#NoNewYouthJail

The Annie E. Casey Foundation states “Research shows that placement into a secure detention facility can have an outsized impact on the ultimate case outcomes for court-involved youth – with potentially profound and negative consequences….Youth who spend time in custody are less likely to complete high school, less likely to find employment, and more likely to suffer mental health problems than comparable youth who are not detained. In addition detained youth are more likely to be re-arrested, adjudicated or convicted for new offenses and incarcerated than youth who remain at home awaiting court or pending placement”.

· The Governor has recently been quoted as saying that the “Raise the Age” Bill is a progressive piece of legislation. He is sadly mistaken. New York State is the 49th out of 50 States to start treating 16 and 17-year-olds as juveniles and furthermore, the implementation of the Bill is outdated and regressive. There is a disconnect between the actual legislation and the implementation.

· The State adopted a reform bill called “Close to Home” in 2012. This means that children should be kept in their communities and close to their families and not shipped away. The bill appears to apply only to New York City and not the surrounding counties. Therefore the State is encouraging Westchester County Department of Probation to build an 80 bed detention facility for a 14 county region. Most of these youth have not been adjudicated. The counties are: Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Delaware, Broome, Duchess, Ulster, Sullivan, Columbia, Greene, Schoharie, Nassau and Suffolk. Some of the counties are over two (2) hours away. Shouldn’t the “Close to Home” policy be applied to all children in New York State?

· As part of the Raise the Age agreement, New York State is willing to pay $1,200 a bed for County children and $2,400 for out of County, thus creating an incentive to ship children away from their communities. (In contrast, the 40 year old Youth Shelter Program of Westchester located in Mount Vernon has a per diem rate of $200 and provides many more services and a much lower recidivism rate than the County detention center.) Why these discrepancies in per diem rates?

· The Raise the Age funding is limited to incarceration. It does not include any money for community prevention/diversion. We recommend that for every dollar spent on incarceration there be a dollar for dollar match for prevention/diversion.

· Community Prevention/Diversion starts with the Police. When police officers are poised to arrest a youth they have many alternatives to arrest and incarceration at their disposal: community service; church sponsored youth groups; community centers with tutoring programs, youth courts; alternatives to incarceration centers; and wrap around mental health services all imbedded in the community. Arrest should be the last resort.

· As compensation for a strain on the Juvenile Justice System New York State is providing money for construction and staffing of a jail for children. Is there data to justify this thinking? Is there an agency looking at the Juvenile Justice System as a whole? Will the incipient legalization or decriminalization of Marijuana affect the numbers? Will we continue to have a disproportionate number of Children of Color incarcerated in our County? Do we know who is being diverted and who is being incarcerated? Have we consulted with the other 48 States as to what is the most effective and appropriate system?

This incarceration plan is a travesty for our young people and needs to be stopped, and re-evaluated. We need to redirect funding and reach deep into our communities to raise up the services that would welcome our youth as a diversion from incarceration. We need to do it NOW!