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Voices from the Trenches
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John Rhoads, chief juvenile probation officer of Santa Cruz County, recently took his county through a serious reform of its juvenile justice system, reducing the general population of detained youth by at least 40 percent and the number of Latino youth confined by 18 percent. |
Rhoads on key strategies for reforming the juvenile justice system:
"Reforming the juvenile justice system is a very complicated, difficult process. It is not an easy thing to do. In Santa Cruz, our facility was overcrowded, terribly so. Our juvenile hall has a capacity of 42 beds, and, in 1997, our daily detention population was peaking at over 60. Crowding has every possible effect you can imagine. Kids are sleeping on the floor, and it's not humane; it's not constitutional; and it's not hygienic. Some kids aren't getting into school because the school is overcrowded. And you have a higher incident of assault, because there simply isn't enough room in the institution to run it correctly.
"In addition to being crowded, our detained population was highly disproportionate to the general population, and we averaged 60 to 70 percent ... Latinos in custody, compared to the county breakdown in population of about 35 percent Latino. So we looked at developing an instrument that assessed risk of detention right at the front door -- should this person be kept in detention? should they be released to an alternative? or should they just be released outright with no services because they are not likely to commit another offense? We had an instrument, but it wasn't being analyzed or used in a way to generate services for each individual. So we not only got a risk instrument in place but we also developed some detention alternatives. We had home supervision, where kids are seen on a very intensive basis daily, but it was underutilized, and so we looked at trying to expand that service, and in fact we did increase our usage of that.
"One of the other things we worked on was developing alternatives to placement, because we could see sending kids to group homes and residential treatment places wasn't making the impact that we wanted. What happens is you generally have to send kids outside of their neighborhood, and kids would stay there and run away, and they would almost always run back home. So we thought maybe we should offer some services in the neighborhood and in the community, work with the families and try to keep families together. And that has been very successful. It is very important to work through the problems of youth in their community. Kids are all going to come back to their communities, and they are going to come back to their families for the most part. And so if we can't change that system a little bit, then our efforts are doomed for failure.
"The juvenile justice system has failed too many kids, and we haven't really provided what is necessary to make the changes. I think we need to extend ourselves and believe in rehabilitation, try to offer that to every single person that we work with, and never turn away from that."
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