President Barack Obama released his spending plan for 2011 today. Advocates in the JJ world, and pretty much every other corner of youth work, will obviously not be ecstatic with the proposed freeze on domestic spending. The funding proposal for OJJDP programs is not even level: this year Obama would spend $290 million, down from a proposed $317 million in 2010.

[For the entire Justice Department budget proposal, click here]

Now, the largest difference between Obama’s last proposal and what actually got funded for 2010 was the demonstration projects account: he proposed it be nixed, and it got $91 million from Congress. That is, of course, because the entire pot of money gets raided like a slop trough at lunchtime by earmark-hungry appropriators. The president has zeroed out the demonstration grants again, ditto for the Byrne Discretionary Grants at the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). So we’ll see what happens in Congress. [Here’s our guess: the same thing as last year, earmarks go back in.]

The biggest changes from last year’s proposal to this one are in juvenile mentoring and juvenile accountability block grants (JABG). Obama proposed $45 million for juvenile mentoring, down from $80 million last year, and $40 million for JABG, down from $55 million last year.

That shaves about $50 million out of the 2010 proposal. The president’s plan would recoup about half of that amount as savings, and put the rest of it into a few new JJ programs he is proposing. They include:

--$12 million for gang and youth violence prevention, on top of the $10 million for gang prevention work within Title V funding.

--$13 million on National Juvenile Delinquency Court Improvement to “assist states, territories and Indian tribes in implementing the Key Principles of a Juvenile Delinquency Court of Excellence in their juvenile justice systems.”

Expect the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges to get a fair chunk of the funding for this if it gets appropriated, because the whole “Court of Excellence” concept is the council’s creation.

--$806,000 on a Disproportionate Minority Contact Evaluation/Pilot Program, to “support empirical impact and outcome evaluations of delinquency prevention programs and systems improvement activities, and provide intensive technical assistance to…governments to address the disproportionate number of juvenile members of minority groups who are exposed to the juvenile justice system.”

The DMC proposal is modest in dollar amount. But it must be a good sign for those working on that issue, some of whom were frustrated by the lack of attention paid to the issue in OJJDP’s program plan for 2010.

Other new juvenile-related projects in the Obama budget, most of which would be funded through the Bureau of Justice Assistance:

--$12 million for mental health courts, part of a larger $57 million proposal to fund specialty courts.

--$37 million for Attorney General Eric Holder’s Initiative on Children Exposed to Violence.

--$10 million for Smart Probation, which would give out demonstration grants aimed at helping communities innovate new and better ways to manage adult and juvenile probation caseloads.

--$1 million on a “What Works Repository” that would house information on best practices in juvenile and criminal justice.

--$20 million to help states implement the Adam Walsh Act.

That last one is a doozy. There are a whole bunch of states that appear to be on the fence about complying with the Adam Walsh Act, particularly when it comes to its requirements on sex offender registries (and the subsequent monitoring of people on it).

Some JJ advocates want states not to implement the law for philosophical reasons, because there is great potential for juveniles with a good chance at rehabilitation getting stuck on registries for a long time. States have a much simpler reason: the cost of implementation might be way, way higher than the penalty for not complying (10 percent of its justice assistance grants).

This proposal might alleviate the cost of implementation, and therefore could remove the concern of some states. But $400,000 ($20 million spread across 50 states) seems like a pretty meager incentive if you are a state with a budget deficit and already have trouble maintaining your current sex offender caseload.   

Finally, the president includes $100 million again for Second Chance Act programs, which aim to assist adult and juvenile offenders who are returning to the community from incarceration. There is $15 million in the proposal for Second Chance mentoring grants. Two other juvenile-specific carve-outs: $2.5 million for evaluation and improvement of education at prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities, and “$4 million for re-entry programs for juvenile drug offenders.”

***There is officially a sign that the administration of Barack Obama has juvenile justice on its radar. And it came down unto the field in the grand form of a …meeting of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, held Monday afternoon.

Thanks to deadlines for our little juggernaut of a paper, JJ Today could not get over to the OJJDP offices. We got word earlier that Attorney General Eric Holder would chair the meeting himself, which is one more cabinet member than we ever saw at a council meeting during the Bush administration.

Holder’s presence would have been newsworthy enough, but that was not all.. In attendance for the council gathering (either for the closed session, the public one or both):

-Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services

-Pamela Hyde, Administrator, Substance and Mental Health Services Administration at HHS

-Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education

-Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor

-Jane Oates, assistant labor secretary for the Employment Training Administration.

-Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

“I’ve never seen so many political appointees in a room at one time,” said Harry Wilson, one of the nine practitioner members of the council. Keep in mind: he was a political appointee of Bush.

Wilson, now a consultant at ICF, oversaw the Family Youth Services Bureau at HHS. He also serves on the board of the National Network for Youth, which is the group he represents as a practitioner member of the council. Wilson said he was amazed when he saw all the cabinet members that turned up for the meeting, and even more stunned when they formed a receiving line to meet and greet the practitioner members.

Holder started the public portion of the council meeting by quipping that this was one of the few rooms he could preside over without some kind of media firestorm (true, especially since to our knowledge, JJ reporter emeritus Marion Mattingly was the only scribe in attendance).

What both Mattingly and Wilson took away from the meeting, they told JJ Today, was a sense that Holder wants progress on juvenile justice to be a hallmark of his tenure as attorney general.

“He said he wants to leave a legacy” that includes youth development, Mattingly said.

Justice did a lot of advance work before this meeting to craft the agenda for this year’s coordinating council. OJJDP staff, led by deputy administrator of policy Melodee Hanes and Concentration of Federal Efforts Director Robin Delany-Shabazz, conferred with staff at the other agencies to develop a list of issues that might be taken up by the council. That effort bore a list of about 17 issues, which was pared down to four that will be focused on for 2010:

-Education of youth at-risk of delinquency

-Tribal youth

-Juvenile re-entry

-Racial/ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice and related systems.

Each of the issues will be taken up by a focus group made up of agency leaders and staffers along with OJJDP staff and the council’s practitioner members. JJ Today was a little surprised not to see mental health-slash-drugs on there, especially with HHS in the mix. Then again, the council has already made some strides recently in improving the federal investment in juvenile drug courts.

Now, some inside-the-Beltway meeting, in and of itself, doesn’t do squat for juveniles, or youth on the brink of becoming juvenile delinquents. And the coordinating council has a pretty meager budget to spend. But this should be viewed as a momentous occasion for two reasons.

First: juvenile justice has gotten pretty short shrift in Washington this year. There was a lot of excitement about the prospect of a dynamic new administrator and reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. Neither has materialized. And though it should be noted that OJJDP has by all accounts run smoothly and effectively under Acting Administrator Jeff Slowikowski, many advocates believe the push to reauthorize JJDPA would go a lot faster if Justice would start supporting it publicly.

This was a major gesture from the administration that juvenile justice is on the agenda, really the first since Charles Ogletree represented a newly-elected Obama at a town hall on the subject hosted by the American Bar Association.

Second: With a spending freeze on discretionary spending looming for next year, coupled with crippled state budgets, federal resources for youth services will be at a premium. One JJ insider we talked to believes that interagency agreements on programs and projects could make that situation better and the people at the meeting on Monday are the ones who can easily cut away red tape to make it happen.

***The D.C.-based Violence Policy Center released an analysis of data on black homicide victims from 2007. Of the 7,387 documented victims that year, 674 (nine percent) were under 18.

Another interesting figure: 10 percent of the 4,362 cases where circumstances were identified were reported to be gang related, and almost half of that 10 percent was in California.

It’s possible that California is more diligent about reporting gang connections than other states. But we bet if you asked Joe Sixpack what percentage of black homicides were gang-related, he’d guess way higher than 10 percent.

***Funding is available from OJJDP for community organizations and public agencies that can help law enforcement develop effective responses to online enticement of children by sexual predators, child exploitation, and child obscenity and pornography cases. The Internet Crimes Against Children Program Support grant will likely go to one recipient in the amount of $2 million. Deadline to apply is March 26.

***In New Jersey, the Monmouth County Board of Freeholders voted to close the county’s detention center yesterday, and the news sort of epitomizes the bittersweet scenario these days when it comes to de-incarceration efforts.

On one hand, the closure probably would not have happened had Monmouth not pared its detention population. The county is part of the state’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), and the state has become a model of that process for its architect, the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Closing some of the state’s 17 detention centers likely would make any future proclivity towards over-incarceration tricky.

On the other hand, the reason Monmouth and other detention centers around the country are being shuttered lately is because of money – pure and simple. Counties are struggling to rein in costs across the board, so the savings from the closure (about $2 million per year in this case) is just a credit on a big balance sheet. What advocates of reform want is for the money spent on locking youth up to be plowed into other programs for youth.

Also, the center Monmouth juveniles will now be detained at in Middlesex County is about 30 miles from the Monmouth center, so some families could have trouble visiting juveniles. And you hate to see any 56 people lose jobs (let alone youth workers) in the current economy, which is what will happen the day the Monmouth center closes.

***The Nebraska legislature is considering two bills that would remove a lot of the collateral consequences for teens and adults who were adjudicated as juveniles. The central aim of LB 800 and LB 923: preventing juvenile offenses from affecting the employment and academic prospects of young people.  

Quick one today, we’re busy finishing up the February issue of Youth Today. Check that issue for the following, by the way: a front-pager by Dick Mendel looking at some intriguing findings from a Canadian JJ study; analysis of the 2010 juvenile justice budget and earmarks; and more on the sexual victimization survey released by the Justice Department this month.

***The Iowa Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in the case of Ruthann Veal, who was sentenced to life without parole (LWOP)  at the age of 14 for killing Catherine Hayes in 1993. Veal is defended by Bryan Stevenson, the attorney who last year argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that LWOP sentences should be banned for any youth under the age of 14.

But Veal’s case is exactly why the justices appeared wary of drawing a deep line in the sand on LWOP, whether it was to ban the sentence for certain age groups or for juveniles receiving certain sentences. Are they going to ban it for youth under 13, then have to hear arguments the next year on 14-year-olds? That was clearly on the minds of a few justices during the oral arguments.

***The National Juvenile Justice Network, which is led by Sarah Bryer, is accepting applications for its Juvenile Justice Leadership Development Institute. The institute’s mission is “to create the foundation for a more effective juvenile justice reform movement by developing a strong base of well prepared and well trained advocates.” Click here to apply.

***The effort to reform juvenile justice in New York centers on two things: improving the quality of treatment and programming within the detention centers and post-adjudication facilities, and keeping youths who do not need lock-up out of those buildings.

Obviously, the two are intertwined, because crowded facilities don’t lend themselves to massive quality control improvements. Also, if New York ever considers moving out of the dark ages and raising the juvenile age above 16, it would help to have facilities with the space to accommodate such a move.

Lowering the number of confined juveniles coming out of New York City is paramount, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a big step toward making that happen this week. Bloomberg announced he will move the city’s juvenile justice system into the Administration for Children’s Services, the child welfare agency for the city.

