‘Lock ’em up’ juvenile justice doesn’t work in N.C., Charlotte Post (10.5.11)
RALEIGH – When youths act up, a new report says, locking them up is the wrong thing to do in most cases.
The report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation provides evidence that youth correctional facilities don’t keep kids from committing crimes later, don’t benefit public safety, waste taxpayer dollars and expose young people to violence and abuse.
North Carolina law requires that 16- and 17-year-olds be tried as adults, even for minor offenses. As chief executive officer of Action for Children North Carolina, Barbara Bradley believes the state should reconsider its approach.
“If we send these kids off and they learn more about crime and they become more hardened and don’t get the treatment they deserve, these kids are coming back to our community someday,” she said.
More than 32,000 juveniles are serving time in North Carolina’s adult prison system, and Bradley says 94 percent of them are accused of nonviolent crimes.
Several states already are moving away from relying on juvenile incarceration, the report notes, mainly because of budget woes or scandals over abuse in institutions. It finds that more than 50 facilities have been closed since 2007 nationwide.
Bart Lubow, the Casey foundation’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group director, says that since the research shows that locking youths up hasn’t paid off, it’s time for North Carolina and other states to adopt policies to slow the sentencing stream and invest in alternatives that focus on treatment and supervision.
“That will not only ensure that there’s fewer kids locked up but that will ensure that there’s less crime, and less money spent, and the kids have better odds of being successful in adulthood,” he said.
For the few dangerous teens, he says, large institutions should be replaced with small, treatment-oriented facilities. That’s one of the report’s six recommendations to help states change systems.
The report also sheds light on how youths end up in the juvenile justice system in the first place.
“The largest single source of new referrals to juvenile courts (is) public schools enforcing zero-tolerance requirements and using police officers to supplant the disciplinary functions that schools used to exercise.”
The full report, “No Place for Kids, The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration,” is online at aecf.org.