John Farrell, a gratuate student at the University of Minnesota and a Board Member of the DFL Education Foundation recently gave this lecture on juvenile justice.  It is worth reading.

StoneArch talk Doing Juveniles Justice

How Minnesota’s Juvenile Justice System Needs Reform

Thank you for having me. As Arvonne mentioned, I’m completing my graduate work at the U this May and I figure if I can defend my thesis in front of the StoneArch group, I can probably handle the professors. However, as with most graduate work, my thesis is a little narrow, so I’ll talk about the juvenile justice system more broadly this morning. To look at Minnesota’s juvenile justice system, I’d like to split it into two parts.

First, how we treat youth different from adults as we arrest, try and sentence them.

Second, how we go about trying to rehabilitate youth who have been deemed delinquent. To do so, I have to define three terms I’ll use a lot: The first is recidivism. which I’ll use to describe the tendency of youths in particular programs to relapse into delinquency. The second is adjudication, which is the juvenile court term for a conviction – as in, “Jimmy was adjudicated delinquent” The third is disposition, which is the juvenile court term for a sentence – as in, “Jimmy was given a 3-month disposition.”

PART ONE – how we treat youth differently from adults.

Background

Juvenile courts are over 100 years old, established during the Progressive era when people thought it might be nice to stop hanging 15-year-olds for crimes. Minnesota’s juvenile court was established in 1905. The purpose of the juvenile court, according to state statute, is to (in this order) protect public safety, reduce juvenile delinquency, and help develop individual responsibility. The U.S. Supreme Court says that juvenile courts exist to “provide measures of guidance and rehabilitation for the child and protection of society, [and] not to fix criminal responsibility, guilt, and punishment.” The key point is that juvenile court is not adult court – it’s rehabilitative and not punitive. And because of that, juveniles are not given the same rights as adults and are not supposed to be held to the same standards of accountability.

Adolescent Development

The juvenile court’s legal design is increasingly supported by research on adolescent brain development. In a series on juvenile justice, the American Prospect writes that numerous scientific studies show that: “adolescents are risk-takers who inflate the benefits of crime and sharply discount its consequences, even when they know the law. Adolescents take more risks with health and safety than do older adults, such as having unprotected sex, driving drunk, and engaging in other illegal behaviors. Adolescents are more impulsive than adults and insensitive to contextual cues that might temper their decisions.” Put in layman’s terms by Paul Raeburn of the New York Times: “Nobody is arguing that teenagers deserve a pass; the new brain science is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sometimes adolescents do appear to act like adults -- but the point is that they can't do so consistently.” Interestingly, this scientific understanding of adolescence has been refined in the last two years by discoveries that the development of impulse control continues well into the mid-20s. In other words, adulthood and maturity are not instant at age 16 or 18 or 21, but maturity is an evolutionary process where youth gradually accumulate greater control over impulsive actions. This explains why high school freshman experiment with unprotected sex and college freshman binge drink, but older men tend to just splurge on a new miter saw at Home Depot.

Competency to stand trial

This developing level of maturity is also reflected in the competency of a youth to stand trial. In a study in Georgia of youth in the general community, approximately 20% of 14-15 year-olds were found to be as impaired in their abilities to stand trial as are adults with serious mental illness. So, 20% of typical adolescents should not stand trial. In another study examining already detained youths between 11 and 15 years, two-thirds had an IQ that was associated with a significant risk of being incompetent to stand trial. This is important because delinquent juveniles are far more likely to have low IQ than those in the general community. For example, of the 550 youth in North Carolina youth development centers on a given day, the average IQ is 80, twenty points lower than the average of non-delinquent people. In a follow-up to the Georgia study, researchers looked at 13-16 year olds who were already adjudicated delinquent. In addition to discovering that juveniles gain competency as they age, they found that only 2% of the entire sample would have been considered competent to stand trial, despite the fact that they had already been adjudicated. Furthermore, even after giving all the juveniles training in competency (regarding the court and its proceedings), only 11% (including the original 2%) reached the competence cut score, i.e. would be considered competent to stand trial. In summary, the majority of delinquent youth 16 and under are not competent to stand trial. And this has largely to do with ongoing cognitive development that continues through adolescence into the mid-20s.