The purpose of the move is clear: deal with low-level offenders in the community, save locked facilities for public safety threats only. Now it will be up to ACS Commissioner John Mattingly and the new guy at the city probation department – Vincent Schiraldi – to make sure the community alternatives work.

***Luzerne Update! Lawyers for the private detention centers involved in the lawsuit want Judge Richard Caputo to prevent the destruction of documents that might aid in the defense of facility leaders named in the lawsuit. They believe some documents set to be destroyed could help them make the case that a number of youth adjudicated by Judge Mark Ciavarella would have been detained regardless of any illicit payment.

***Good headline on this article, Somerville Journal. You really captured the essence of the story. And with that, have a great weekend!

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but there is a clear pattern affecting juvenile justice that is emerging in states with enormous budget shortfalls for 2010 and beyond. Many states are passing the buck to the counties; or rather, passing the responsibility for juvenile justice to the counties – without the buck.

And, guess what? Counties are not happy about it.

For your consideration, the situation in three states:

Tennessee ($1.5 billion shortfall for 2011)

Carroll Academy is a successful alternative high school in Tennessee. Judges in seven Tennessee counties routinely send low-level juvenile offenders to the school in lieu of a more formal sentence. In the two years before the school opened in 1994, judges in those counties committed 80 kids to the state. Since then, they have committed a TOTAL of 68 – in 15 years.

Carroll is a bit of an odd duck structurally, though. It is not part of any school district, but credits accumulated by its students transfer to their regular schools with them. It is not overseen by the juvenile justice school system, but the approximately $650,000 it receives each year from the state juvenile justice department is one of its primary sources of revenue.

Carroll Academy, along with 30 other juvenile prevention programs around the state, faced extinction last year when the state zeroed out the $7 million in juvenile prevention grants. But federal Recovery Act money alleviated pressure enough in 2009 for Tennessee to restore the grants.

This year, no manna is falling from the federal heavens. Short of a fiscal miracle, Carroll Academy and a number of the other former state grantees will shut down later this year.

“Most say they will be going out of business,” said Deputy Commissioner of Juvenile Justice Steve Hornsby, who you can bet has heard an earful from every judge that leans on such programs. “I hate it, I have nothing but positive comments for all of them. They are doing a good job.”

But Hornsby said the reality of his administration’s budget for next year renders any discussion of saving the prevention fund impossible. “The original [legislative] budget plan had us closing all of our group homes,” he said. And while he concedes that probably 20 percent of the youth in residential or locked facilities could be in less restrictive settings, that amount is not enough to warrant closing any of the state-run buildings.

Oh, and then there is that little thing called politics. “No legislator wants a facility closed in their district,” he said. 

But Hornsby was as critical of county priorities as he was praiseful of Carroll Academy’s ilk. “Communities are gonna have to step up to the plate and start trying to look at ways to reduce juvenile delinquency within home counties and school districts,” he told JJ Today.

That’s what Carroll Academy does; what he means is, counties need to step up and pay for it.

“Prevention programs are addicted to state money,” said Hornsby. “Everyone starts acting like an addict. These issues are first and foremost community.”

Randy Hatch, the longtime senior administrator of Carroll Academy, doesn’t see it as a realistic option (full disclosure: he is an employee of Carroll County).

“Counties are not in any situation to help right now, it’s highly unlikely they’d come up with this type of funding,” Hatch said. And in a cruel twist, he added, county juvenile judges were told this fall that if they exceed their quote of youths committed to the state system, the county would be responsible for excess costs.

So now, if the judges decide to commit any of the youths they might have sent to Carroll Academy, they risk running up a commit rate over their county’s quota and costing the county money. Which might be a good thing, if such a rule forced judges into using less restrictive alternatives. But judges in this case were already using the alternative –Carroll – and keeping youth out of the state’s hair.

“We keep kids out of state custody,” Hatch said. “I don’t know how you run a juvenile justice system without prevention programs.”

Arizona ($3.2 billion shortfall for 2011)

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has made the most aggressive proposal: shuttering the state juvenile corrections department, and pushing all responsibility for JJ to counties. 

That would mean layoffs for 980 state employees, including 140 juvenile corrections staff from the state’s three facilities. The state pays about $67 million per year to handle the youth locked up in the three centers.

“The national movement is to decentralize the holding of juveniles," said John Arnold, Brewer’s budget director. "They do better when kept closer to their communities."

That’s true, and most JJ advocates would tell you they want to see offenders as close to home and in the least restrictive setting possible. But this would essentially force counties – in the space of a year – to equip themselves to handle and pay for the most seriously troubled youth in the juvenile justice system, while also managing whatever juvenile caseload it already has. That could lead to some good consequences (like counties investing in cost-effective alternatives to incarceration) or bad consequences (like prosecutors trying to move more youth over to the adult system).

We’ll see if this plan makes it very far in budget negotiations. As Tennessee’s Hornsby points out, no legislator from the districts where those three state facilities are located wants to okay a plan that renders all of its union workers unemployed.  

Iowa ($1 billion shortfall for 2011)

Senate Study Bill 3030 would eliminate the Juvenile Detention Home Fund, which over the past two years has provided counties with nearly $8 million to operate detention centers. That loss of funds, with counties already budget crunching, would almost certainly be the end of some of Iowa’s 11 county-run detention centers.

Might that lead to a lower total of youth being detained or housed in centers? Yes. But judges will still want to detain most of the youth they would have detained at their nearby center; closing those county-run detention centers will mean those same  juveniles will be locked up further away. And the centers that do stay open almost certainly will see an uptick in population.

"It's going to set us back 20 years," Lori Reynolds, executive director of Iowa Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health, told the Des Moines Register’s Jason Clayworth. "We think we have kids falling through the cracks now? Just give us a couple of years."

The good news there, at least, is that Iowa has lowered the average daily population in some of its centers by as much as 40 percent, thanks in part to working with Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative.

Detention populations might be further thinned out in the state if the legislature passes a bill now under consideration that would eliminate dispositional holds, which allow judges to lock a youth up for 48 hours in detention as a sentence.

The Bureau of Justice Assistance issued a solicitation today for nonprofits interested in seeking funds to mentor adult or juvenile offenders headed back into society. The Second Chance Act funds in this solicitation are available only to nonprofit organizations and federally-recognized Indian tribes.

Awards will be about $300,000, and winner would have to come up with a 25 percent match (meaning: for $300,000, you come up with $100,000 to make it a $400,000 project). The primary outcome measure for performance on these grants will be recidivism.

The application deadline is March 18. Applications for the broader Second Chance Act grant competition, which we mentioned here, are due March.4.

***We’ll start this week by offering condolences and prayers to people in the JJ field whose lives were horrifically altered by the earthquake in Haiti this week. There are two groups in particular:

--The Haitian youths in the custody of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, and all of the Haitian staff working for the department. There are 45 Haitian youths in Florida’s detention centers, according to Florida DJJ spokeswoman Samadhi Jones, and more in custody at residential and secure confinement facilities around the state. 

Jones said DJJ is “offering any help we can” to assist juveniles in locating their family members back home. In detention centers, “mental health services are being provided as needed” and other facilities have been notified by DJJ leaders to “be aware these kids might need assistance.”

--The youths locked up at the Boys’ Detention Centre Delmas 33 in Port-Au-Prince. It is not a good situation at the center, based on this excellent story by Vancouver reporter Roberta Staley; lots of youth awaiting trials, orphans, children as young as 8, all in an overcrowded facility using plastic buckets for toilets.

JJ Today could find no information on what physically became of the center after the earthquake, and whether people escaped it. Staley told JJ Today that her unconfirmed information was that the youth detention center had collapsed but that there is no estimate on how many youths died. The adult prison, located in the same complex, also collapsed, and CBS News has reported that many of the 4,000 inmates there have escaped.

“It’s right where the worst of it happened,” Staley said of the center. “Delmas is the main road, the main artery through Port-au-Prince.”

You have to think that at the very least, there are a lot of youths in the detention center who have lost family. The worst case is even hard to think about.

No matter what crime these youths in Florida and Haiti committed, they are very much victims this week. Consider a donation to any of the charities doing much-needed relief work in Haiti.

***The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention put out the solicitation for its Title V Community Prevention Grants, which is really just a reminder of how absurd that program has become. State advisory groups (SAGs) are advised to use the projection of $33,486 per year in their applications. As state budgets for anything other than locked facilities for juveniles whither on the vine (more on that next week), it is a joke to ask SAGs even to complete applications for that amount of funds.

***We mentioned  D.C. juvenile justice boss Vincent Schiraldi’s emotional going-away bash in last week’s column. This week, Mayor Adrian Fenty announced that Marc Schindler, Schiraldi’s chief of staff, will be the interim director at the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. He was expected to become the permanent successor, but it’s D.C., so who knows why the interim tag was used now. Before joining Schiraldi at DYRS, Schindler was an attorney for the national civil rights firm Youth Law Center. 

***Joyfields Institute is hosting a conference called Evidence & Strength Based Strategies for Working with Youth and Adolescents from March 24-26 in New Orleans. Looks like a pretty good itinerary, although the $1,295 registration fee is pretty steep in these economic times.

***Connecticut’s change of its juvenile age range is under way, reports CNN’s Stephanie Chen. If the adjustment to include 17-year-olds this year goes smoothly enough, the state will likely raise the age again to include 18-year-olds, which was the original plan before the budget crisis made such a large conversion too difficult. The big thing to watch will be local police departments, some of which have welcomed the change while others complain about finding space to separate the older teens from adult offenders.

***The ACLU of Southern California is suing Los Angeles County over conditions at its Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Lancaster. The center operates a school that serves 650 youth and is described as a “probation camp,” which has always confused us about California. Why do the county probation departments, the offices tasked with monitoring youth in lieu of incarceration, operate camps? The lawsuit names the county probation and education departments as defendants, and alleges that the educational program at the center is broken.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has just released its first-ever nationwide survey of youth about sexual victimization in juvenile facilities, which was conducted by private company Westat between June of 2008 and April of 2009. Not surprisingly, there are some alarming (although not entirely surprising) results.

We covered some of this in an article, which you can read here, but here are a few more thoughts on the survey.

*Three private facilities refused to administer the survey to youth; their names are buried toward the back of the survey, but we will happily name them here right at the top of this piece:

Glen Mills School, Glen Mills, Pa.

Northwestern Academy, Coal Township, Pa.

Gulf Coast Trade Center, New Waverly, Texas.

Both of the Pennsylvania facilities are among the places where disgraced Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella sent youth after he ran roughshod over their rights in court.

What possible reason could you have for refusing to cooperate with this survey?

*The report is already stirring action. The Justice Department’s Review Panel on Prison Rape will hold hearings on the BJS report, according to a DOJ press release, and the Office of Juvenile Justice will fund a National Training and Technical Assistance Center for Youth in Custody. OJJDP will also conduct a listening session with juvenile corrections leaders about the study, and partner with the National Institute of Corrections to develop some training resources on the subject of sexual victimization.

