Louisville Courier-Journal

June 23, 2008

Help Reform Juvenile Justice

by Terry Brooks

Every day in Kentucky juvenile courts, young people are placed in custody for disobeying their parents, cutting school or even bringing home bad grades. Youth of color are routinely incarcerated at far higher rates for committing the same offenses as white children. And each day, children who were previously taken into custody for minor infractions return after committing far more serious crimes.

This is the reality of the juvenile justice system in Kentucky today – a system in dire need of reform for youth of color and minor offenders. 

The dysfunctional state of juvenile justice in Kentucky mirrors a larger national problem. The 2008 national Kids Count Data Book, released last week by Kentucky Youth Advocates and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, calls for urgent and massive change in juvenile justice policy, which it says has been shaped for too long by “misinformation, hyperbole, and political prejudices.”  

The report offers a roadmap for reform, including keeping low-level youthful offenders out of court, reducing the reliance on secure confinement for young people and taking strong actions to decrease the disparate treatment of youth of color in the juvenile justice system.

For Kentucky, such changes could not come soon enough. In several areas, our state’s juvenile justice record is far worse than the rest of the nation.  Kentucky has the second highest rate in the country for detaining youth charged with “status” offenses – infractions that would not be crimes if they were committed by an adult.  In one particularly egregious example, a severely obese Kentucky youth was ordered by a judge to lose weight. The child entered the court system when his mother was charged with medical neglect because the boy’s weight was affecting his health. When the child failed to shed pounds, the judge found him in contempt of court and sent him to a detention facility where he spent nearly a week until a public defender was able to free him.

Shockingly, such actions are acceptable under the current system, which too often fails to help the child and deal with the underlying causes of his or her behavior.

Kentucky also doles out punishment along racial lines at higher rates than the already troubling national average.  Two youth who enter the system with the same charge and same history are often shuttled along different paths, with youth of color receiving worse outcomes. In 2006, for every four Kentucky youth of color placed in custody just one white youth was detained, compared with a national rate of three to one.

Several factors are to blame for these trends, most notably a lack of practical options for treating children whose behavior lands them in court.  The result is an over-reliance by Kentucky judges on court orders and detention. This problem was exacerbated during the administration of former Governor Ernie Fletcher, when the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice took a sharp turn away from treatment and rehabilitation of young offenders.

There is virtually no evidence that these harsher approaches reduce crime. Recidivism studies routinely show that 50 to 80 percent of youth released from juvenile correctional facilities are rearrested within two to three years—even those who were not serious offenders prior to confinement.  Moreover, locking up kids is expensive, costing taxpayers typically about $200 to $300 per youth per day.

To address these problems, Kentucky Youth Advocates is setting up a commission made up of prosecutors and defense attorneys, judges, law enforcement officials, educators, child advocates and juvenile justice experts. The commission will consider recommending a variety of reform measures, including developing a database that would track kids as they move through the system and exploring options for creating more home and community-based treatment alternatives to court-ordered detention.

In the past year, the state saw an increase in several factors that tend to trigger higher youth offenses.  These include a 5 percent increase in children living in poverty and a 9 percent rise in children living in families where no parent works full-time, year-round, according to the Kids Count Data Book. Recent budget cuts to the Department of Public Advocacy, which provides representation to low-income youth, means more young people will be forced to navigate the juvenile court system without an attorney, a situation that could further exacerbate racial disparities.

The time to act is clearly now. Kentucky can no longer afford to operate a juvenile justice system that fails to reduce crime and treats youth of color differently than other young people.