Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) by Bernstein Nell

Author:Bernstein, Nell [Bernstein, Nell]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781595589668
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

Burning Down the House

10

A NEW WAVE OF REFORM

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

—Paul Romer, professor of economics, Stern School of Business, New York University

THE STORY OF JUVENILE justice is often told in terms of pendulum swings between the opposing goals of rehabilitation and punishment. These swings, however regular, have been limited in range. Whether we tell ourselves that what goes on behind the gates of the juvenile prison is intended to punish or to heal, the legitimacy of placing children in locked facilities is not fundamentally challenged.

Still, after decades during which the growth of the nation’s youth prisons seemed inexorable, we find ourselves today in the midst of a shift of a magnitude that would have seemed inconceivable even a decade ago. Across the country, the number of juveniles who are incarcerated is plummeting. But whether the current era will be remembered simply as a particularly vigorous swing of a familiar pendulum or heralded as a moment of genuine transformation remains to be seen.

Over the course of a single decade, the number of juveniles confined in local and state facilities in the United states dropped 39 percent, from a high of 108,802 in 2000 to 66,332 in 2010—a low not seen since 1985. So far, this trend shows no sign of slowing. In fact, it has picked up speed in recent years. Fewer juvenile prisoners means fewer juvenile prisons: between 2007 and 2011, eighteen states closed more than fifty facilities in all.

States that were notorious for the fervor with which they locked up their young—California, Louisiana, New York, Illinois, Texas, and others—have shifted course, some radically. In some of the nation’s largest and most prison-happy states, the reductions in juvenile incarceration rates have been particularly dramatic. California, for instance, cut the daily population in state-run juvenile facilities from about 10,000 in 1996 to 922 in June 2012—a drop of more than 90 percent. Likewise, in the years since the Texas Youth Commission was rocked by a sexual abuse scandal in the mid-1990s, Texas has closed nine state-run youth corrections facilities. The number of young people in Texas state juvenile institutions went from 4,700 in fiscal year 2006 to 1,500 in 2012.

This good news is tempered by the fact that conditions in many state facilities remain inhumane and intolerable. Beyond this central wrong lies an array of other concerns. In California, which has achieved its population cuts largely by transferring responsibility for young lawbreakers from the state to the counties, an emerging issue is “justice by geography.” Some counties are responding to the new mandate to keep kids near home with imagination and courage, asking multiple local agencies to collaborate to devise effective community-based responses. Other counties, however, are spending state funds now earmarked for local juvenile justice efforts to build new lockups or expand those that exist. While it is too soon to say with any certainty how the big picture will shake out, recent research indicates that despite the massive cuts at the state level, when

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