Past that, it would not be surprising to see more states pressured into paying for on-site independent monitors who could check on victimization. That could come in the form of a broader ombudsman’s office like the one in Texas, which was created as part of the state’s JJ reform in 2007. The existence of that office did not, however, stop a number of Texas facilities from posting pretty high victimization rates.

*Of the youth who reported incidences of victimization, 80 percent reported that no physical injury resulted from said incident. That figure may prove to be one of the key findings, based on what Dana Shoenberg, senior staff attorney for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP), told us. Current rules require anyone who wants to litigate around the issue of prison conditions to demonstrate physical injury, Shoenberg said. And in this case, the threat of force or bribes of protection or drugs leave no physical bruises, even though the acts are considered victimization.

CCLP and other JJ advocacy organizations have pushed for removal of the physical injury requirement, and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va) has a bill in the hopper now that would do just that.

*Because the report’s appendix provides figures for each facility in which the survey was administered, JJ Today predicts that will lead to a whole lot of news coverage about the facilities with high rates, and zero stories about the facilities that demonstrated low levels of reported victimization (and there are a lot in that category). We will try and follow up with some facility administrators whose wards reported low rates of victimization in an attempt to learn what, if anything, they are doing that others are not.

*The amount of inappropriate sexual activity involving female guards and male inmates – of the approximately 2,730 youth engaged in sexual activity with staff, 92 percent were male wards who had engaged in sexual activity with a female staff member – is surprising, because it’s not the image most people have when they think of sexual misconduct in prison.

On the other hand, facility administrators are well aware that it is the most frequent arrangement, according to Michael Dempsey, who is now director of the Division of Youth Services for the Indiana Department of Corrections. Last year Dempsey was superintendent of Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility. Pendleton is one of 13 facilities identified in the report as having the highest rates of reported victimization.

“It typically starts out as a mothering type of relationship,” Dempsey said. “They feel something for the kid, pay more attention to him. And it evolves from that.”

*Female juveniles report a slightly higher rate of victimization than males (14 percent compared with 12.6 percent). What’s interesting is, they report far higher rates of youth-on-youth victimization than males (11 percent versus 2 percent) and far less victimization from staff (5 percent versus 11.3 percent).

*The survey has nothing to do with pure detention centers; it was given almost entirely

to youth who have been sentenced to confinement by a judge. If 25 percent or more of a facility’s wards were pre-adjudicated youth, it was excluded from the survey. So the extent to which victimization occurs at facilities geared toward short-term stays is yet to be quantified.

A quick one, since we have already posted extensively today about the nauseating revelations about reported sex abuse in juvenile facilities.

***After a long national search, the Oakland, Calif.-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency has chosen a successor to Barry Krisberg, its president of 14 years. Taking the helm at NCCD will be executive vice president Chris Baird, who has overseen the NCCD office in Madison, Wisc. since 1985. That office is home to NCCD’s Children’s Research Center, which does cool stuff like this.

***Krisberg, meanwhile, moves over to the University of California-Berkeley’s Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. He will be a senior fellow at the center and teach juvenile justice at Cal’s Boalt School of Law. Until recently, the center was led by David Onek. But JJ Today has learned that Onek has left the center, leaving it in the hands of his former deputy director, Andrea Russi. Onek did not return a call asking what his future plans were. Could they include a job with the Obama administration?

***Speaking of NCCD, the National League of Cities has published a Gang Prevention Toolkit, which it developed after working with NCCD on a gang prevention network in 13 California cities. You can access it here.

***There was a huge turnout for the going-away party thrown for Vinny Schiraldi, the outgoing director of D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services who will head home to New York City and run adult and juvenile probation for the Big Apple. Among those in attendance: Casey Foundation leaders Gail Mumford and Bart Lubow, Campaign for Youth Justice boss Liz Ryan, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Georgetown professor Peter Edelman.

The night included lots of warm, campy toasts, a proclamation from Fenty, shots at Washington Post columnist (and Schiraldi critic) Colby King, and some not-so-veiled references to his sailor-esque vernacular. The crowd even sung a rousing ode to Schiraldi that parodied the tune “My Guy.”

The conventional wisdom in D.C. is that Schiraldi’s number two guy, Marc Schindler, will take over DYRS.

***There was one factoid in the sex victimization report that had nothing to do with the subject, but fascinated JJ Today. Of the 252 juvenile facilities that the Bureau of Justice Statistices deemed eligible to include in the survey, 18 had closed by the time administrators were contacted and two others had merged with another facility. That’s almost 10 percent of the eligible facilities. For advocates of less incarceration, it has to be a good sign that so many candidates for a study on large facilities are no longer around.

Happy New Year!

The W. Haywood Burns Institute, led by Executive Director James Bell, endeavors to address and then reduce racial disparities in local juvenile justice systems, a phenomenon commonly referred to as disproportionate minority contact (DMC). It does this mostly by working directly with communities, particularly those involved in the reform efforts undertaken by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Last year, Burns released Adoration of the Question, a paper that called on states to move beyond half-hearted attempts to address racial disparities. The San Francisco-based nonprofit recently followed up that paper with The Keeper and the Kept, which spells out exactly how Burns believes systems can make real and lasting changes in regard to DMC.

After reading the most recent Burns piece, JJ Today e-mailed some questions for Bell, who responded thoroughly.

JJToday: You have objective decision-making and creating alternatives to detention as the final steps listed in BI’s (the Burns Institute’s) “intentional approach to reducing disparities.” But many would argue that making objective decisions in case-processing and intake, and creating alternatives to detention, should happen whether a jurisdiction has a race problem or not. Is racial and ethnic analysis really necessary to make them happen, shouldn’t that analysis pertain more to policing strategies?

Bell: From our experience in jurisdictions, youth of color are disparately detained for administrative failures – such as failure to appear or placement failures – therefore, we feel it is important that decision-making about consequences for these behaviors is as race-neutral and objective as possible. Directly related to the issue of using detention as the first response to administrative failures is the reliability and quality of the alternatives available, if any. An important component of quality can be that the alternative is neighborhood-based and easily accessible. Indeed, your observation about some of these approaches being good overall practice is well taken. It is our position that reducing disparities is about good overall juvenile justice practice. However, there are strong structural notions that youth of color are so dangerous that “good practice” is not sufficient to meet their needs. Therefore, we need to focus on that dynamic specifically.

As for policing – certainly we see the greatest disparities at the point of arrest, but such disparities get worse as a youth gets deeper into the system, and the consequences become more dire. Therefore, we need to focus on all decision-making points, not just arrest or detention. Every  person who comes into contact with a youth in the system has a role – from police to intake to judges to probation – and because of the number of people involved in the whole process, we don’t want to look at just one decision-maker.

JJToday: A quote on page 8 of the report says “we have yet to encounter one jurisdiction that does not have political issues around race and ethnicity that impact its juvenile justice system – whether they are on the surface, or require some digging to uncover.”

Wasn’t quite certain what that meant. Can you give me an example (don’t have to name the place) of a political issue around race/ethnicity that impacted a juvenile justice system?

Bell: When the BI does work to reduce disparities, we often begin with a collaborative we help to bring together of traditional and nontraditional stakeholders including judges, probation, police, community people, etc. One typical example of how politics affect our effort to impact disparities involves which community people are invited to the collaborative table. There is politics around which community members are perceived as more compliant, more vocal or not team players, and often there’re elected officials around who are afraid how their statement might be perceived. Everyone is eager to speak about public safety but at the same time many are worried about saying the wrong thing or appearing racist. Such worries or problems related to racial politics and interpersonal relations can become so profound that in some jurisdictions we’ve worked in, vocal community members have been shut out of the process by being “disinvited” to meetings, or particular topics have been avoided when they’re at the table.

Almost everywhere we have been, folks of color in communities have a different sense of the system than the system has of itself. Therefore there must be someone that can address that with the skills to mediate with both parties.

JJToday: Much of the existing research on DMC revolves around why minority youth ARE brought into the system more often, and for longer; at the very least, it confirms that it is in fact happening in a lot of places. Taking the flipside of this issue, has anybody tried to figure out why white youth are NOT? Any common trends identified in how white youth avoid arrest and then further involvement in JJ systems?

Bell: We believe that the juvenile justice system is over-utilized. We know that youth of color are committing offenses at the same level as white youth, but youth of color are involved in the system more. The question really isn’t about why white youth are not detained more, but why the system is overused and only for certain youth. We know that youth do not need to be involved in the juvenile justice system to the extent that they are, and that white youth who aren’t incarcerated to the extent of youth of color are aging out of the system without the recidivism rates. We need to give all youth that benefit.
 
That said, there certainly is not as much data collected on the “why,” once the disparity has been identified. To answer your question, it seems the most prominent place that white youth are able to avoid arrest is diversion. White youth get offered and accept diversion programs more than youth of color, and, in our experience as we attempt to create alternatives to detention and other diversions for youth of color, we have found that the nature of the diversion program can sometimes reduce the number of youth of color who accept such programs. Diversion programs, for example, often require admitting to the alleged offense, among other conditions. Many youth of color distrust the system and will not admit to an alleged offense, while white youth readily admit because they trust that the sanction will be less severe.

JJToday: Burns Institute’s approach is one of collaboration: working with community and government to look at and then address race/ethnicity issues in juvenile justice. Is it fair to say that you have encountered sites, some within JDAI, that have no interest in taking on the DMC aspect of JJ reform? How do you generally approach situations where that is the sense your team gets?

Bell: Juvenile justice reform by its nature is work to reduce racial and ethnic disparities simply because of the fact the youth involved in most local juvenile justice systems are predominantly youth of color. Whether a juvenile justice jurisdiction wants to be intentional about reducing disparities as an issue is up to them. We believe that anyone working on juvenile justice reform will have a positive impact on kids of color because they are involved in juvenile justice at disparate rates.

That said, jurisdictions that do not want to self-examine their numbers or practices are brilliant at throwing up distractions. For example, “If the schools don’t come to the table there is nothing we can do.” Or, “It’s all about the parents and we can’t fix them.” At the BI, we are not interested in convincing people to engage in disparities. Our approach is for those who are open to the process. That is why we are in a small amount of jurisdictions. But the numbers of jurisdictions interested in engaging in this process are growing each year, which is promising.

JJToday: We heard from one jurisdiction that the biggest cause of DMC there was really hidden from plain view: judge’s orders for probation. As in, one juvenile judge routinely handed out tougher terms of probation in his orders to minorities than he did to white kids. And then, predictably, more minority youth violated probation. How would you handle that situation, because at some point someone has to confront this judge about a racist tendency, right?    

