National Initiative Keeping Youths Out of Jail, Report Says

By Henri E. Cauvin

Washington Post

 August 6, 2009

A national juvenile justice initiative is helping reduce the number of young offenders being jailed after arrest, according to a new report by the foundation that has backed the effort.

But in the District, where the number of juveniles detained had been dropping since the Justice Detention Alternatives Initiative was put in place in 2005, there has been an increase this year, officials said.

The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services and the D.C. Family Court are studying the recent uptick in detentions to identify what's behind this year's change and what can be done to reverse it.

Promoted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Justice Detention Alternatives Initiative is a 20-year-old effort to limit the number of juveniles locked up after they've been arrested.

Officials and experts have said that detaining a juvenile, even for a few days, can have considerable long-term consequences and therefore should happen only when essential to public safety.

The report released Wednesday by the Casey Foundation comes as juvenile justice officials are meeting in Washington to discuss the initiative.

Judge William M. Jackson, who heads D.C. Family Court, said the initiative has been effective. "There's a lot more that can be done, but I think we've made substantial progress in making sure that only those juveniles that need to be detained for community's safety reasons are detained," Jackson said.

Vincent N. Schiraldi, who as director of the Youth Rehabilitative Services Department has championed the detention alternatives initiative, said support for the program was broad. "People have generally bought into it," he said.

With the number of juveniles detained rising instead of falling, that buy-in won't be enough, Schiraldi said. "I think we need to redouble our efforts," he said.

Both Schiraldi and Jackson declined to discuss the size of the increase, saying the figures could be released only by the D.C. Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. Nancy Ware, executive director of the council, could not be reached Wednesday evening.

For juvenile justice systems, which generally stress rehabilitation over punishment, recidivism is an important measure of success.

In the District, more than 90 percent of juveniles diverted from detention complete the alternative program without being re-arrested, Schiraldi said.

Whether the program is curbing recidivism among juveniles nationwide is not clear from the report. Jurisdictions calculate recidivism differently, with some counting an arrest and others, such as the District, counting only a conviction, all of which makes a broad comparison difficult, the report says.

Still, the report praises the 20-year-old initiative that has been championed by the Casey Foundation and is in more than 110 jurisdictions nationwide.

Casey's analysis concluded that the number of juveniles detained in the District had dropped 30 percent from 2004, the year before the initiative was implemented here. Casey compared a one-day count in June to the average daily population the year before the juvenile detention initiative was put in place in the District, a methodology that the report's author acknowledged was "less precise" than comparing long-term averages.

Shay Bilchik, who heads the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University, said that despite the limitations of the assessment by Casey, the report was a useful window on a promising program.

"For what they've been able to do, I think you can draw some pretty good faith conclusions," said Bilchik, who is a former director of the federal office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.