Where We Put Kids Who Break the Law

EVERY DAY FOR A YEAR, Marcus awoke in a locked room in a Wisconsin youth prison.

“You wake up every day hoping it’s a dream, and it’s not,” said Marcus, who at 17 was sent to the Lincoln Hills boy’s detention center for sexual misconduct. “Four walls, a desk, and a cot.”

He said guards in that lockup often told boys, “You’ll be back.” But Marcus—who spoke on condition that he not be identified by his full name—not only swears that’s not going to happen to him, he’s working to keep others from having the same experience.

Despite years of reform efforts, thousands of teens still wake up in large, secure, prison-like facilities such as Lincoln Hills, many of them for nonviolent offenses. Marcus is one of a growing number of voices arguing that such places should be shut down for good.

“It’s clear that youth prisons are not places of redemption and hope,” said Liane Rozzell, a senior policy associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The foundation has led a nationwide push to shutter juvenile incarceration facilities, which have failed to reduce youth crime, and replace them with effective alternatives that keep kids in their communities, are less expensive, and drive down the juvenile crime rate. “There’s a clear lane for faith-based organizations and people to grasp that real care for young people means we will not be putting them in situations that traumatize them, cut off their opportunities, and lead them to essentially be thrown away,” Rozzell said. These institutions fail the duty to provide for the “basic human dignity” of youth, she added, violating the principles not only of Christianity but of many other faiths.

The movement has drawn in onetime prisoners such as Marcus and parents of kids in the system, which is how Rozzell got involved. But it’s also bringing in courtroom players, lawmakers, and ordinary people from a wide swath of religious traditions.

“What’s kind of great about this is that no matter where you fall on the spectrum—traditionalist conservative religious faith, or more of what folks might call progressive or liberal faith organizations, or anything in between—folks are pretty clear that using this kind of approach is not only not good for young people, but not good for their communities,” Rozzell said.

Doing nothing is not an option

Since the 1970s, juvenile-justice reformers have been arguing against the idea of large, secure lockups for young offenders. But they were swimming against the tide of a surge in crime that didn’t abate for two decades—tough-on-crime policies spawned by that era have lingered on much longer.

And there’s a wide racial disparity among those who get locked up. “The rates of black youth [incarceration] are five times greater than white youth; and Latino youth are at two to three times,” said Marcia Rincon-Gallardo, founder of Noxtin, a California-based juvenile-justice think tank with a special focus on Latino and Indigenous communities. While racial and ethnic disparities have been reduced in the last quarter-century, structural racism still exists that “allows for predominantely youth of color to still sit in detention.”

By the late 1990s, more than 77,000 teens were held in large lockups across the United States, and more than 12,000 teens were in adult facilities. “Lock-em-up” policies fueled a chicken-and-egg paradox for authorities that further swelled the rolls, said Steven Teske, the chief juvenile-court judge in Clayton County, Ga., in suburban Atlanta. “Most judges are not just throwing kids in prisons because they want to,” said Teske, who sits on a state justice-reform council. “We’ve spent so much of our state money in brick and mortar and building prisons, there’s very little for treatment in the community. So judges are forced to put them in prisons, because there’s no place else for them.”

Advocates such as the Casey Foundation argue that youth prisons have proven impervious to reform, despite years of efforts. But gradually, state-by-state, reformers have racked up a series of wins—sometimes with the support of conservative politicians who can’t stomach pouring more taxpayer money into detention centers that cost approximately $100,000 per kid.

The shift to move beyond youth incarceration is happening in places such as Kansas, where one of the state’s two youth prisons closed its doors in March 2017. Notoriously cash-strapped Kansas not only passed an extensive package of reforms in 2016, but agreed to plow all resulting savings into community-based alternatives, said Benet Magnuson, executive director of Kansas Appleseed. The win was the result of “a slow and building process” that started at the local level, trying to convince communities there was a better way, Magnuson said. “I would throw out the question to a group: ‘If your kid got in trouble with the law, and the state gave you $100,000 a year to get the kid back on the right path, how many of you would spend that to put your kid in a cell? How many of you would spend that on therapy or education or all this other stuff?’ It was a wonderful brainstorming moment.”

That built to the state level with help from The Pew Charitable Trusts, which collected data and brought lawmakers in for meetings. In one of those meetings, Magnuson said, State Sen. Greg Smith—the Republican chair of the Senate committee that oversees juvenile justice—declared that doing nothing “was not an option.” “I think it really set up the reform effort for success,” Magnuson said. “It was like Doubting Thomas—at some point, the evidence is there, and it’s not a matter of needing more study or more interviews; it’s a matter of having the will to act to make lives better for people.”

The first-year results of the Kansas reforms have been better than expected. Not only has the 128-bed Larned Juvenile Correctional Facility northwest of Wichita closed, but judges are placing fewer teens in custody overall, Magnuson said. And the savings, which had been expected to run about $8 million in the first several months, instead topped $12 million, he said.

A youth-centered approach

Other new efforts are underway in places such as Milwaukee, where Marcus is helping out by speaking to community organizations about his time in Lincoln Hills. Sharlen Moore, co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee, said Lincoln Hills and its sister facility for girls, Copper Lake, are known for “atrocious” treatment and high recidivism rates. As many as three-quarters of those teens end up back at the facilities, she said. “It’s a breeding ground for mistreatment, abuse, and, quite frankly, young people not learning from their mistakes,” Moore said. “They’re getting set up to be pushed into the adult system.”

