This blog is a part of a series dedicated to
celebrate JPI’s 20th Anniversary. Bart Lubow’s piece is excerpted
from comments he delivered at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s JuvenileDetention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) conference in Orlando, Florida in April
2017 on the occasion of JDAI’s 25th anniversary. JPI has been proud
to partner with JDAI since its inception. We are particularly thankful to the
leadership of Bart and other champions from the Casey Foundation and around the
country, who made this success story possible and continue the work.
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Twenty-five
years ago, the juvenile justice system was struggling to survive. It was widely condemned as soft, ineffective,
and unaccountable. Elected officials
across the country, reacting to a brief spike in violent crime, ridiculed and
diminished the system, most obviously by passing a slew of laws that took the
most serious cases and mandated that they be prosecuted and incarcerated in the
adult criminal justice system. The core notion behind the creation of juvenile
justice—that youth were different from adults and deserved a system that
recognized those developmental differences—was at risk of being abandoned.
For
a variety of reasons juvenile justice did deserve criticism. While it was perceived as soft on crime,
juvenile justice was in fact locking up rather minor law
violators—misdemeanants, probation violators and status offenders--in jails and
prisons which we euphemistically called “youth study centers” and “training
schools” but which were endemic with abuse and neglect like their adult
counterparts. None of this would have
been allowed had the youth in question looked like, spoke like, lived near or
were related to people like me. Indeed,
the collective complexion of those who were grist for this mill was darkening
at a rapid rate, with more and more Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American
youth being hauled before a system that routinely acted as if youth of color
were all dangerous and unredeemable.
From this, the Annie E. Casey Foundation
began the Juvenile Detention Alternatives
Initiative. JDAI required a huge political risk, a major shift
in the way we approach pretrial detention for youth, and the development of new
procedures and programs to better serve America's troubled young people.
We believed that the basic myth driving the incarceration explosion—that
locking up large numbers of people was the pathway to public safety—was
fundamentally wrong. Second, we argued
that the use of detention was driven first and foremost by the policies and
practices embraced by adults, not the behavior of the kids. Third, we hypothesized that a focus on
detention reform—while limited given the many problems with juvenile
justice—would spill over to affect other issues. Finally, we argued that no system which
claimed to represent “justice” could have any credibility as long as it was
perceived as biased and unfair in its treatment of youth of color.
Now
there are about half as many youth locked in juvenile facilities as there were
25 years ago, and juvenile crime rates are a modest fraction of what they were
as recently as 15 years ago. If nothing
else, over the past 25 years JDAI has demonstrated that it is possible to
radically reduce confinement without sacrificing public safety.
The
entire trajectory of juvenile justice has changed in the past two and one-half
decades. States across the country are
now raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction and rolling back mandatory
transfer laws, rather than pulling more youth into adult courts and
prisons. More and better tools are being
used to inform decisions and stronger, more innovative alternatives have
expanded the range and effectiveness of options in lieu of confinement. At the national level, the U.S. Supreme Court
abolished the death penalty for crimes committed before age 18 and declared
mandatory juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional. A movement to end solitary confinement has
emerged with interest at the local, state and federal levels of government. Over the past 25 years, juvenile justice,
rather than retreating under criticism, has increasingly served as the
laboratory for more enlightened and effective approaches to crime, some of
which are now infiltrating many state adult justice systems.
While
JDAI, is not responsible for all the progress of the past 25 years, it has been
in the center of much of it and it at least deserves credit for forsaking the
myths and excuses of the past and for helping to nourish a wide array of
practitioners, advocates and researchers whose ideas and voices were hidden
during the dark days of the so-called super-predator era. We have learned many
things relevant to a better future, not the least of which is to not be
constrained by the limits that the status quo would impose on our
thinking.
We
have come very far, but not nearly far enough for this system to pass what we
have come to refer to as the “my child” test.
There can be no let-up in our clamor for change, not while lives are at
stake and communities suffer the effects of mass incarceration. The clamor must now come, first and foremost,
from the next generation of reformers. All enterprises of this scale and
influence are built from collective, collaborative work. All of us stand on the shoulders of others.
Bart Lubow is a Senior Consultant with the
Annie E. Casey Foundation
With almost 40 years
of improving criminal justice systems, Bart Lubow served as director of the
Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile
Justice Strategy Group from 2009 until 2014. Today, as a senior consultant, he
supports the Foundation’s juvenile justice reform agenda, which includes
reducing unnecessary confinement in order to minimize long-term consequences of
incarceration, prevent family disruption and increase opportunities to
positively alter the life trajectories of youth in the juvenile system.
