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Articles, information and additional online resources. |
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Voices from the Trenches
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Katherine Weinstein Miller is director of program development for the San Francisco Mayor's Criminal Justice Council. Part of her job is raising state, federal and foundation funding for youth services that can provide alternatives to detention. Miller is a work-group participant in San Francisco's new Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative. |
Miller on alternatives to detention:
"I've looked at how the different counties in California do in terms of how long kids spend in juvenile hall and how overcrowded those halls are, and the numbers for San Francisco aren't really great. I think what we really need is this initiative we are starting on in San Francisco, called the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative [aiming to reduce the numbers of detained youth]. There are so many steps in the juvenile justice system that we need to understand and know whether we are doing things right. We can have the greatest detention alternatives out there, but if the court isn't comfortable using them or probation isn't comfortable using them or the police don't trust them, we'll never get kids to those places.
"For example, one of the programs that I've been involved in starting is the Community Assessment and Referral System. What it does is, when police arrest kids anywhere in the city for basically low- and mid-level offenses, they bring the kids there instead of going to juvenile hall. It doesn't get kids out of the legal system; they may well wind up in probation depending on what their charge was. But it hooks kids up with a case manager at a really early point so that there is someone really advocating for that young person as they go through the legal system. It sees about a quarter of kids who are arrested now in the city. It's open six days a week, 16 hours a day, but it's not 24/7 yet.
"Watching the Community Assessment and Referral System get started was a real crash course for me, in terms of understanding what it takes for reform. The police, for example, all of a sudden had a different procedure to follow in juvenile arrests. Same with probation officers. It is going to be a similar educational process with this larger Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative."
Miller on local funding challenges:
"With a lot of community organizations, one of their complaints is that the funding we give them is only for one to two years. But in turn, [with] a lot of money the city gets from the federal and state government, the city never knows more than one or two years out how much money we are going to get. So it hampers our ability to do a lot of multiyear funding for organizations.
"Also, a lot of times with federal and state funding, there's tons of constraints around what kind of kids we can serve. They can have a mental health issue, but not a substance abuse [one]. Or they can't be special-ed, or they can. They are looking for very specific profiles in some of the funding pools. What that means is, by the time that translates out to the community in San Francisco, it's frustrating for providers who may be able to use money to serve one kid but not the other.
"The economy and just the strings that come with funding are the hardest for us. I worry about what is going to happen if there are any kind of significant decreases in funding to the city."
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