Bell: First, we would not begin by alleging or assuming that the judge had racist tendencies.  In fact, well-intentioned decision makers, in their desire to help, often try to provide additional supports or structure to high-need youth who are disproportionately youth of color.  However, this often results in the arbitrary application of tougher conditions, policies and practices on these youth, which may actually increase the disparate treatment of youth of color.  Next, we would use data to reveal the issue and work with the collaborative to establish an institutional response to the problematic practice.  Finally, if the only fix is to confront the judge, then that is our job and we have become skilled in having difficult conversations with powerful people. Importantly, we would always approach the judge with data to support the conversation and the development of a tangible solution.

JJToday:  Has any technology or software emerged that you would recommend to jurisdictions in regard to tracking racial/ethnic data?

Bell: There is no need for sophisticated software, just the political will to collect strategically. We have developed a fairly simplistic template to help jurisdictions identify whether and to what extent racial and ethnic disparities exist and to help jurisdictions to identify target populations to focus their efforts.

JJToday: OJJDP calls you tomorrow and says, “James, we want you to come in here and set up one federal demonstration project to help address DMC in local jurisdictions.” Let’s say you have $10 million to spend each year for five years. What’s the best thing you could do with that money at the federal level to help address DMC as a whole?

Bell: Realistically, we would push the system to do what it is supposed to do effectively – devolve the money down to the states and make sure that they participate in a process that is proven to have measurable reductions in racial and ethnic disparities. California is a model for such an effective system – and while its model could be even better – for now folks can take that model and adjust it for local replication.

Also, I would bring together all the JJ Specialists and DMC coordinators and give them very state specific instructions about what their work around DMC must be and that there will be performance measures regarding progress. I would use the bully pulpit to send the message that “handwringing and more dialogue are no longer acceptable.”

The Office of Justice Programs has issued a competitive grant announcement for Second Chance Act funding. Three of the six eligible categories of grantees are state juvenile justice agencies, county juvenile justice agencies and tribal juvenile programs.

OJP has not specified a minimum or maximum grant award in the announcement, but all grantees will be required to match the award with an equal amount of funds; that’s no small feat given the budgetary circumstances in most states. Only half of the state’s share has to be cash, the other 25 percent of a project’s total funds can be in-kind contributions.

The grants can be used for: developing actuarial-based assessment instruments for reentry planning, targeting “criminogenic needs that affect recidivism,” providing case planning/management in the community and supporting services for offenders.

The deadline to register for the grants is March 4. Click here for details.

A final Weekly Notes for 2009! Thanks to everyone who read, e-mailed or contributed in JJ Today’s first full year of existence. Hope everyone in the juvenile justice world – facility staff, probation, administrators, advocates and youth workers – have a great week and a happy New Year. For the juveniles locked up this holiday season, we pass on a special wish that they all get to at least hear from family during the holidays.

***The bill to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act finally made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee after being held up behind nominations and other legislation for weeks. There were no real surprises. An amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was accepted that mandates an audit of OJJDP grant making. The amendment by Sen. Jeff Sessions to create more automatic transfers of juveniles in federal court, which we covered here last week, failed. It’s worth noting that a handful of the present committee members are former prosecutors, and were against the amendment.

Sen. Grassley was the only Republican to vote for the bill; the lone Democrat to vote against it was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), who voiced concern over the size of the authorized spending levels.

How about Sen. Grassley’s Thursday morning? At about 9:30am, he was at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), announcing the formation of a Foster Care Caucus that will focus on the issues of older foster youth facing the age at which they will leave care. An hour later, he’s pushing for an audit to make sure OJJDP does its job. Then, he becomes the only Republican Yay vote on the reauthorization bill, maintaining its all-important “bipartisan” status as it moves to the full Senate. Good morning, indeed, sir.

Meanwhile, zilch is happening on the House side at the Committee on Education and Labor. Heard this from one Beltway advocate: the hope is that editorial-page columns pushing for reauthorization, which appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times recently, will inspire (or embarrass) the committee into action.

***Interesting stand-off going on between Gov. Pat Quinn and Chicago radio station WBEZ. The station wants access to investigate conditions at juvenile facilities all over the state, and no wonder; here is a transcript of an interview on the station with a youth who spent some time in one of the facility’s solitary unit.

Quinn’s spokespeople are saying that can’t happen until the administration concludes its own review of the facilities, which is absurd, but offered up a tour of Cook County, which is undergoing a major overhaul at the hands of rehab guru Earl Dunlap. WBEZ wasn’t buying that, so the saga continues.

Certainly there are privacy issues for systems when it comes to youth in facilities, but media outlets routinely forge arrangements to protect anonymity in these situations. JJ Today remembers Connecticut fighting this battle with a youth media organization – Youth Rights Media, based in New Haven – and losing. The courts forced the state to allow the organization in with cameras to film conditions in the Connecticut Juvenile Training School.

Quinn has generally been open to the reforms at hand in Illinois, and his chief of staff is former Voices for Illinois Children CEO Jerry Stermer, so it’s a little surprising he is taking a tough line with WBEZ. But a high-profile expose might lead to a lawsuit, maybe a pricy reform settlement, and Illinois is up against it in the budget department. He is also about to actually run for governor for the first time, so the less scandals the better for him.

But keeping a lid on facility conditions could turn into the bigger scandal if he isn’t careful. “I think the conditions are a long way from the mission of the agency,  which is to move towards a Missouri model,” said Betsy Clarke, president of the Illinois Juvenile Justice Initiative. Considering the level of commitment to reform in the state and the buy-in from a number of foundations, “it’s sobering the conditions remain so bad for children” in facilities.

***Joyfields Institute, which provides training and education to workers in a number of JJ-related fields, is looking for presenters and trainers. Click here for information on how to pitch your services. Upcoming sessions the institute needs speakers for include:

"Breaking Through With Youth in 2010 -- and Beyond! Evidence & Strength Based Strategies for Working With Youth and Adolescents" - March 24th (Plenary presentations only available. Currently interested in youth focused program talks on Gangs intervention, trends in assessment practice, performance measurement and quality assurance)

"Evidence Based Correctional Reform and Reentry Conference & Workshops: Paving The Way To Community Safety" - April 28-30th (Full day Workshops and hour-long plenary sessions available.  Evidence Based Adult Reentry Practices, Trends, Technology, Performance Management and Budgeting, Criminal conduct interventions, Cultural issues, etc)

"International Prisons & Corrections Leadership Summit: Public Safety Through Evidence-based Correctional Reform, Reintegration and Reentry" - July 19 - 23 (Full day Workshops and hour-long plenary sessions available.  Leadership Development, Reentry Practices, Trends, Technology, Performance Management and Budgeting, Criminal conduct interventions, Values Based Leadership, Cultural issues, etc)

***Some recently released reads:

-The Government Accountability Office’s report to the House Judiciary Committee on OJJDP’s efforts to enhance information on effective reentry and substance abuse programs for juvenile offenders. GAO’s verdict, the office has helped promote an array of programs in both arenas, but only a few of them have generally been proven to be effective. The office recommended the development of “a cost-effective mechanism to regularly solicit and incorporate feedback from the juvenile justice field on the usefulness of information in the Model Programs Guide.”

The Department of Justice agreed with the recommendation.

-Second edition of the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Guide for Preventing and Responding to School Violence, which is done in conjunction with the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Chapters in the guide cover pretty much every angle of school security: prevention, threat assessment, crisis planning, major crisis situations, and handling media and legal issues.

-Charting a New Course, the report by New York Governor David Paterson’s Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice. This reform is almost certainly going to mirror the path taken first by Missouri, and later by D.C.., where the state moves towards small, dorm-style buildings that focus on youth development and education. The task force is lead by John Jay College of Criminal Justice President Jeremy Travis, who was director of the National Institute of Justice under former President Bill Clinton.

New York JJ boss Joyce Burrell might have an easier time than her compatriots in Missouri and D.C., but not for the greatest of reasons. New York is one of the few states that consider everyone over 15 to be adults for the purposes of the justice system. So the state juvenile justice agency can focus in on younger, and potentially less-hardened, juvenile offenders. Also, it’s clear now that a slew of the locked-up juveniles in New York were there for low-level crimes. So downsizing the population could be pretty easy, and with reformer Vinnie Schiraldi scheduled to take over juvenile probation in February, you can certainly expect to see less youths landing behind bars for simple probation violations.

All of that bodes well for an attempt by New York to change the way it works with serious offenders in locked facilities. On the other hand, findings on the state system point to a whole lot of juveniles in need of serious mental health services, and the Missouri model isn’t really targeted at youth in that situation.

Congress passed an omnibus appropriations package for most domestic spending in 2010, and President Barack Obama is expected to soon affix his signature to the bill. In a less tumultuous time, the administration might take issue with the fact that the bill is bloated with thousands of earmarks. Three of his fellow Democrats voted nay on the bill in part because the pork jacked up the price tag (total: $1.1 trillion): Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.), Russ Feingold (Wis.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.).

But the president has too many other irons in the fire between war, health care and job creation. And you have to hand it to Congress and the president, this is the fastest they have arrived at a domestic spending agreement in recent memory.

Here is a look at some of the appropriations related to juvenile justice and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention:

Second Chance Act: The bipartisan bill funds services for juvenile and adult prisoners returning to their home communities, and was signed in to law by President George W. Bush in April of 2008. The act funds some job training and education services through the Department of Labor, and other services through the Justice Department.

On the Justice Department side, Congress did not start the act with a bang last year, dedicating just $25 million. That figure quadrupled to $100 million for fiscal 2010, while the Labor Department appropriation is also around $100 million.

The Justice funding includes $7.8 million for “family-based substance abuse treatment.” Look for that figure to rise over the years if Congress and the feds are serious about investing in what works, because the early evidence from the Pathways to Desistance research is that family-involved drug treatment is one of the few things that clearly lowers the chances of reoffending among juveniles convicted of serious offenses.

Mentoring: $100 million, up from $80 million last year. That’s staggering, when you consider this was only a $10 million pot in 2007.

Community-Based Violence Prevention Initiative: $10 million for the new project requested by President Obama in his 2010 budget. (He asked for $25 million). This could pave the way for PROMISE Act funding, if and when that bill ever gets signed by the president.

Title V: Funded at $65 million. $60 million goes to three projects (tribal programs, gang resistance and enforcing underage drinking laws) completely unrelated to what Title V was originally for: sending grants to states to use at their discretion. That leaves $5 million for the state. Not sure whether it’s more sad or good that this is more than double what states got last year.

Earmarks: Porking is down this year, no question. Taxpayers for Common Sense identified just north of 5,000 earmarks totaling $3.9 billion in the omnibus bill, and the current number of total earmarks for all 2010 spending bills adds up to $6 billion. That is well below the administration’s goal of $7.9 billion, the amount earmarked in 1994. But the defense spending bill has not been finished, and the odds of that coming in below $1.9 billion in pork are very low.

Did the easing off of earmarks happen in youth-relevant pots? Quite the opposite, it would seem. JJ Today counted 277 OJJDP earmarks in last year’s appropriation bill; there are 319 in this bill. The list of earmarks in the Byrne Discretionary Grants was even longer, and many of those are also JJ-related.

