Virginia report encourages alternatives to incarceration
Okay, so it’s only a report. But it has such distressing statistics and positive, doable reform suggestions that maybe, just maybe it won’t be tossed on the scrap heap with so many other hardly read studies.
We’re talking about Virginia’s Reinvest in Supportive Environments for Youth Campaign Coalition, or RISE for Youth report.
“Virginia's youth prison model doesn't work,” said Jeree Thomas, a Legal Aid Justice Center attorney and manager of the RISE for Youth Campaign. “The isolation and separation that occurs in facilities is traumatizing for many youth, and it can stunt their social, emotional, and rehabilitative development in ways that are counterproductive to public safety.”
Bad system, bad stats
The present system is a dismal failure. Consider these statistics.
Last year, almost 80 percent of youth were re-arrested within 36 months of release from prison.
A juvenile locked up for more than 15 months was 44 percent more likely to be re-arrested within a year after getting out than one whose sentence was 10 months or shorter.
The cost of incarceration? Try $142,000 for one young person for one year. That’s right, $142,000.
There is also racial disparity. African American youths are only 20 percent of the commonwealth’s population, yet number 43 percent of all juvenile intakes, 56 percent of juvenile detainment and 67 percent of commitments.
And young people in prison fare poorly in school as measured by exams. Only 28 percent passed the English Standards of Learning (SOL) test and 7.2 percent their mathematics test. Compare that to Virginia as a whole—79 percent of all students passed their English and mathematics SOLs.
These statistics should not be surprising as well-meaning efforts by juvenile justice officials to improve public safety and hold offenders accountable via incarceration often backfire because grouping antisocial youth together often results in a “well-documented phenomenon” called deviancy training. That is, when youth receive positive reinforcement for deviant behavior by equally, or more, deviant peers.
Consequently, it is imperative, if one is interested in both public safety and prosocial child development that efforts are made to reduce juvenile incarceration.
Juvenile justice system reforms
Virginia has already taken some steps in the right direction. For one, it is closing the massive Beaumont Correctional Facility that houses 284 and building a smaller facility in Chesapeake for 64. Beaumont was costing $30 million a year to run.
Beaumont, said Gov. Terry McAuliffe, is a gigantic concrete maximum-security prison that houses “these young kids, and I tell you, you walk in and I don’t care who you are, you cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the injustice.” But even the Chesapeake facility is too big for the writers of the report. They argue for smaller, home-like settings that would let youths mature in an appropriate fashion while still being held accountable for their actions.
And they suggest that instead of wasting the $30 million on Beaumont, the money be spent on community-based alternatives that “could serve many more justice-involved youth more effectively than our current prison model.”
One of the alternatives cited was Multisystemic Therapy (MST). It was called an "effective community-based program for high-risk youth."
One can only hope Virginia acts on the RISE for Youth recommendations.
Phillippe Cunningham is a co-developer of MST-SA and a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina
To learn more about what makes MST an effective intervention for at-risk youth, download this white paper.
