Group in Pulaski County told of child-jail alternatives

Public servants who watch young people move through the Pulaski County juvenile-justice system met Tuesday to discuss making detention a last resort rather than a stopgap.

County attorney Chastity Scifres introduced the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Close to 300 jurisdictions across the United States use the initiative. By consulting research, those areas learned how to lock up fewer children before their hearings while still maintaining a safe community, Scifres said.

Children who are held in jails before their trials are much more likely to be found delinquent and committed to a correctional facility, the foundation says. Meanwhile, there's little to no benefit to public safety.

Detention, even for a day or two, strains a child's relationship with schools, family and community, advocates say.

What the initiative offers is an online "playbook" on ways to avoid locking up low-risk children, Scifres said.

She conducted the training in a conference room at the Arkansas Association of Counties building, 1415 W. Third St.

This year, an outside agency scrutinized Pulaski County's services for at-risk youths. Though the county's improvement in recent years was noted, the report said there was room for more.

In 2016, about 42 percent of children admitted to the 48-bed lockup on Roosevelt Road were charged with misdemeanors, according to a report created by the Center for Children's Law and Policy, based in Washington, D.C.

More than half of youths, about 54 percent, were sent to jail for probation violations, a percentage that's "among the highest that we have seen in our work on juvenile justice reform," the report says.

And "virtually everyone recognized that detention is often used in Pulaski County for other reasons: e.g., to sanction youth for violating orders of the court ... or to serve as a 'wake-up call' for youth," the report says.

Going forward, the initiative can help county officials establish alternatives to jail, Scifres said. In January, criminal-justice stakeholders will begin debating how to forge those alternatives.

They could include options like day or evening check-ins and electronic monitoring, according to Scifres' presentation. Benton and Washington counties already have certain alternatives in place.

Data collection will be key, Scifres said.

The county assessment referred to some statistics taken from the Administrative Office of the Courts.

But that information "contained so much missing data for race, ethnicity and gender that an analysis of intakes by those variables was impossible," the report says.

The eventual goal is to track each child's race, ethnicity, gender, geographic location and offense, plus aggregate averages. That way, trends, and unintentional biases, can be addressed, Scifres said.

Minority-group children are locked up "in droves," said Pulaski County Juvenile Judge Joyce Williams Warren, who attended the two-hour training session.

"We have biases that we don't even think about, sometimes," she said.

While black children made up about 47 percent of the county's youth population in 2015, they represented 87 percent of jail admissions, and 81 percent of commitments to the state Youth Services Division in 2016, according to the county assessment.

In support of small, data-driven changes, Scifres pointed to Carma Gardner, the director at the Roosevelt Road jail.

Among the report's recommendations were to eliminate a mandatory 24-hour "lockdown" period for every child. Also, children should wear regular clothes, not orange jumpsuits, the report says.

Gardner made those changes, and violent incidents did not go up, Scifres said.

Some debate arose Tuesday when Scifres mentioned "risk assessment tools," in which youths would be graded at low, medium or high risk before they see a judge.

Factors, like the seriousness of the crime, would be taken into consideration for the grade. That way, judges would know something about the child they're seeing to make an informed decision on detainment, Scifres said.

Laura Robertson, who works in juvenile intake for the 11th Division, voiced some skepticism.

"I mean, we're dealing with kids, not numbers," Robertson said.

A couple other people asked if such a system would overlap with work already being done by intake officers.

"It's proven. It's evidence-based. It works," Warren said, partly in response.

And as always, saving money is a motivator, said Herbert "H.L." McGill, a program manager at the state Youth Services Division.

He estimated it costs tens of thousands of dollars to keep a minor locked up for a year.

"We could send them to Harvard for that."

Metro on 12/06/2017

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