At OJJDP, the earmarks eat up every single cent of the $91,095,000 in Part E (challenge and demonstration projects) grants that was appropriated by Congress. The strange funding total for that account leads JJ Today to one conclusion: Congress just put together a list of earmarks, added it up and appropriated that amount.

Here’s a suggestion for OJJDP, should it want to actually craft some sort of discretionary account of its own: Push the dozens of earmarks for mentoring projects into the $100 million mentoring account, and use the money dedicated for those projects in Part E to pay for an OJJDP-conceived venture.

Is that legal? Someone tell us. But really, is it necessary to carve out earmarks for mentoring when there’s a hundred million dollars already set aside for it?

Some notes on a few earmarks that jumped out:

-- Strictly based on dollar amount, the $2.5 million for Boys & Girls Club of Hawaii (for rural youth crime prevention) and the $2 million to West Virginia outfit Community Connections (for a youth training initiative).

-- The big newcomer to the Justice earmark trough is West Coast Chabad, a Jewish nonprofit with a strong presence in California. Four of its branches (in Los Gatos, Tarzana and Riverside, Calif., and in Las Vegas) got earmarks for drug prevention programs.

-- The following groups need to send a hefty fruit basket to their lobbyists and/or government relations personnel:

Starr Commonwealth, Michigan and Ohio (four earmarks, totaling $1.2 million).

Bolder Options, Minnesota (three justice earmarks for $500,000).

KidsPeace, Pennsylvania (three earmarks, totaling $700,000, for therapeutic foster care in Florida, New Jersey and New York).

Enough is Enough (three earmarks adding up to $660,000).

Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, Brooklyn (four earmarks for a total of $1 million).

-- Lots of earmarks for mentoring, and lots of earmarks for residential program providers. You can be sure that a lot of those residential providers badly needed the federal boost this year, as some states cut way back on their use of institutional and residential care.

-- Ramsey County Community Corrections (St. Paul, Minn.) got $560,000 for the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), a project the county works on in partnership with the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That’s worth mentioning because we can’t remember a JDAI site ever landing an earmark.

Two months ago, we noted in our informal guide to the OJJDP grants that the agency had awarded 19 fewer earmarks than Congress had appropriated for Fiscal 2009. Upon recounting, it was actually 11 fewer: 277 earmark grants were announced by OJJDP, compared with 288 appropriated by Congress.

We finally got an explanation last week, after much back-and-forth with the agency. Most of the missing earmarks are easily accounted for, but one traces back to a strange unfolding of events that may prevent one Texas county from getting much federal patronage in the future. The story shows how sloppy earmarking can be.

First, let’s tackle the first 10 missing earmarks that can be easily accounted for.:

* Five earmarks totaling about $1.4 million were absorbed by the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

*Another three, totaling $1.3 million, were funded by the Community Oriented Policing Services program (COPS).

This is significant: That’s a couple million dollars more that OJJDP was able to spend on competitive grants or operating costs. And considering that there is no longer a set amount allocated to OJJDP for general operation, diverting these earmarks to other agencies might be a survival tactic.

*A $400,000 earmark requested by Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) was listed in congressional appropriations for “Allegheny County,” and apparently OJJDP needed some clarification before it could make that grant. The agency has determined that the county agency receiving the funds will be the Allegheny County Housing Authority, according to OJJDP spokeswoman Joan LaRocca, to support the Harrison Township Community Center After School Program. “The award is in process,” LaRocca said.

*A $150,000 grant to Youth Alive, in Louisville, requested by Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), could not be funded because the “Youth Alive branch no longer exists,” according to LaRocca.

Youth Alive shut its doors this summer because of financial uncertainties brought on by a tragic accident on Dec. 18, 2008. Youth Alive was transporting youths home from one of the organization’s events that night and, with three of its own vans full of kids, told four teens to get a ride in a van operated by Herbert Lee, a 16-year-old who, unbeknownst to staff, had stolen the vehicle.

When the police attempted to pull Lee over, a short chase ensued and Lee crashed the van, killing all four passengers. Facing litigation from the families of the teens and a lawsuit by its own insurance company, Youth Alive closed its doors.

Bay City 

Then there is the case of Bay City, Texas. Population: 20,000.

The city was awarded a $500,000 earmark that would essentially pass through to a group called Nu Beginnings Labor Action Committee (NuBlac), which would use the funds to provide drug rehabilitation programs to juveniles. The earmark was secured by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who, surprisingly, is among the biggest pork-securers in Congress.

LaRocca told JJ Today that the earmark wasn’t funded because NuBlac “declined to submit an application for the earmark.” That’s true, and is pretty much all OJJDP needs to know. If someone doesn’t bother to apply for their earmarked money, it is hardly the job of the agency to find out why.

But it was curious that someone would go to the trouble of landing a $500,000 grant, then decide not to provide the basic paperwork required by OJJDP. Especially in these economic times.

Here’s what happened:

NuBlac President Joyce Black moved back to Bay City from California a few years ago, and took NuBlac, the nonprofit she started out West, back home with her.

NuBlac is a reactive type of entity, in that Black tries to pair needs with available resources. This is reflected in the wide variation of earmark projects she proposed to Tom Lizardo, a senior staffer for Rep. Paul:

-$10.3 million for a youth center
-$2.2 million to help improve conditions in low-income housing
-$2 million for a rehabilitation center to serve minority veterans
-$500,000 for the juvenile drug rehab center.

Black pursued all of these in 2008, which meant the money would be in fiscal 2009 appropriations if she was successful. Black met with Lizardo (of the congressman’s office)  and with community leaders, including local judge Nate McDonald and Mayor Richard Knapik.

NuBlac’s formal proposal to congressman Paul included letters of support from Knapik and other elected officials. In an e-mail that Lizardo wrote to Knapik recounting the process, he mentions having “talked with you and Judge McDonald about trying to get together the elected leadership with leaders in the minority community.  It was a positive and productive talk.”

Clearly, in the early stages, Knapik and others were supportive of the idea for this earmark.

Now, a quick but relevant tangent. Aside from her work at NuBlac, Black said she is a trained paralegal and that she frequently dispenses legal advice on basic matters to members of the community.

So it was that two Bay City employees came to her after being fired by the city. The two women worked in the city’s finance department, and had voiced concern over the use of city credit cards to purchase alcohol, expensive meals and questionable hotel reservations. Black continued helped the two employees as they filed complaints for wrongful termination with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This all happened after the initial meetings between Black, the mayor and congressional staffer Lizardo. Meanwhile, Lizardo had put in the request for the earmark and listed Bay City as the grantee and fiscal agent, even though funding for the center would go to NuBlac for the center. Black says this was always the arrangement she anticipated; she never intended that NuBlac be the lead grantee.

In summer of 2008, OJJDP’s 2009 appropriation moved out of the House appropriations committee. In included an earmark of $500,000 for “The City of Bay City” for “the NuBlac rehab center.”

Then in May of 2008, Knapik wrote Lizardo and told him that Bay City would not serve as the grantee. Que paso? JJ Today asked, and Knapik answered:

“The City of Bay City simply could not meet the requirements mandated by the State of Texas for the licensing and operation of a Rehab Center. We were supporters of this venture but we could not be the licensee.”

Black says that explanation is hooey. She is convinced that Knapik got angry at her for helping the former city employees, and pulled the plug on the center as retribution. The EEOC complaint filed by the women was closed, but the Texas Rangers have since July of 2008 been investigating the city for misuse of credit cards and retaliation against former employees, according to coverage from a local newspaper, the Matagorda Advocate. The Rangers did not return a call regarding the status of that investigation.

Her main piece of evidence is a letter from Knapik to Lizardo in July 2008, which does not mention any concerns over licensing. Said Knapik of the rehab center and other requests:

“These requests appear to have come straight from NuBlac, an entity which is not registered to do business in Texas, and which does not have 501(c)(3) status. … Representations to the contrary have been made to us, and we are concerned that such may have been made to you too.”

Tax return documents on the website Guidestar.org indicate that NuBlac is a 501(c)(3) exempt organization, and was incorporated in California in 1986.

Lizardo appears to agree with Black that the project went sideways because of squabbles, not city licensing protocol.

“Simple answer: infighting at the local level,” Lizardo wrote to JJ Today when asked for his take on the ill-fated earmark. He expressed similar frustration in a letter to Knapik: “At some point the relationship between the City Administration and Joyce [Black] have deteriorated.”

That letter was sent in July 2008. Eight months passed before the OJJDP appropriations became part of an omnibus budget bill signed by President Barack Obama. And in that time, nobody stepped up to accept fiscal responsibility over the earmark.

Whatever Knapik’s motivation, it looks crazy in retrospect that the city was named a grantee without ever formally being asked if it wanted to be one. And when Knapik did indicate his unwillingness to take the funds in May 2008, why didn’t the process stop right there? Why did the earmark make it all the way to the end of the line with so much uncertainty around who would take responsibility for it?

The immediate result here is that Bay City will have one less alternative for handling juvenile offenders this year. Long term, the losers may include anyone who looks for a congressional earmark for Bay City in the future.

“If nobody in Matagorda County can be found to take the federal funds, that is fine with me,” Lizardo told Knapik in his July letter. “Frankly, it will greatly decrease our interest in making requests for the area in the future – but with the way this has been handled, personally, I am already at that point.”

Couple of quick-hit notes today

***The Senate Judiciary Committee did not mark up the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act reauthorization at yesterday’s committee meeting. Hopefully the committee gets to the bill next week, now that it has moved the Free Flow of Information Act to the full Senate.  

Meanwhile, the House passed a consolidated appropriations act that encompasses most funding for youth-related agencies, so we might see the president sign a 2010 budget for those agencies soon after the holidays.

More on the appropriations next week, but one thing JJ Today did learn immediately was that the House broke out $30 million of the missing and exploited children’s budget for the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force program. It’s the first time ICAC has had its own line in the House approps.

ICAC Task Forces have had real success tracking down and busting Internet predators, and it’s been a good year for proponents of the program on Capitol Hill. The Protect Act passed in October, Sen. Barbara Mikulski managed to secure $50 million for the task forces in the Recovery Act, and now both sides of Congress have recognized ICAC as an official, stand-alone line in the federal budget. And the $30 million appropriated in both the House and Senate bills is double what ICAC got in 2009.

***The National Institute of Justice announced some research solicitations for 2010, and a number are available for youth-related projects. They include:

Program Name: Children Exposed to Family Violence
Program Contacts:  Bernie Auchter, (202) 307-0154, Bernie.Auchter@usdoj.gov
Bethany Backes, (202) 305-4419, Bethany.Bakes@usdoj.gov
Program Description: NIJ requests applicants to submit multidisciplinary research and evaluation proposals addressing interventions, justice system responses, and child development, coping, and resilience related to childhood exposure to family violence; and the impact of domestic violence on child custody decisions. Children Exposed to Family Violence encompasses a broad area that includes both children as victims of various forms of violence and as bystanders or observers of various forms of violence in the home. This solicitation is limited to violence that occurs in the home and excludes violence within the school, community, or popular culture, such as television, movies, music and video games.

