Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, is revamping its approach to juvenile justice, launching a new Department of Youth Development, which will take a more supportive and less punitive approach.
The agency debuted on July 1 and aims to divert teenagers from the justice system to social services.
Vincent Holmes, the Department’s acting director, said more children with petty crimes will bypass the courts, incarceration and probation.
“Instead, you’re going to be referred to a community organization that understands the dynamics and culture of your community,” Holmes explained. “This agency is going to engage with you and your family unit, to do an assessment and figure out exactly what kinds of services you might need, what kind of care plan needs to be created for you.”
Young people can be offered counseling or make amends through a restorative justice program. The county’s previous diversion programs operated through a patchwork of agreements with local police departments, serving just 700 youths last year, according to Holmes. But he pointed out that about 85 percent of youth arrested in Los Angeles are charged with crimes, making them eligible for diversion programs; approximately 6,500 per year as of 2018.
Holmes noted that the first thing to do was to expand the diversion program to the entire county. Part of the goal is to reduce the number of young people of color caught up in the juvenile justice system.
“We think this is definitely a way to address the patchwork and disproportionate representation that we see of black and brown youth in our justice system,” Holmes argued.
A 2021 study by the Sentencing Project found that young Latinos were 28% more likely than their white peers to be detained or committed to juvenile facilities, which is a big improvement from 2021, when young Latinos were incarcerated 80% more often than young whites.
get more stories like this via email
Reducing the number of young people involved in the criminal justice system means working on the root causes that can lead them there. A youth justice advocacy group will host a series of events this week to address the issue.
The Connecticut Justice Alliance’s #InvestInMeCT campaign was first launched in June 2020 after much discussion about the state’s lack of investment in youth, especially in communities of color.
Christina Quaranta, executive director of the Alliance, said the campaign relaunch comes at an important time, after a bill became law last month aimed at tackling a perceived wave of youth crime.
“We don’t pay attention to the fact that we are in a pandemic and before March 2020, black and brown communities were ceded, intentionally, for many years,” Quaranta claimed. “The importance of addressing the root issues and investing time and money, resources, love and care, is more important now than ever.”
As part of the week of events, the Justice Alliance updated its report from two years ago on ending the criminalization of young people. Quaranta said it includes new conversations with members of the community that the Justice Alliance had during its “visioning sessions.”
The new state law increases penalties for some serious crimes, with the maximum sentence for minors being extended to five years. It also increases the length of time a young person can be detained pending a judge’s decision.
Quaranta explained that she hopes the events can spark more discussion about the root causes of crime, such as mental health and trauma, in public policy.
“For many years, Connecticut made many different changes to the legal system without necessarily hearing from those who had actually gone through the system,” Quaranta noted. “Hearing what people have to say about how they have been affected by the justice system will inform the decisions lawmakers make.”
Alliance Visioning Sessions are held Tuesday through Thursday, in New Haven, Norwalk and Waterbury. They will discuss with residents what solutions are working in their communities to support youth and find out what resources are needed. The week of events culminates Friday with a celebration in Bridgeport.
get more stories like this via email
From Fox News to the New York Times, media coverage in recent years has sounded the alarm about an alleged increase in violent crime among children. However, a new report reveals that these claims are either false or grossly exaggerated.
Research by The Sentencing Project finds that rates of youth violent crime, in categories ranging from murder to robbery, declined nationwide from 2019 to 2020. This may have long-term repercussions.
“Negative stereotypes about young people, gaps in services and structural racism underpin the youth-related policy and criminal justice system we have today,” she said, “at the level nationally and in Wisconsin”.
To keep children out of the system, the report’s authors propose diverting youth accused of crimes to restorative justice programs, placing more counselors in schools instead of the police, and providing positive development programs for children. that have gone through the system.
With the imminent closure of Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons, McCullough said she believes the time has come to start a new chapter in Wisconsin’s youth correctional system. However, she added, alternative programs are facing significant staffing shortages, a problem she said could be addressed in part with new investments from lawmakers.
“Public health models for violence prevention work,” she said, “but they also need to be funded and supported at the same level as our corrections system in order to see meaningful change.”
According to data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, arrests of minors in Wisconsin have dropped about 70% from 2011 to 2020. Richard Mendel, who authored the report as a senior researcher for The Sentencing Project report, said national child and teen crime rates have been declining for years.
“Over the past 20 years, the share of arrests of children under 18 has more than halved and continues to decline,” he said. “A lot of this is pandemic-related. The share of crime committed by children has gone down – and despite that, we see this narrative of ‘out of control’ youth crime.”
The Sentencing Project report only includes data up to 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are publicly available, and its authors acknowledged that future data may reveal that youth crime rates have increased. since then. However, they noted that this would be understandable, given the effects of the pandemic on children’s mental health, and said they believe this should not be used as justification to push for more juvenile justice policies. punitive.
Disclosure: The Annie E Casey Foundation contributes to our fund for reporting on children’s issues, criminal justice, early childhood education, education, juvenile justice, welfare reform. If you would like to help support news in the public interest, click here.
get more stories like this via email
New research has found that reports of soaring youth crime are not only unfounded but also fueling calls for tougher sentencing.
Data from the Sentencing Project showed that the share of crime in the United States committed by young people has more than halved over the past two decades. It also fell across all major offense types in 2020.
Richard Mendel, senior researcher for The Sentencing Project and author of the report, said given the stress young people have faced over the past two years, he wouldn’t be surprised if future data showed an increase in crime juvenile in the age of the pandemic. But he argued that a temporary increase should not be used to justify a return to “resilient” approaches.
“Now is not the time to panic about youth crime,” Mendel explained. “Especially if this panic is going to cause us to embrace solutions that we know the evidence shows don’t work.”
According to the report, juvenile detention and transfers to adult court can worsen outcomes for young people. Instead, Mendel pushed for reforms to help steer young people away from delinquency, including reducing reliance on youth confinement and investing more in social and mental health supports in schools and communities.
Mendel pointed to Ohio as a national model for reducing youth incarceration through RECLAIM Ohio, which provides financial incentives to counties to divert youth from Ohio Department of Youth Services institutions to programs community.
“The research on this is overwhelmingly positive that children do much better,” Mendel reported. “In terms of re-arrest, in terms of re-incarceration, in community programs than in incarceration. And yet this program has been attacked.”
A commission is reviewing the past three years of the program after learning that the suspect in the shooting death of a Cleveland police officer was on probation in juvenile court. The youth services population has grown from a peak of more than 2,600 in May 1992 to 375 in December 2020, which officials attribute to the success of RECLAIM Ohio.
Meanwhile, Cuyahoga and Columbus County officials have reported a recent increase in stolen cars and carjackings among young minors. But Mendel thinks media coverage of youth crime is often sensational and lacks critical context.
“There’s a lot of political expediency being applied,” Mendel observed. “It’s important to be skeptical, to seek context and look at historical data. Is it really true?”
The report notes that in the absence of published federal data on carjackings, increases in a number of cities do not necessarily indicate a national trend.
get more stories like this via email
