The study was issued last month by the Building Blocks for Youth initiative, a national effort to promote a fair and effective youth justice system. It found that during the 1990ıs, Maryland increased its detention rate by 3 percent, while the District of Columbia reduced its detention rate by a substantial 71 percent. If locking kids up were the answer to crime, the District should have suffered mightily, from a crime control standpoint.
But exactly the opposite happened. DCıs decline in violent youth crime was three times as great as Marylandıs. During the 1990ıs, the violent youth arrest rate fell in DC by 55 percent, while Marylandıs dropped by a modest 15 percent. DCıs property crime rate declined by 42 percent and Marylandıs by a similar 34 percent.
DCıs experience is similar to other large cities around the country that reduced their detention populations during the 1990s. For example, from 1993 to 2000, the number of youth detained on an average day in Cook County (Chicago), Illinois declined by 30 percent and yet violent offenses by youth fell by 54 percent. In Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon, the number of youth referred to detention declined by more than half from 1994 to 2000, during which time overall felony arrests for youth declined by 45 percent.
In this era when some are claiming that more incarceration equals less crime, these findings will be counterintuitive to some. But a better understanding of what detention is, who gets detained, what goes on in large locked institutions, and what some of the alternatives are makes it easier to believe that keeping young people out of unnecessary detention and in rehabilitative settings is a goal worth pursuing.
Detaining youth prior to adjudication is the rough equivalent of jailing adults pretrial. Youth who have been arrested but not yet convicted of a crime go to detention, where they sometimes sit for weeks or even months awaiting adjudication. For most, their cases will be dismissed or they will be returned to their home communities.
Not only have these detained youth not been convicted of any crimes, but the vast majority of them are accused of non-violent offenses. The Maryland House of Delegates reported this year that only 10 percent of detained youth are locked up for violent offenses, and another 23 percent for serious property crimes. Nationwide, only about 4% of all arrests of juveniles in 1997 were for serious violent offenses.
Additionally, the decision to detain is very subjective, punishing minority youth more harshly than white youth. While African American males make up 17% of the Maryland's youth population and 39% of arrests, fully 81% of the youth confined at the stateıs most notorious detention facility, the Cheltenham Youth Facility are African American. As recently as February of this year, overcrowding, untrained staff and a culture of violence contributed to the brutal rape of a 13-year-old African American boy at Cheltenham.
These kinds of troubled youth facilities are nothing new to Maryland or the District. During the 1990ıs, DC closed two of its three locked facilities due to pressure from a lawsuit resulting in Congressional and judicial action. Long before last yearıs closure of the stateıs troubled boot camps, in 1988, Maryland closed the Montrose Training School, a large facility plagued by abusive conditions and scandals. This year, according to a report in the Frederick Post, staff at the Victor Cullen Academy, a 225-bed locked youth institution in Frederick County, arranged fights for entertainment purposes between youth in their care.
If large, jail-like institutions are not the answer, what is? Some hopeful lessons can be learned from Marylandıs experiences that can inform practice around the country.
For example, when the pressure mounted over conditions at Montrose, Maryland officials hired the non-profit National Center on Institutions and Alternatives to permanently close the facility. NCIA developed individualized release plans for those youths, carefully placed them into community-based settings and closely supervised them. A subsequent evaluation of the closure of Montrose found that only 15% of the youths released from Montrose were reincarcerated within the first year. In discussing the closure of Montrose, Ira Schwartz, former director of the U.S. Justice Departmentıs Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention stated, ³There is clearly strong evidence that community programs work and they do not compromise public safety and they reduce recidivism.²
Maryland is now poised on the brink of reform. Earlier this year, Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Bishop Robinson promised to demolish the Cheltenham Youth facility and replace it with a much smaller facility. In March, the legislature backed Robinsonıs pledge with funding for alternatives to detention. Since then, Cheltenhamıs population has declined by a third and some new detention alternatives have been put in place. In August, Secretary Robinson openly voiced concerns about the Victor Cullen Academy suggesting that it too could be closed.
The state should now fulfill its promise to close Cheltenham, and should embark upon a one-year effort to close Victor Cullen. It costs an average of $50,000 per year to lock up a youth in Maryland. This money could be better spent on a network of options including small, locked facilities for youth who need to be in locked custody; as well as small, non-locked secure facilities; group homes; independent living arrangements; and in-home supervision and support services for youth who can be worked with while remaining in the community.
During the 1990ıs, Maryland overrelied on locked institutions, and did considerably worse from a crime control standpoint than DC. Maryland has begun to take steps toward a more balanced approach to juvenile justice, eschewing large institutions and moving toward a continuum of community-based approaches. They should do so with confidence, because if the District of Columbia can reduce its detention population and still have sharp declines in violent youth crime, so can Maryland.
Vincent Schiraldi [202/737-7270] is President of the Justice Policy Institute and co-author of ³A Tale of Two Jurisdictions: Youth Crime and Detention Rates in Maryland and the District of Columbia² which can be found at http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org.
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