Removing juvenile offenders from families should be last resort in Pa.
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Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system takes too many kids away from their families while costing too much and doing too little to actually safeguard our streets. It’s time for a change in the commonwealth. And a group of Pennsylvania policy experts have proposed one.
The bipartisan Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force recently spent 16 months investigating the system and identifying what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t. Its 35 policy recommendations, if enacted, would create a juvenile justice system that strengthens families while making public safety a priority. The American Conservative Union, which hosts Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, every year, has three policy goals for criminal justice legislation: increased safety, accountability, and human dignity. The effort to reform the commonwealth’s juvenile justice system advances each of these goals.
More:Editorial: It’s time to rethink juvenile justice in Pa.
As conservatives, we believe that strong families are the foundation that supports American exceptionalism and our place in the world. The problem is that taking children from their homes shatters that foundation. Study after study show that even for kids with serious offenses, intensive community-based interventions, such as family therapy, work better to prevent future re-offending than out-of-home placements in dangerous facilities. And that makes us all safer.
Yes, even kids must be held accountable. The question is whether we need to separate them from their parents when doing so. And that question has been clearly answered: In the vast majority of cases, we don’t. The most effective way to get kids back on the path to success is to keep them with their families. Working with parents is the key to developing children into successful, productive adults who strengthen our communities and contribute to economic prosperity.
Keeping families together is also more cost-effective: The task force found that placing kids in facilities costs taxpayers, on average, as much as $192,720 per kid each year. That’s nearly 50 times the cost of family therapy.
You might expect, given the price tag of these facilities, that Pennsylvania would reserve the use of out-of-home placements (i.e., juvenile incarceration) for kids who have committed serious crimes, or for kids who have long histories of delinquency. But in fact, the opposite is true, as illustrated by some of the shocking data presented by the task force. Most kids are sent to these outrageously expensive facilities for their very first offense.
The most common first offense? Nonviolent misdemeanors.
As for the kids with histories of serious offenses, one study found that incarceration is no more effective in reducing recidivism than allowing them to stay at home with their families under community supervision.
An even more disconcerting finding by the task force is that the state routinely takes kids with serious offenses out of the juvenile justice system and automatically prosecutes them as adults — without the opportunity to even be heard by a juvenile court judge.
This practice, called “direct file,” is a lingering result of a misguided law from the 1990s. Legislators of both parties codified a morally repugnant view that a new breed of children were “superpredators” who could never be rehabilitated. We know now that this is wrong, and that the legislature should end the practice. By diverting kids facing nonviolent offenses, Pennsylvania can bring the most serious cases back into its juvenile justice system, without incurring additional costs.
All of this is why the findings of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force are so troubling — and its recommended solutions so promising.
Some conservative leaders may be under the impression that these reforms are big-city liberal solutions that go too far, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that similar efforts have already been embraced by conservatives of every stripe across the country.
For example, in 2013, Georgia unanimously enacted legislation prohibiting placing kids in facilities unless they had committed a felony or had a significant history of offending. Georgia also barred incarceration for minor violations of community supervision, such as missing appointments or curfew.
Yet in Pennsylvania, most kids placed in facilities are there on their first offense.
In 2016, Kansas prohibited its courts from sending kids to facilities for misdemeanors and lower-severity felonies, which saved the state millions of dollars that they reinvested into evidence-based community programs.
Yet in Pennsylvania, approximately 60% of kids sent to state-run facilities are there for misdemeanors.
And in 2017, the Utah legislature required that kids coming in the front door of the juvenile justice system for low-level offenses be diverted from formal court proceedings.
Yet in Pennsylvania, two-thirds of kids who score as “low risk” to reoffend do not receive diversion from court and become entangled in the system.
Despite making these reforms, which reduced juvenile incarceration and cut costs, Georgia, Kansas, and Utah all saw no spikes in juvenile-related crime, and in some data, juvenile crime dropped.
Removing children from their families must be a last resort, not the first step for juvenile authorities. Yet, that is often what happens in the commonwealth. And the cost of juvenile incarceration is massive, not just for the families, but for the taxpayers who have to pick up the tab. Pennsylvania can do better. And the Juvenile Justice Task Force has provided the way.
David Safavian is general counsel for the American Conservative Union (ACU) and directs the ACU Foundation’s Nolan Center for Justice.
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