The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) attempts to reduce inappropriate jailing of young people here and around the country.Jim Payne is a consultant and technical assistance provider for the Annie E Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. Payne began his career as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s office, where he spent six years, the last four trying homicides and major felony cases.
In 1982, he was appointed New York City’s chief juvenile prosecutor. After six years in that position, he was named commissioner of the New York City department of probation. Since leaving government service, Payne has worked in the private, non-profit sector. He advises the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, which he says “is about system transformation. It’s about looking at our juvenile justice system, looking at the children that we make decisions to detain and to place out of home, and making those better decisions – keeping kids in the community, under a degree of support and supervision and monitoring that protects public safety and has good outcomes for the kids.
“Annie E Casey Foundation in Baltimore, MD is 18-years-old. We work in about 104 jurisdictions throughout the nation. The idea is to examine which children do we put in our detention centers – secure detention centers-- and look at why they are there. Are they a threat to public safety? Will they appear in court?,” Payne said.
“The kid who may be dangerous or the kid who may not get caught is the child that should be held. We were holding kids that are neither. We were holding them because we were just angry and we didn’t like what they did, even if it wasn’t that serious,” said Payne offering an example of youth who are too often jailed for instances such as missing their counseling appointments.
Payne said on a national level 35% to 40% of all the youth, at any given point in their detention centers, are youth who have violated probation, but not committed another offense.
“Maybe they’re not going to school, maybe they’re not going to their counseling program,” he said. “Any number of these things, short of committing another criminal offense, and we bring them in, and we determine, ok, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to put you in our detention center for one week, two weeks, or whatever it is, and then you will do what we want you to do. Looking at that from a data perspective, you are using your most expensive resource to correct conduct that is not criminal. And this is universal – every jurisdiction does this, because we’re upset with these kids. They should be going to school. There are better ways to do this that work better for the youth, work better for us, and save us money.”
Payne said the kid who should be in detention is the kid who is doing the robberies, or walking around the streets with a loaded gun. “If you’re going to have a policy that puts a youth in detention, it must be objective. When it is not objective you see the high incidence of youth of color in detention centers and lockups,” he said.
“In urban centers, it is overwhelmingly youth of color,” Payne said. Youth of color make up 85% of the youth detained in Hennepin County, more than two and a half times their representation in the actual community, he said.
Judge Tanya Bransford is the assistant presiding judge of Hennepin County Juvenile Court, and co-chair of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative in Hennepin County.
“One of the first things that Jim Payne noted is also true in Hennepin County –when we started this Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative about three years ago, we had to use data to figure out what’s going on. We didn’t have the data. So we used data collected by the Council on Crime and Justice. We found out that about one third of the young people that were in the detention center were there because they committed new offenses. Approximately one third were there because of a warrant, usually because they failed to show up to court the first time, so it was a bench warrant, or a warrant issued from court for their failure to appear in court, and the other third was there because of probation violations. So, we said we need to figure out how we can do objective screening. We established a risk assessment instrument, which is an objective tool to look at things such as, has the young person failed to appear in the past, how serious is the offense, what are the bases in which we can determine whether or not they should be detained or not.
“We looked at bench warrants and we asked why are these young people not coming to court.
If a young person is charged with, let’s say, stealing a couple CD’s from Target, we want them to come to court for that, but it’s not a public safety issue. They’re not robbing with a gun, and they’re not hurting people. They would get a ticket and a court date. But then they don’t show up for the court date,” she said.
“And if they don’t show up for the court date, the judge would basically turn it over, administratively to the clerk who would automatically issue warrants for the arrests of all the kids that didn’t show up,” she said.
Bransford said the County changed that policy. “We established a policy in Hennepin County of not doing bench warrants for kids who don’t appear at their court dates. .By doing that in conjunction with some other policies we’ve been able to reduce our actual number of young people in the detention center by 33%.”
She said Hennepin County Detention Center can hold 87 persons, but before the policy changes average occupancy was 98. “That meant kids were sleeping on the floors and extra places. We now have an average daily population of 64,” she said.
Bransford said the decrease reflects 23% less African-American kids and other kids of color in the detention center. Yet there remains a disproportionate number of youth of color. “We know that some of the young people are being detained because they are public safety risks – if they’re in with guns, if they’re using them on people, if they’re doing aggravated robberies – those are the types of cases that we’ll probably detain people for because of a danger to the public. The number that are in custody because of a new felony crime is also almost 50% of who we have in custody.
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