Program Name: Crime and Justice Research/Investigator Initiated
Program Contacts: Karen Bachar, (202) 514-4403, Karen.Bachar@usdoj.gov
Marilyn Moses, (202) 514-6205, Marilyn.Moses@usdoj.gov
Louis Tuthill, (202) 307-1015, Louis.Tuthill@usdoj.gov
Program Description: The Crime and Justice Research solicitation is NIJ’s investigator-initiated solicitation for social and behavioral research and evaluation on topics relevant to federal, state, local or tribal criminal and juvenile justice policy and practice. Most crime and justice topics that are relevant to policy makers and practitioners are eligible for consideration. Applications submitted under Crime and Justice Research that appear responsive to other NIJ-targeted solicitations may be transferred to those solicitations at the discretion of NIJ.

Program Name: Evaluation of Programs to Reduce Gang Membership, Crime and Violence
Program Contact: Louis Tuthill, (202) 307-1015, Louis.Tuthill@usdoj.gov
Program Description: NIJ’s portfolio of gang research seeks to understand the interconnectedness of gang membership, firearms violence, drug sales and criminal behavior and how best to control and prevent gang-related crime. Communities that have reduced gang-related crime have done so by following certain principles and applying them to their unique problems, needs and circumstances. NIJ has sponsored evaluations of several anti-violence and anti-gang programs, ranging from Chicago CeaseFire to Project Safe Neighborhoods. These programs were modeled after, and informed by, the strengths and weaknesses of previous efforts such as Boston CeaseFire and its offshoots (Project Exile and the Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative). NIJ will issue a solicitation for further research about gangs.

Program Name: Research on Sentencing and Community-Based Alternatives to Incarceration
Program Contact: Linda Truitt, (202) 353-9081, Linda.Truitt@usdoj.gov
Program Description: NIJ will seek applications for funding to research sentencing and community corrections policies and practices that promote effective and cost-efficient, community-based alternatives to jail and prison without jeopardizing public safety. Priority research questions include what policies and practices promote effective and cost-efficient alternatives to incarceration for alcohol and other drug-involved offenders, including those with mental health (i.e., comorbid) issues, and what technological applications and protocols for assessment or monitoring support effective and cost-efficient alternatives to incarceration. The target population must include adult offenders in federal, state or local jurisdictions who are convicted on criminal charges and may be sentenced to jail or prison.

Program Name: Graduate Research Fellowship
Web Link http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/funding/graduate-research-fellowship/welcome.htm
Program Contacts  Christine Crossland, (202) 616-5166, Christine.Crossland@usdoj.gov
Marie Garcia, (202) 514-7128, marie.garcia@usdoj.gov 
Program Description: NIJ’s Ph.D. Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program provides awards to accredited universities that support graduate study leading to research-based doctoral degrees. NIJ invests in doctoral education by supporting universities that sponsor students who demonstrate the potential to successfully complete doctoral degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the Institute. Applicants in policy and health sciences or in an education field are eligible to apply only if the doctoral research dissertation is in an NIJ-supported discipline (i.e., social and behavioral sciences, operations technology, information and sensors research and development, and investigative and forensic sciences). This program furthers the Department’s mission by sponsoring research to provide objective, independent, evidence-based knowledge and tools to meet the challenges of crime and justice, particularly at the state and local levels.

Program Name: Human Trafficking
Web Link: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/human-trafficking/welcome.htm
Program Contact: Karen Bachar, (202) 514-4403, Karen.Bachar@usdoj.gov
Program Description: NIJ will seek funding applications for research and evaluation projects to address the knowledge gaps related to trafficking in persons in the United States. NIJ is particularly interested in evaluations of programs that operate demand reduction interventions for sex trafficking and commercial sex acts. NIJ is also interested in research that describes and estimates the unlawful commercial sex economy in the country. All applications should be for research with direct, immediate and obvious implications for policy and practice in the United States.

Program Name: Violence Against Women: Sexual Violence, Teen Violence, Stalking
Web Links: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/welcome.htm; http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/stalking/welcome.htm
Program Contact: Carrie Mulford, (202) 307-2959, Carrie.Mulford@usdoj.gov
Program Description: NIJ will fund research projects to increase women’s safety and improve the justice system and related responses to sexual violence, stalking and teen dating violence. Desired research topics include the criminal justice system’s response to sexual violence and stalking; the extent of the problem of teen dating violence and characteristics of abusive teen relationships; and the evaluation of teen dating violence programs, policies and legislation. Applications addressing other areas of research on violence against women, such as intimate partner violence, will be accepted.

***Interesting reads from this week:

Research on Pathways to Desistance. The report was released at this week's Models for Change conference in Washington, and presents the initial findings of the Pathways to Desistance project, which followed 1,354 juvenile offenders for seven years after their conviction or adjudication. Both Models for Change and Pathways are funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This is just a seven-page teaser for what this project will ultimately produce; you will be reading about Pathways to Desistance findings for years to come. But two significant findings are unveiled in these pages.

First, researchers found that it is virtually impossible to predict which youth will continue to commit serious offenses, and which will desist after adjudication. This is true even when factoring in the decision to place a youth in a locked facility. So youth who are sentenced to a facility are just as likely to stop offending as those sentenced to community programs, and vice versa; youth in community programs are just as likely to continue offending as youth released from locked facilities.

That finding could produce some heated debates down the line, no? Proponents of more alternatives to incarceration can make the argument that if both options have the same odds of curbing criminal behavior, why pick the more expensive and oppressive one (institutions)? And those who favor secure facilities can make the claim that, if community programs can’t guarantee better odds of reduced criminal behavior, why risk it?

The second big finding identifies perhaps the biggest exception to the unpredictable pattern of persisters and desisters: self-reported substance abuse. Researchers found that substance use strongly related to continued criminal activity, and also found that substance abuse treatment that involved the offender’s family can prevent future offending.

Juvenile Justice Update October/November. This didn’t get released this week, but we read it over lunch a few days ago. Very, very good as usual. Update is available by subscription only, but it’s worth the money. This issue includes Marion Mattingly’s  interview with Miami-Dade Juvenile Services Department Director Wansley Walters, Ted Rubin's fantastic look at record sealing/expungement,  and Ken Kozlowski’s breakdown of recent legal activity around juvenile justice.

***Speaking of Walters, JJ Today heard that OJJDP will not fall back on her or other candidates who had been interviewed for the OJJDP job before Karen Baynes was recommended to the administration (Baynes withdrew from consideration last week). The word is that it’s back to the drawing board in the search for an administrator.

Most JJ leaders will be diplomatic about it with an administration that is still viewed as amenable to juvenile justice reform, but the delay on nominating an administrator has a lot of them ticked off. The headless agency has been on the sidelines as advocates press Congress on reauthorization and the PROMISE Act.

For what it’s worth, it looks to JJ Today like the office has been remarkably more functional this year under the leadership of Acting Administrator Jeff Slowikowski and deputy Melodee Hanes. OJJDP has probably released more publications and reports this year than it did in the past three under J. Robert Flores, and there have been few complaints on review and dispersal of 2009 grants and Recovery Act money.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) on the schedule to get picked up tomorrow or next week. Our guess is next week, because the committee meeting scheduled for tomorrow has a ton of items on the agenda.

Two pieces of news leading up to the markup. First, the Campaign for Youth Justice (CFYJ) is circulating a letter signed by six former OJJDP administrators that urges the reauthorization of JJDPA. It is the first time in history that a group of former administrators have voiced support for reauthorization. And really, it’s only the second time that a group of former administrators have done anything together; the first was a panel hosted by Youth Today last month.

The signors are: Shay Bilchik, John Rector, Verne Speirs, Ira Schwartz, Robert Sweet and John Wilson. Wilson was never a senate-confirmed administrator; he was acting administrator 1993 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2001

Two living former administrators do not have their name affixed to the letter: Reagan-era administrator Al Regnery and George W. Bush’s administrator, J. Robert Flores.

CFYJ Executive Director Liz Ryan tells JJ Today that she thinks Regnery would have signed it. She admittedly got the letter to him late in the game, and the campaign wanted to get the letter into the hands of Senate and House leaders this week.

She did not ask Flores to sign. “I did not want Flores’ name,” Ryan said. “He damaged the credibility of OJJDP. It would have lessened the impact of the letter.”

Second piece of news: Sen. Jeff Sessions may introduce this amendment to the bill, which would allow federal prosecutors to transfer more juveniles into adult court without having to get judicial approval.

The amendment is pretty limited in scope. It allows prosecutors to transfer freely in cases where juveniles have committed very serious offenses against certain federal law enforcement officers or U.S. officials and judges.

“It is time for the rest of the country to … treat juvenile murderers the way we treat adult murderers; as dangerous predators that should be removed from society,” Sessions wrote in an explanation of the amendment.

Ryan and a number of other JJ advocates fear the precedent set when the feds give prosecutors more discretion on transferring juveniles to adult court. “It sends the wrong message” to states, Ryan said. “It says it’s okay to give prosecutors unfettered review authority.”

Ryan said she’s fairly confident the amendment will be defeated in committee, but CFYJ is pushing for people to sign this online letter in opposition to the amendment.

JJ onlookers were hoping that the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) would be in the news because the president nominated someone to run it. Instead, the office finds itself on the fringe of a situation involving Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), who is front and center in the health care reform debate as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Baucus’ girlfriend and former staffer, Melodee Hanes, has been the acting deputy administrator of policy at OJJDP. But before she got that job, it turns out, Baucus recommended her and two others to the Obama administration to serve as U.S. attorney for Montana, and did not disclose at the time that he was in a romantic relationship with Hanes.

Hanes withdrew as a finalist for that job so that she could live with Baucus in Washington, according to a statement sent to the website Main Justice by Baucus spokesperson Ty Matsdorf. Hanes’ ex-husband, Thomas Bennett, had other thoughts for Main Justice.

In her role at OJJDP, Hanes oversees a staff of 10 who work on policy development and  communications. That staff is responsible for providing legal and policy advice to the administrator and for setting the direction of research, technical training and assistance. 

“She was recommended for the position because of a very close and personal relationship with Max Baucus and she withdrew because of a very close and personal relationship with Max Baucus,” Bennett told the website.

Baucus insists that he did not promote her for the job at OJJDP. “Mel applied independently with the Department of Justice, and, not surprisingly to anyone who’s looked at her resume, got the DOJ job on her merit,” he said in a statement issued last week.

Hanes’ resume seems pretty light for a U.S. attorney job, but it does reveal a familiarity with children’s issues. Before joining Baucus’ staff in 2002, she prosecuted sexual assault and child abuse cases in Yellowstone County, Mont., and before that she trained child protection investigators for the Iowa Department of Human Services.

The pattern of children who witness or experience violence and who later commit acts of violence themselves has been a focal point for OJJDP in the first year of the Obama administration.