Why It Matters

In the late 1980s and early 1990s – juvenile crime rose rapidly, causing a shift in juvenile law toward a more punitive system

 Politicians responded with new laws:

o to allow juveniles to be tried as adults for violent crime or weapons violations

o to lower the age for the death penalty o to automatically make youth of a certain age (in Minnesota, 16 and up) stand trial in adult court for crimes that carry a presumptive prison offense for adults (e.g. murder)

These laws often created a kind of perverse system where a youth would be certified as an adult and would receive a harsher sentence than an adult with a similar crime. For example, “For 11 years between 1985 and 2001, a young person convicted of murder was more likely to get life than an adult.” (national data) While I don’t have comparable data for Minnesota, youth who are as young as 14 can be prosecuted as adults and be given life without parole for their crimes in this state. Another change to Minnesota’s juvenile justice law was the creation of the Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile (EJJ):

 The first part was a blended sentence – a juvenile sentence with an adult sentence that was stayed for good behavior.

 The second part gave the juvenile court authority over youth until age 21 instead of 19.

The result of these changes isn’t necessarily good. Youth who are still going through adolescence and developing mentally can be given adult-length sentences for crimes committed as kids. In Minnesota in 1999 (the last time I could get data), 4 percent of the prison population was juveniles certified as adults. So, taking into account – or not taking into account – different levels of brain development in adolescence can have a severe impact on juvenile justice.

PART TWO

The second major challenge facing Minnesota is how it handles juveniles once they are in the juvenile justice system. While the vast majority of youth who come into the system leave quickly and never return, a few youth account for a substantial amount of the casework, time, and money invested in juvenile justice. Unfortunately, a “black hole” would a fair approximation of where this money goes, since very little is done to track how effective juvenile treatment programs are.

Recidivism

Take recidivism, for example – how many youth reoffend after treatment. Of the treatment programs serving youth statewide, just a handful report data on recidivism. Of those that do, it’s not pretty - close to 40% of youth released from two of the larger state-run facilities in 1998 were re-arrested and re-adjudicated within three years. This compares with 30% in Maryland and 8% in Missouri. So when we have data on recidivism, it’s not good.

DMC

We also have a problem with racial disparities, an issue called “disproportionate minority contact.” Although minorities in Minnesota only represent 16 percent of the age 10-17 population in the state, minority juveniles make up:

 36% of juvenile arrests

 42.4% of juvenile cases resulting in confinement in secure juvenile correctional facilities

 42.3% of juvenile cases transferred to adult court

In other words, minority youth are three times as likely as whites statewide to end up in secure detention for juveniles. However, while there are statewide reports on racial disparity, only 3 counties out of 87 – Anoka, Hennepin, and Dakota – have individual reports on racial disparities. And in these counties, between 14 and 49 percent of juvenile court cases are filed with race listed as “unknown.” Once again, sparse data collection, but pretty serious stuff when we bother to collect data.

Mental health treatment

A third major issue facing juvenile justice is adequate mental health treatment. Minnesota Public Radio recently reported on one study saying that less than one third of Minnesota children get needed mental health treatment. This problem is magnified by the substantial need for treatment: compared to 20 percent of all 9-17 year-olds, 50 to 75 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have at least one disability, Instead of treatment, however, youth with mental health needs are often simply housed in a detention facility. In a 2003 survey of juvenile detention facilities across the country, two-thirds reported housing youth waiting for mental health treatment that they could not access in their community. There are even cases of parents trying to get their child committed to state care – giving up custody – in order to get mental health treatment.

What to Do

 discount sentencing – send kids to adult court but reduce their sentence based on their age under 18. Bad: still sends kids to prison

 A better option is a second chance - people who go to prisons get trained to be criminals just as boot camps for juvenile offenders increase recidivism.

 detention diversion o intensive, community-based programs reduce recidivism by up to 80%

 Effective treatment programs such as MST reduce recidivism by half over traditional probation

In 2001, the Minnesota Supreme Court’s Juvenile Justice Services task force completed a 75-page report on Minnesota’s juvenile justice system. It called for a change in perspective, to a system that “gives equal weight to principles of community safety, accountability, reintegration and restoration of youth, and competency development.” Fortunately, some folks have taken steps in that direction. The Youth Transition Funders Group, a national organization of nonprofits and foundations, has created “A Blueprint for Juvenile Justice Reform.” Their nine tenets for reform were the basis of the research work I did with the Alliance for Families and Children and cover the most pressing problems in the juvenile justice system.