Texas Juvenile Crime Justice Reform Reduces Crime & Saves Money

In 2007, after abuses were reported in Texas juvenile facilities, the legislature put together a reform package. Part of its aim was to keep youthful offenders close to home in the hopes of reducing the size of the correctional system, the second largest in the United States. Money that would have been spent putting kids behind bars, building new jails and prisons, and all the ancillary costs of incarceration were to be funneled into community supervision.

Over the course of the years since the reforms began, juvenile incarcerations plunged from 4,305 to 1,481, a 66-percent drop. At the same time, arrests fell by 33 percent from 136,206 in 2007 to 91,873 in 2012. So, it would not appear that locking up fewer adolescents was a threat to public safety.

By closing eight juvenile correctional facilities, the state shaved its appropriations from $486 million to $290 million from 2006-2007 to 2014-2015. The savings went to local probation departments that find community supervision, services, and treatment for the offenders.

Imagine yourself 17. You’ve been convicted of armed robbery. In jail, you were caught with a shiv. In the eyes of the institution, no excuse for that. However, any viewer of the TV series “Law and Order” would know having protection might be the only way to stave off predators.

Now take this further. Imagine you are confined to an 8-by-10 foot cell, 23 hours a day without human contact. That’s what happened to Michael Kemp. “You just like, ‘Man, I feel like an animal in here. I don’t even feel real...where I’m not even a human being."

Pew Poll Finds Voters  Support Juvenile Sentencing Reform For Those Who Commit Lesser Crimes

In the 1990s, the country and its lawmakers took a “get tough on juvenile offenders” stance. Keeping the community safe by getting delinquents off the street and locking them up was the attitude. 

Judging by a 2014 Pew Charitable Trusts poll, the times, have changed.

Study Finds Hispanic Juvenile Offenders in LA County Show Marked Improvements with MST

With Hispanics and Latinos making up more than 48 percent of Los Angeles’ population, it is no surprise that those concerned with the local juvenile-justice system would turn to the Rand Corporation to evaluate how effective Multisystemic Therapy is with minority youth offenders. 

Rand’s study followed 757 juveniles who received Multisystemic Therapy and 380 offenders who did not participate in the program from 2003 to 2010 to compare the outcomes of both groups. Of the MST group, 77 percent were Hispanic as compared to 69 percent in the non-MST group.

The results show MST-treated youth having a lower recidivism rate and doing better in their dealings with the county's probation system. (See below.) MST youth had significantly lower incarceration rates than the other group (11.2 percent, compared with 20.3 percent) and significantly higher rates of completion of community service (8.5 percent versus 2.6 percent).

Legal Highs Changing The Face Of Substance Misuse In The U.K.

It used to be when you talked about illegal drug use in the United Kingdom, you were talking about weed, cannabis, hashish, coke, snow, whiz, amphetamines, speed, and heroin. The risk, dangers, and effects of these substances were widely known.

However, in recent years, we are seeing the increased use of what is called “legal highs.” It is not against the law to buy these substances in head shops or at festivals. They are often sold as “not for human consumption,” which means they are not yet controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Research is ongoing, and decisions are being made on whether they should be made illegal with some already classified A, B, based on their potential harm.

The top 6 Reasons MST eschews out-of-home placement  

Juvenile crime is, unfortunately, a common topic in today’s news and leaves parents, police and communities struggling in their search for answers. Also unfortunate is the call by some people for “more of the same”—incarceration, residential facilities, or other cocktails of the commonly used approaches that have failed to curb the problem.

Our juvenile justice system is like a bicycle stuck in one gear, and that gear is incarceration. But it just doesn't make good sense to keep building prisons and sticking youth in them for non-violent offenses. The body of evidence on successfully rehabilitating juvenile offenders emphasizes keeping adolescents with their families and in their schools. Worse still, locking kids up doesn’t make our communities safer.

In this era of extreme political contentiousness in the United States, it seems as if the conservatives are the conservatives, the liberals, the liberals and never the twain shall meet.

Except . . . there is one issue on which the two adversaries—or at least some of them—can agree. Criminal-justice reform.

There is no debate that juvenile crime is of great concern in the United States. According to the FBI, youths younger than 18 commit almost 20 percent of all serious crimes, 13 percent of violent offenses, and 20 percent of crimes involving property. It’s also been found that a single lifetime of crime amounts to a $1.3 to $1.5 million burden on society. Knowing that makes it even more imperative to keep adolescents from becoming habitual criminals.

Where there is debate is how to deal with this problem and where to allocate funds earmarked for it. There are many who lean toward paying as little as possible upfront. Policymakers and those who sign the checks are under pressure to come up with programs that reduce crime without draining the budget. Often, they choose individual therapy instead of a program like Multisystemic Therapy (MST). What they overlook is the long-term savings when a treatment such as MST is implemented. It has been shown that youths commit fewer crimes following MST. That means lower future expenses for taxpayers and crime victims relative to the expenses associated with individual therapy.

MST provides parents with the tools to build strong families

When I think about the kids I meet and the families who invite me into their homes, I think about the despair that no one should have to experience. These parents at some point lost the power, not only to their child who is acting up but to the system. If you have ever held the hand of someone who is fighting back the tears as the judge is preparing to announce the decision he or she has made about the child's future, you know what despair I'm talking about.

We, as a nation, are sometimes riveted to something in our popular culture that we can’t stop talking about it and wait anxiously for the next episode or revelation. We speculated about Walter White’s motivation and moral compass as we collectively watched “Breaking Bad.” We repeated snippets of dialogue and mourned many deaths on “Downton Abbey.” Today, it’s not a TV show that has captured our national attention. it’s a podcast, “Serial.”

For many listeners, it’s a true “Did He Do It?” Did Adnan Syed, then 17, kill his former girlfriend? Did he, along with a small-time drug dealer named Jay, drive her body and ditch it in a park, as Jay told the police? Or was Syed at a library across from his high school, as one witness named Asia, who was never called to testify, maintains?

It’s a murky, complicated 15-year-old case that sent Syed, declaring his innocence, to jail for life. Most people were drawn to the podcast because of the mystery and anticipation for the next installment. They have theories about the case and how information was highlighted or downplayed, based on personal perspective. The Marshall Project interviewed legal minds right before episode 11, and it’s no surprise that lawyers leaned toward explanations and theories that were consistent with whether they “played offense or defense.”   I am drawn to it, in great part, because I filter everything through my MST lens.