For Hanes and OJJDP, the political issue might erode a promising connection to Congress, particularly in regard to the effort to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.

“Her connection to the Hill could have helped OJJDP and the strengthening of the JJDPA,” one juvenile justice veteran told JJ Today. “But with this cloud over her, she will need to stay away from any contact.”

Karen Baynes has withdrawn her name from consideration for the top job at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

Baynes, who was recommended for the job by the Department of Justice, cited family concerns as the reason for her withdrawal. Her fiancée Art Dunning, vice president for public service and outreach at the University of Georgia, was last week named vice chancellor of international programs and outreach for the University of Alabama. The two will be married on New Year’s Eve.

The notion of moving away to Washington right after getting married was “most definitely a factor” in her decision, Baynes told JJ Today.

Instead, Baynes will also join the Alabama staff. She said she is optimistic that the University would allow her to continue working on juvenile justice issues, which was part of her portfolio in her last job as associate director of the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

“We’re working on that,” she said of a possible juvenile justice project at Alabama.

Now that she has withdrawn, it is anyone’s guess how long it will take President Barack Obama to nominate an OJJDP administrator. A nomination could come quickly, since a handful of candidates were already interviewed by Justice officials (although one of them, Vincent Schiraldi, has already accepted another job). Or, the administration could go back to the drawing board on long-term OJJDP leadership, and leave Acting Administrator Jeff Slowikowski in charge for awhile.

Either way, with a holiday recess coming up at some point for Congress, it is hard to imagine a new administrator actually taking over until spring.

***The Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support and Education (Youth PROMISE) Act was passed out of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, and it is easy to see why Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) is being cautious about advancing his legislation. The bill made it out of markup unscathed by a 17-14 vote, but not without a bizarre attempt to stick it with the sort of get-tough caveat that Scott is committed to avoiding.

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), one of the 232 co-sponsors of the PROMISE Act, proposed an amendment that would establish the following penalties on members of a “criminal street gang,” which he defines as a group of three or more individuals who commit more than two gang crimes (violence, robbery, obstruction, drug dealing, etc):

* For a crime resulting in death, a sentence of death or life in prison

* For kidnapping, aggravated sex abuse or maiming, minimum of 30 years

* For a crime resulting in serious bodily injury, minimum of 20 years

* For any other conviction, minimum of 10 years.

Nowhere in the amendment does Forbes state he intends these penalties only for youth, but you have to think his intention was to include them; after all, it is the Youth PROMISE Act. Was he not aware that the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in cases involving juveniles four years ago?

Forbes’ proposed penalties are in some ways steeper than those included in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Gang Abatement Act, and Scott has expressed little interest in finding a compromise between his and Feinstein’s bills. The companion to the PROMISE Act in the Senate – submitted by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) – now has only two fewer co-sponsors than does Feinstein’s bill.

The amendment was killed because it was not “in order” with the legislation. Another amendment by Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) did make it into the bill, and it would require a newly-created Center on Youth-Oriented Policing to “develop, compile, and disseminate to youth-oriented police … information about the ‘stop-snitching’ culture pervasive in many communities in the United States and tactics to counter such culture.”

The PROMISE Act will be referred to the House Committee on Education and Labor, which controls legislation related to juvenile justice. But don’t expect movement anytime soon. Because PROMISE amends the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), it only makes sense that the reauthorization of JJDPA will come first at Education/Labor. And while the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider its JJDPA bill next week, there has been almost no movement toward reauthorization on the House side.

***A few publications of note that were recently released:

OJJDP 2010 Program Plan

Obviously, much of what the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) does is driven by what Congress funds it to do. But this is the agency’s presentation of its own wish list for the coming year. JJ Today cannot find such a document for any year since 2002, before Bush-era administrator J. Robert Flores was confirmed.

It’s a quick read at 13 pages, and the agency is asking for public comment on the plan. Among the proposals: projects to help programs treat children exposed to violence; a model training and technical assistance program for juvenile defense attorneys; a National Girls Institute that would evaluate gender-specific services for girls in the JJ system; and the Reducing Community Violence program, modeled after Operation CEASEFIRE in Chicago.

Juveniles Who Commit Sex Offenses Against Minors

This got absolutely no coverage in the media, but OJJDP published a bulletin that for the first time provided hard numbers about juvenile sex offenders. They account for 25 percent of all sex offenders, according to the bulletin, and one-third of all offenders known by police to have committed sex offenses against minors. Other findings that distinguish juvenile offenders from adults: They are far more likely to act in a group, commit an offense against an acquaintance and offend against a male victim.

 It’s a little disappointing that there was nothing in here about re-arrests, or at least self-reported continuance of offenses. A singular sex offense by a juvenile offender is not a good predictor of future sex offending, as University of Toronto Professor Howard Barnabee explained to us in a 2007 piece about implementation of the Adam Walsh Act. It would have been interesting to know how much more (or less) often adults were picked up again for new offenses as compared to juveniles.

Meanwhile, Ohio is the only state in compliance with the Adam Walsh Act, writes Associated Press reporter Greg Bluestein.

Strengthening Indian Country Through Tribal Youth Programs

A report done for OJJDP by Sarah Pearson, the deputy director for the Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership (although actually, she did the work on behalf of her old employer, American Youth Policy Forum.) Federal money for tribal youth programs is available from both OJJDP and the Substance and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) at the Department of Health and Human Services, and this report looks at the experiences and successes of five tribal youth programs. The gist: Youth and community members report that the programs help teens avoid negative behavior and improve school performance. Program leaders report that they could do a better job if federal funding agencies coordinated tribal youth efforts better, and gave grants over a longer period of time (five- or ten-year grant cycles).

OJJDP and SAMHSA do have a prototype now for synthesizing similar grants. Both agreed to put out juvenile drug court funding for 2009 in one single solicitation, meaning you either got funded by both agencies or by neither.

***The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by Charles Lane this week in which Lane wonders whether the horrific killing of the four police officers in Seattle will affect the juvenile life without parole (LWOP) cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Maurice Clemmons, the suspect in the killing (who was himself killed by police officers on Dec. 2), was granted clemency after 11 years in prison. Clemmons was 17 when he committed a string of crimes that landed him behind bars, and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s (R) decision to commute the sentence had everything to do with Clemmons’ age at the time of the crimes.

Lane believes this could affect the justices’ analysis of Graham v Florida, in which attorneys for Terrance Graham are asking that the court deem LWOP sentences unconstitutional in cases of juveniles convicted of non-homicides.

JJ Today can think of two reasons that this case should not factor into Graham. First, the very reason Huckabee felt moved to pardon Clemmons was because he was 17 and got 108 years in prison, which is basically like getting life without parole. Had there been a more rational sentencing guideline applied to a juvenile offender at the time, Clemmons’ sentence might have had an actual chance for a parole hearing during his natural life. And if that was the case, Huckabee might not have felt clemency was necessary.

Second, during the oral arguments on Graham, the justices seemed far more interested in the practicality of imposing a bright line on the subject than on the morality. If the court rules against Graham, it will more likely be because the majority of the justices believe that factoring age into juvenile sentences should be done at the time of sentencing and not decades later at parole hearings.

***Funding is available for Offender Reentry Programs from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. SAMHSA is looking for grantees that can provide “substance abuse treatment and related recovery and reentry services to sentenced juvenile and adult offenders returning to the community from incarceration for criminal/juvenile offenses.’

Pretty much any organization or public agency can apply, and the deadline just got extended to Feb. 2. The maximum grant award is expected to be $400,000, but that figure is based on projects from the president’s budget requests for 2010.

***Some JJ stories from around the country:

--The Victor Cullen Center was supposed to be a centerpiece of JJ reform in Maryland. But recidivism rates for youth who have stayed at the center are staggeringly high, reports Brian Witte of the Associated Press.

--A whistleblower has prompted an investigation of conditions at the Kansas Juvenile Correctional Complex.

--Florida State Rep. William Snyder, in a column published on TCPalm.com, says the Supreme Court needs to let states handle the calls on life without parole.

***An advocacy group in Virginia is asking state legislators to put power back in the hands of judges when it comes to moving juveniles into adult court, says Daily Progress reporter Tasha Kates. The full report by the advocacy group, JustChildren, can be found here.

***Officials in Bibb County, Ga. believe their $4 million investment in a new, stand-alone juvenile court building will help change the way the county deals with youth in trouble and in crisis, reports Macon.com’s Mike Stucka.

***Wyoming legislators may finally pass some laws that codify juvenile justice practices in the state, writes Tribune-Eagle reporter Michael Van Cassell, which would bring some much-needed sanity to a state that basically amounts to the JJ Wild West.

In early 2009, many in the JJ world thought there would be talk of Vincent Schiraldi taking a new job around this time. But not in another city.

Schiraldi, director of D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services since 2004, pushed early and with national support to be President Barack Obama’s administrator for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, but ultimately the job was not in the cards. Instead, he will return next year to his birthplace, New York City, to become the city’s probation commissioner.

“While I’m excited to take on a new challenge, I’m also proud of the agency we’ve built together and I am sad to be leaving so many of you whom I’ve come to know and respect over the years,” Schiraldi said in a memo to his staff yesterday.

Schiraldi’s new post places him in charge of New York City’s entire probation caseload, juvenile and adult, which marks a return to the adult side of justice for Schiraldi. He co-founded the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in 1985, and later created the Justice Policy Institute.

Schiraldi flirted with the idea of leaving for one state JJ agency during the past five years. But the commitment to finishing the Oak Hill closure, plus an eye on the OJJDP job, kept him in Washington.

“New York has a lot of problems with its juvenile system right now,” Schiraldi said of his new job, which he will start Feb. 1. But he also said he looks forward to manning an office with some stability.

“When I got here, everything was on fire,” he recalled of his first year at DYRS. Schiraldi was the 20th DYRS director since 1986, the year the agency settled on a court-supervised improvement plan stemming from a lawsuit.

There were four DYRS directors in the nine months before Schiraldi arrived. “It was crazy here,” he said. “It’s not gonna be crazy there.”

There was a lot of support among national reform-minded advocates for Schiraldi to lead OJJDP. The most vocal among them were Bart Lubow, head of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and former Florida juvenile judge Frank Orlando, who also founded residential and community program provider Associated Marine Institutes (AMI).

Schiraldi had his backers in Washington as well. He was one of the few agency leaders left over from the tenure of Mayor Anthony Williams who appeared to have the full support of Mayor Adrian Fenty. It always seemed that the chairman of the human services committee for the D.C. City Council, Tommy Wells, supported Schiraldi’s end game, even when he called him to the carpet for various mistakes. 

He also garnered significant enemies in the city, including law enforcement representatives and a Washington Post columnist.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) D.C. Lodge 1, which includes DYRS among its member agencies, has lambasted Schiraldi and the city for closing its old juvenile secure facility (Oak Hill) in favor of a smaller, less-secure one (New Beginnings Youth Center). The correctional officers union for New Beginnings has done the same.

