, a supervisor in NOPD's juvenile division who has worked with at-risk youths for 14 of the 23 years he's worn a badge. "When we're transporting kids from detention to court, I hear kids from different neighborhoods saying, 'When you get out, call me at such and such a number,' " Gilbert said.
Bell has seen the same thing. Soon after the 10-year-old was released, Bell said, he hooked up with his new friend, this time in Central City, where Soulja Black ran a ring of youngsters, most of them under 12 years old. Under Soulja Black's direction, this ring of pint-sized criminals stole cars, broke car windows, smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine.
Juvenile crime in the area increased dramatically, then plummeted once all members of the group were apprehended, Bell said.
The 10-year-old ended up in Bell's courtroom for stealing a car, driving it into a house and evading police.
The case provided Bell with a textbook example of the way in which early detention can push a child toward heavier involvement in crime -- "peer contagion," the experts call it. Bell found programs to address the child's low skill levels and, upon doing a study of his home life, placed him with his biological father. Within nine months, the boy showed marked improvement; he learned to read and write and now said, "Yes, sir" or "Yes, ma'am" to adults, Bell said. Two years later, he hasn't had a subsequent brush with Juvenile Court.
The power of "peer contagion" is borne out in a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute. The study found that 70 percent of detained youth were re-arrested or returned to detention within one year of release. "If we unnecessarily detain younger and less-experienced offenders, we're exposing them to other juvenile offenders who are fully engaged in criminal life," Bell said.
Most youths are arrested only once. The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that 54 percent of males and 73 percent of females who are arrested will never again have contact with the juvenile justice system.
Awareness of statistics like those has taught many police officers to strive for a more restrained response when dealing with a first-time juvenile offender. "We all know that crime is a symptom of something bigger -- education, the economy, the kids' situation at home," Gilbert said. "The question is, 'How are you helping that child to break that cycle by putting him in jail?' "
Not all officers support eliminating detention for juvenile offenders. "You have to understand, when you're dealing with police officers, they're thinking, 'I put bad people in jail,' " Gilbert said. So to release someone who just committed a crime doesn't make sense to them.
From Gilbert's experience, officers who spend time among juvenile offenders become the movement's biggest supporters. "They'll say, 'It's about time. Locking them up did nothing,' " Gibson said.
Gilbert shrugs. After all, he said, if the alternative system doesn't work, they can always go back the system they had. "But I tell people, 'If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always gotten.' "
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Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3300.
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