Wisconsin’s juvenile lockup centers are about 225 miles north of Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. That makes it difficult for many families to visit. And lawsuits recently revealed cases of teens pepper-sprayed by guards and locked in solitary confinement for long stretches. When the videos documenting the use of pepper spray came to light as the result of lawsuits, a state corrections spokesperson told reporters the facilities have made “significant changes” to improve conditions.

Marcus believes Lincoln Hills should be closed, “simply because it is not run the correct way. I had personal experiences that were good, but I witnessed things that were not good,” he said. He had a counselor he credits with changing his life, and made friends he’s kept in touch with since getting out. But some staffers treated their charges “like garbage.” Sometimes that involved physical abuse; other times, kids on their way out were taunted, “Everybody comes back.”

“Maybe Lincoln Hills itself doesn’t need to be shut down, but I just think the idea behind Lincoln Hills needs to be shut down,” Marcus said. “I understand, sometimes it gets testy [and] you have kids who act out. You have kids who are going to do dumb stuff and fight. But they’re just kids.”

While some young offenders may still need to be placed in secure facilities for serious crimes, Moore said, what’s needed is “something totally different.” She said, “How we envision a secure facility is smaller, with no more than a dozen young people. It’s therapeutic, and it’s providing young people with all the resources they need in order to learn from their mistake and become the productive and amazing young people they were born to be.”

Activists also notched a recent win in Virginia, where the Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center closed in June. Rozzell’s son once served time in Beaumont, an experience that drew her into efforts through her own church to close similar facilities. “It was clear to see this was not something that was helpful or good in any way,” she said. “I used to say how broken the system was. But I understood that it was designed to do what it is doing, and we need to change how it’s doing what it’s doing.”

Rozzell called Beaumont “basically a Supermax for kids.” It closed after a combination of reforms by Virginia state leaders—including a new juvenile-justice director who came from a background of child advocacy—and pressure by advocates to make sure the money saved went to community-based programs. “There were a number of folks who were faith-based who were part of that effort,” she said.

What replaces the youth prison?

For various reasons, juvenile arrest rates across the nation fell 39 percent from 2000 to 2012, according to the Sentencing Project, and new models are emerging for dealing with youth offenders. In the past two decades, a new approach—often dubbed the “Missouri model” after the state that pioneered it—has become a preferred direction for many advocates. It limits out-of-home placements for young offenders, maintains safety through “eyes-on” supervision instead of isolation or technology, keeps those who are committed to facilities closer to home, and emphasizes therapy and education over correction and punishment.

In the Missouri model, states supervise and treat the small group of youth whose criminal behavior poses a significant threat to public safety, and treat other offenders differently, instead of an expensive, ineffective, one-size-fits-all approach. Most teen offenders need an arrangement more like special education programs in schools, Teske said. “These are kids who have some extremely special needs, but their needs are the type that can cause harm to other people when they’re on the street,” he said. “When we put them in large populations, they’re not going to get the attention they need and deserve.”

In Georgia, a 2013 overhaul of the juvenile justice system resulted in 20 percent fewer teens being committed to the state Department of Juvenile Justice—and an estimated saving of $85 million. Judges can no longer commit a young offender for a misdemeanor, Teske said, unless it’s a third offense and one of the priors is a felony. As a result, the agency has closed one of its youth prisons and won’t build two other planned facilities. And in Teske’s county, the number of kids placed in secure facilities is down 43 percent. “The sky didn’t fall. In fact, crime has gone down,” he said. “Our juvenile crime is down 71 percent—46 percent of it is felonies that are down, which is really a true measure of juvenile crime.”

There’s also an increasing focus on what’s called “restorative justice.” It’s drawn from civil traditions and the New Testament’s Golden Rule, and emphasizes personal responsibility, making amends, and repairing community. There’s a better chance of that happening if the offender isn’t shipped away somewhere. “There is a really diverse group of people who are all pursuing restorative justice from different cultural and spiritual backgrounds,” Rozzell said. “This is an approach that is available to and can be used by people from all kinds of faith traditions and no faith tradition.”

Those campaigns have led to a wealth of knowledge for communities looking for change:

• First, every effort needs data, said Judge Teske. “The first step is: What does your population look like? Who’s low-risk, who’s medium-risk, who’s high-risk sitting your prisons right now? Once you’ve identified those, what are the type of criminogenic things that got them in there? You can use that to identify what would be the best evidence-based programs and practices you should target ...”
• Use the personal touch. Voices of people with their own experiences of the system—like those of Rozzell and Marcus—often carry more weight than those of experts. “They’ll be the ones with the urgency and the political will to really hold systems accountable to close systems down,” Rincon-Gallardo said.
• Several organizations have put together guidebooks for would-be reformers, including Youth First, the National Juvenile Justice Network, and the FrameWorks Institute.
• Finally, be inclusive. In Milwaukee, Moore said, that means including not just minority communities that are disproportionately affected by crime and incarceration, but white people as well—and victims as well as offenders.

“We have to do a lot of community building with everyone,” she said, “to talk with them about the issues that are impacting this city and what we need to do differently to overcome them.”