“D.C. is now safer, and New York is a little less safe,” FOP chairman Kristopher Baumann told the Washington Post yesterday. “He was absolutely open about his belief that juvenile offenders and violent juvenile offenders needed to be coddled.”

Colby King, a longtime Post opiner, has been relentlessly critical of DYRS’ commitment to locking up only a small amount of juveniles and deal with most youths committed to the agency in community programs. In a series of Saturday edition columns that has spanned two years now, King has used sources within DYRS and leaked confidential information to describe individual cases of juveniles who were killed while in DYRS custody, or were accused of committing homicide while still in custody.

“These youth need so much more” than community programs and monitors, King wrote in a Nov. 21 column entitled Safety Without a Net. “They need individualized, professional and sustained support in a safe setting…They deserve to be treated as more than fodder for an ideologically driven social policy.”

There is little question Schiraldi’s tenure has marked a sea change for juveniles in post-adjudication lockup. He inherited Oak Hill, which by all accounts was one of the worst juvenile facilities in the nation. Staff was assaulted, as were its young wards. The legally-mandated school within Oak Hill’s walls was largely manned by the dregs of the public school teacher pool, those who could not quite be fired but who were too bad at their jobs to warrant a classroom anywhere else.

Today, a brand new facility exists. Inside of it is the Maya Angelou Academy, a charter school operated in partnership by DYRS and the See Forever Foundation. There has been some debate on the size and security of the New Beginnings Center, but nobody questions the increased quality of the programs within its walls.

Community programs and supervision have improved as well. Schiraldi junked most of the community program contracts, split the city into two regions, and had community groups help design services for offenders in community custody. He brought in programs such as Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), a well-known provider of community programs for juveniles that is based in Harrisburg, Pa., to assist in that. The newly constituted format, called Lead Entity Service Coalitions, became official Oct. 1 and will have $5.6 million to spend on services this year.

Under Schiraldi, DYRS also increased the requirements of DYRS staff responsible for checking in with DYRS wards in the community, which enabled DYRS to fire people that weren’t doing the job and hire new community supervisors who would.

But King’s columns have painted a very public picture of youths sent back home with the promise of monitoring and rehabilitative programs, only to end up killing or being killed. If DYRS cannot start to counter King’s selective case critiques with some hard evidence that community services are getting better, the calls to lock up more youths will get louder. And Schiraldi’s most powerful defender, Fenty, faces a tough re-election next year.

One DYRS senior staffer told JJ Today a year ago that when Schiraldi brought his team in, it was clear that there were two very different facets of DYRS in need of reform -- the secure facility and the community programs and supervision -- but the agency only had enough money and resources to fix one at a time. Getting away from Oak Hill got top priority.

Schiraldi admits as much. “When a facility is under a lawsuit, they really do suck up attention,” he said. “It’s easy to make community programs play second fiddle, even for me, and I’m totally a community guy. But Oak Hill was so bad, and the lawsuit put so much pressure on it, a lot of time when to that and not case management and community program reform

The opening of New Beginnings this year, five years into Schiraldi’s leadership, brings some closure to the first focal point of reform. It will be somebody else tasked with whatever comes next. Expect Schiraldi to recommend someone from his own staff to replace him.

Whoever it is, the new director will have two advantages. First, it is likely that this will be the year DYRS gets out from under the lawsuit that has hung over its head for decades. The second advantage is that his or her name will not be Vinnie Schiraldi.

The latter advantage may give a successor a better chance than he at coming to the table with “unions and other key stakeholders,” said Schiraldi.

“I had to move fast” on making changes, he said. “That bent some noses out of shape. But I wasn’t looking to be a 20-year man; I wasn’t even looking to be a five-year man.”

What is a juvenile recidivism rate?

In Maine, it’s a measure of how many juveniles are adjudicated again in juvenile court or convicted in adult court. In Missouri, it measures only those juveniles who are re-incarcerated, and does not count any juveniles who reoffend while they are still on parole.

“You’ve got states that do only first-time offenders, or only juvenile corrections,” said Kim Godfrey, deputy director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA), on different states’ approaches to the measure. “That is what it is, but it’s not the entire picture.”

No matter how it’s calculated, juvenile justice advocates and state agency leaders cringe at the idea that their services and youths are judged by such an inherently negative standard. But in a field where evidence of effectiveness is increasingly asked f or, recidivism figures are frequently requested by media, legislators and governors’ offices for three reasons:

1) It reflects what the public most wants to know: whether a juvenile program or service is preventing juvenile crime.

2) If a youth has not been arrested again, it is generally an indication that he or she is making better decisions (although some just get better, or luckier, at not getting caught).

3) It is easy to calculate compared to other things that would indicate success, such as educational achievement, employment or family life. Recidivism can be calculated from specifically recorded events like arrests or convictions; other indicators often require intense tracking or self-reporting.

A cadre of JJ leaders agreed in 2005 that if recidivism has been fated to become a primary gauge of the system, it should at least become a better-developed gauge. It is that meeting that spurred an effort now led by CJCA to establish more standard and thoughtful approach to gauging recidivism.

The History

Recidivism has existed as a correctional calculation for decades, but only recently has a majority of states begun to track it formally in connection with juvenile justice. At the moment, most track the most basic population: youth who end up in locked facilities. A look at the numbers, based on state reports in CJCA’s 2009 Yearbook:

--40 states (including Puerto Rico and D.C.) track it as of 2007, up from 26 in 2005.

--90 percent of states that track recidivism use the measurement for evaluation and assessment; 80 percent use it for agency planning.

--20 states measure recidivism only for juveniles leaving secure care; only four states report measuring recidivism based on the program or facility a juvenile attended.

--No states attempt to calculate recidivism rates grouped by specific charges (i.e., how many juveniles who are adjudicated for armed robbery reoffended.)

The Problem

To explain why many think recidivism needs to evolve as a measurement, allow us to analogize between sports and juvenile justice.

One of the best things about sports stats is that they are set up to facilitate intelligent debates. There are stats that allow for easy comparisons of a player on the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals.

Those stats are kept by one national league, and everyone uses the same calculations to arrive at them. The slugging percentage of a hitter on the Cardinals teams is calculated the exact same way as that of a hitter on the Royals. And what those stats do not tell you about a player or team can mostly be sussed out by the naked eye, because there are cameras and spectators at every game.

When evaluating juvenile justice programs? Not the case. There are no fans, no cameras, and rarely is there a reporter around to observe regularly. But that doesn’t stop a governor or state legislators from wanting to know if that state’s JJ agency is performing well. And the first question, said Godfrey, is always about recidivism.

“The next question is, ‘How do we [compare] to the state next door, or a state with a similar population?’ ” said Maine’s Barry Stoodley, one of the longest-tenured state juvenile justice directors in the nation.

So the stats matter, because they generally stand alone with little visual accompaniment. That makes the lack of something like a National Juvenile Justice League, making everyone calculate statistics the same way, a problem. 

States’ recidivism measurements are all over the place. Some states count juveniles who are on parole, others start measuring once parole is complete; some states track juveniles for two years, some three. About half the states that track recidivism do not count a former juvenile who was later arrested and sent to the adult system, which is pretty baffling.  

The Fix

Appropriately, it is CJCA that undertook a federally funded project to help states move toward a national standard for measuring juvenile recidivism. Money for the project was tacked on to CJCA’s usual grant from OJJDP to help juvenile facilities meet performance-based standards (PbS).

State directors “do want a national consensus on effective ways to measure it,” Godfrey said. But “unless studies use the same population, definition and time frame,” nobody will fully rely on recidivism as a comparative measuring stick.

The goal was to “try and devise a way of standardized measurement, and standardized reporting that transcend a variety of organizational structures,” said Stoodley, who leads the CJCA committee on recidivism. This is crucial is there can be any hope of one day establishing a national standard, he said, because the number of responsibilities assigned to state agencies differs greatly. Some handle everything from pretrial diversion to commitment, some do probation, and some only deal with adjudicated youth.

Godfrey and the committee have developed a three-part model for developing a recidivism calculation. The first phase involves coupling new adjudications with at least one other point-in-time measurement (arrest, for example) to track recidivism for offenders who have been released from a secure facility. CJCA recommends a 24-month time frame.

Once a sound measurement is in place for securely committed offenders, Stoodley said, the second part of the strategy is to extend recidivism tracking to probation populations and, ideally, youth who are either diverted or sentenced to participation in community programs.

The third aspect would be to develop a scoring mechanism, so that recidivism measures would also weigh what Stoodley calls criminogenic risk factors for each youth. This, Stoodley said, helps account for the fact that some jurisdictions simply have youth who are more likely to reoffend than other jurisdictions.

A forthcoming white paper by Temple University Professor Phil Harris will discuss the CJCA committee’s findings on recidivism measurements and its suggested models.

Not Perfect

No amount of improvement can change the fact that recidivism is probably already relied upon too much, and may end up becoming even more powerful if made more precise. It’s not by any means a perfect measurement of effectiveness.

Lots of juveniles will make a bunch of stupid decisions before they make the right ones. It could very well be that Program X gets such an offender after say his fourth offense, has a profound effect on him, but he gets picked up two more times before he gets it together for good.

Maybe that youth goes on to be a successful adult, a good father, and he personally feels that Program X got him on the right path. But statistical history will show that the program failed with him: he completed the program and then reoffended. 

Longtime JJ researcher Jeff Butts, now the vice president of Public/Private Ventures, thinks recidivism is an imperfect indicator of effective juvenile justice services because it’s prone to the effects of bureaucracy and procedure. He e-mailed us a hypothetical example in which two jurisdictions would use a standardized recidivism measurement, but the results probably would not tell the true story. Butts’ thoughts:

What if recidivism were defined as “a new arrest within 12 months of the previous court disposition”? And what if Community A makes heavy use of informal diversion to keep kids out of court while Community B sends nearly every case to court? In Community A, only the most serious cases would have a previous court disposition. Their denominator would be smaller, and thus they would have a higher recidivism rate than Community B.  Community B could correctly claim a lower recidivism rate, but their “success” would be a function of their case flow procedures and not the effectiveness of their rehabilitation efforts.

Plenty of people on the recidivism committee agree with Butts on the flaws of measuring recidivism, which is why CJCA will also hand over a white paper by Butts on some positive youth development (PYD) outcomes that should also become standard measurements for juvenile delinquency program success.

What’s Next

Publishing the work of Harris and Butts essentially will be the end products of the first OJJDP grant, which was made in 2007 under Bush-era administrator J. Robert Flores. CJCA will make a final round of edits to Harris’ paper before turning it over to OJJDP; Butts’ PYD piece will follow it sometime next year.

The hope of the committee is that the Obama Justice Department will want to take the next step on the project. The next phase would involve finding a several states or jurisdictions – “ideally we’d find two or three that were quite different,” Stoodley said – to test the model measurements.   

“We are definitely hoping OJJDP will be interested and engaged in going forward,” said Stoodley.