Balance Needed In Juvenile Justice
Back in 1977, Washington’s Legislature loaded up the juvenile justice system for a magical mystery tour on the battered bus of ‘60s idealism: What troubled children needed was lawyers, rules, rights, bureaucracy. So the state gave kids a right to run away, made it tougher to remove children from abusive families, placed its faith in serial foster care by government-regulated strangers and created a by-the-numbers sentencing system for juvenile crime.
Today, with street kids too numerous to ignore, the foster care system overwhelmed and juvenile institutions crammed with streetwise thugs, it has begun to dawn on the Legislature that mistakes were made.
Mistakes will be made again, as lawmakers rush toward reform, unless they think with care about what went wrong, what works and what the state’s limited budget can afford.
Some promising reforms are on the table. Some of the best proposals come from Attorney General Christine Gregoire and the Council on Families, Youth and Justice. The Council pulled together educators, judges, police, parents, social workers and teens to examine our sick system and recommend reforms.
The most dangerous temptation is to embrace the current decade’s simplistic solution: git-tuff conservatism. There seems to be no limit on the readiness to lock kids up. But there is a limit: incarceration is very expensive. And while cages certainly have their place, they’re at least as likely to corrupt young people as to correct them. Worse, in today’s political environment dollars spent on cages are dollars taken away from colleges and schools.
If the Legislature is wise, it will explore practical remedies such as these: Empower parents and authorities to pull runaways off the streets and commit them for a brief period of professional diagnosis and drug detoxification. Allow secure youth treatment facilities to operate in Washington so parents no longer have to kidnap runaways and haul them to other states for help. Authorize a speedy licensing process for provisional foster homes, so that abused or neglected youngsters can be placed with trustworthy people they know - relatives, friends, members of their church or tribe - rather than with a series of strangers. And yes, the sentencing system for juveniles needs toughening, but with greater discretion for judges.
It is time for another set of reforms, similar in scope to those of 1977. Society can ill afford another bad trip on any ideologue’s bus. Lawmakers should listen, as the Council did, to a broad range of expertise as they repair the juvenile system.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board