If You Build it, They Will Come

 

It seems like yesterday there was such a great deal of fanfare about a certain bond issue dealing with crime in Las Vegas.  Supporters were asking the citizens to vote for better protection from all the criminals in our midst - protection in the form of an expansion of the county detention center, a new court complex and more bed space at juvenile detention center.  At the time, I wrote an opinion piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal ("The bond issue passed - so what now?" September 29, 1996) criticizing this measure as a waste of taxpayer dollars and warning that the impact on the crime problem would be negligible.  Further, I also warned about possible "cost-overruns" - a usual problem when it comes to building things like these (and this turned out to be the case with the court complex).  I was most concerned about expanding the local juvenile detention center, which brings me to why this article is being written.

The juvenile detention center is once again overcrowded, as noted in a recent story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal ("Officials seek alternatives to incarcerating juveniles in overcrowded detention center," October 24).  The 235-bed facility, which was completed less than two years ago (designed to double its previous capacity), is now about 15 percent over capacity.  This article also noted that there is an effort to find suitable alternatives - which should have been done long before such a problem was ever reached and prior to the building of the additional space, as I have constantly argued before.  Not surprisingly, the state's main youth "correctional" facilities are also overcrowded and the maximum-security Summit View has not reopened yet (this is another big failure, as I have previously noted).

If there is one constant in our society=s response to crime (both juvenile and adult) it is the tendency to succumb to what I would term the "edifice complex" whereby we fervently believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that if we put offenders in huge, expensive "edifices" like prisons, then crime will go down and we will feel safer.  This approach invariably gives rise to a corollary to this general rule, which I call the "field of dreams syndrome" - if you build it, they will come - in this case, the more beds you have, the more people you will find to fill them.  And such beds will be filled at a rate that has little if any correlation with the amount of crime being committed.  A few years ago there was a national study of juvenile detention where the researchers found vast differences in the rates at which juvenile offenders were detained in the different states.  One variable explained most of this variation: the number of beds available.  If beds are available, they will be filled; if they are not, alternatives will be sought out. (Incidentally, the most recent survey, taken a couple of years ago, found that Nevada had the second highest juvenile incarceration rate in the nation.  I'm almost certain we are now ranked number one.)

Will we ever learn?  Of course, the reader might reasonably ask what alternatives can be made available?  Well, as a matter of fact, I have over the years made numerous suggestions. In fact, one such alternative, proven to be very successful, is known as the Detention Diversion Advocacy Project (DDAP). Started in San Francisco about 15 years ago, it has been replicated in several other cities, including Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia.  I conducted an evaluation of the San Francisco program and found that youths considered "high risk" offenders who ended up in this program had a recidivism rate of a only 34%, compared to 60% for a control group who remained in the system. And the DDAP offenders were previously deemed too "dangerous" to be released into the community.  In fact, in my own study, I discovered that a higher proportion of the DDAP youth were labeled as "high risk" kids than the control group.