SHOWCASE
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12 | NOV/DEC 2011
JUVENILE JUSTICE REFORMS: CROSS YOUR FINGERS THAT THEY LAST
by Irene Sullivan, JD
In the Tampa Bay area, across Florida and throughout the nation, something strange and exciting is happening in world of juvenile justice.
Crime is down among juveniles, youth correctional facilities are being closed, schools have backed off the insanity of “zero tolerance,” and more and more young people are able to get through their teenage years without acquiring an arrest record. Soon, I hope, we’ll be able to see a corresponding reduction in the adult prison population, as fewer young people enter the “school to prison pipeline.”
I served nine wonderful years as a juvenile judge in Pinellas County, retiring at the end of 2010. When I read about these recent trends and see the favorable statistics, I experience a myriad of emotions: hope, skepticism, worry, satisfaction, gratitude and fear that the pendulum will swing the other way. After all, we are still the incarceration nation of the Western world, with over one percent of our population, and 1 million teenagers, locked up behind bars every night. What is causing this favorable turn of events?
Many clichés come to mind: Strange bedfellows, the “get tough on kids” right, and the more liberal “give them another chance” left, finally coming together to be “smart on kids” instead. Chicken or egg? Are we closing residential facilities for youth because juvenile delinquency is down, or is juvenile delinquency down because we are closing residential facilities that didn’t work, created recidivism and drained scarce dollars better spent in the communities? You can’t fix the kid until you fix the family. Have we finally realized that family problems—abuse, neglect, generational crime, violence or poverty—create the delinquent child, so that we’re putting more services into the front end to avoid expensive incarceration on the back end?
LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT THE GOOD NEWS—JUVENILE CRIME IS DOWN—ON A LOCAL, STATE AND NATIONAL LEVEL: Pinellas County: In April 2009 we kicked off our Juvenile Arrest Avoidance Project, with a goal of keeping first time misdemeanants from having an arrest record for typical misdemeanor crimes, such as petty theft, disorderly conduct, simple battery or possession
of a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, but (and this is extremely important) assuring that the youth completed the counseling or program that addressed the crime.
Prior to this, we spent months studying the successful Civil Citation program begun by Wansley Walters, now Secretary of Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice, but then the director of the Juvenile Services Division in Miami-Dade County. Ms. Walters had substantially reduced the number of youth arrested, while providing services, lowering recidivism and substantially cutting the costs of overnight detention. We then took an inventory of all the various prevention and diversion programs offered by law enforcement, the court, the state attorney’s office and various agencies in Pinellas County. We were rich in resources, but slow and ineffective in directing them to the individual youth committing a first time misdemeanor crime.
So we got organized; we worked with the many law enforcement agencies in Pinellas County, the courts and the Clerk of Court and produced a program we called the Juvenile Arrest Avoidance Project (JAAP). Instead of an arrest, the youth is brought to the juvenile assessment center to be assessed for services, an arrest complaint is held “in escrow,” and if the juvenile and family complete the ordered services, no arrest is filed, no prosecution occurs. This is extremely important as under Florida law, juvenile arrest records are a public record and can be purchased from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Often, an arrest record affects the juvenile’s ability to get a job, go into the military, obtain a scholarship or student loan.
WE ASKED OURSELVES: Except in matters of public safety, what does an arrest do? Believe me, we upheld our obligation to protect the public and if robbery, burglary, carjacking or felony drug possession occurred, we didn’t hesitate to arrest and lock up the youth. Our focus in avoiding an arrest was on first time misdemeanants, often arrested for misbehavior rather than a crime.
I’m proud to state that 2 ½ years later we have saved over 2,500 kids in Pinellas County from having an arrest record, with about a 90% completion rate for the services ordered, and less than a 10% recidivism rate. Those are statistics to be very proud of, and it took the work of many law enforcement, court and clerk of court personnel to make that happen.
STATE OF FLORIDA: Juvenile delinquency in Florida fell by 10 percent from last year, the state Department of Juvenile Justice reported at the end of August. Referrals to the agency from schools are down 11 percent and the number of youth waiting in detention centers for placement in a residential facility is the lowest in DJJ’s history. (These figures are for a fiscal year beginning July 1, 2010 and ending June 30, 2011.)
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