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by Judge Irene Sullivan

In the Tampa Bay area, across Florida and throughout the nation, something strange and exciting is happening in world of juvenile justice.

Crime is down among juveniles, youth correctional facilities are being closed, schools have backed off the insanity of “zero tolerance,” and more and more young people are able to get through their teenage years without acquiring an arrest record. Soon, I hope, we’ll be able to see a corresponding reduction in the adult prison population, as fewer young people enter the “school to prison pipeline.”

I served nine wonderful years as a juvenile judge in Pinellas County, retiring at the end of 2010. When I read about these recent trends and see the favorable statistics, I experience a myriad of emotions: hope, skepticism, worry, satisfaction, gratitude and fear that the pendulum will swing the other way. After all, we are still the incarceration nation of the Western world, with over one percent of our population, and 1 million teenagers, locked up behind bars every night. What is causing this favorable turn of events?

Many clichés come to mind: Strange bedfellows, the “get tough on kids” right, and the more liberal “give them another chance” left, finally coming together to be “smart on kids” instead. Chicken or egg? Are we closing residential facilities for youth because juvenile delinquency is down, or is juvenile delinquency down because we are closing residential facilities that didn’t work, created recidivism and drained scarce dollars better spent in the communities? You can’t fix the kid until you fix the family. Have we finally realized that family problems—abuse, neglect, generational crime, violence or poverty—create the delinquent child, so that we’re putting more services into the front end to avoid expensive incarceration on the back end?

Let’s take a look at the good news—juvenile crime is down—on a local, state and national level:

Pinellas County: In April 2009 we kicked off our Juvenile Arrest Avoidance Project, with a goal of keeping first time misdemeanants from having an arrest record for typical misdemeanor crimes, such as petty theft, disorderly conduct, simple battery or possession of a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, but (and this is extremely important) assuring that the youth completed the counseling or program that addressed the crime.

Prior to this, we spent months studying the successful Civil Citation program begun by Wansley Walters, now Secretary of Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice, but then the director of the Juvenile Services Division in Miami-Dade County. Ms. Walters had substantially reduced the number of youth arrested, while providing services, lowering recidivism and substantially cutting the costs of overnight detention. We then took an inventory of all the various prevention and diversion programs offered by law enforcement, the court, the state attorney’s office and various agencies in Pinellas County. We were rich in resources, but slow and ineffective in directing them to the individual youth committing a first time misdemeanor crime.

So we got organized; we worked with the many law enforcement agencies in Pinellas County, the courts and the Clerk of Court and produced a program we called the Juvenile Arrest Avoidance Project (JAAP). Instead of an arrest, the youth is brought to the juvenile assessment center to be assessed for services, an arrest complaint is held “in escrow,” and if the juvenile and family complete the ordered services, no arrest is filed, no prosecution occurs. This is extremely important as under Florida law, juvenile arrest records are a public record and can be purchased from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Often, an arrest record affects the juvenile’s ability to get a job, go into the military, obtain a scholarship or student loan. We asked ourselves: Except in matters of public safety, what does an arrest do? Believe me, we upheld our obligation to protect the public and if robbery, burglary, carjacking or felony drug possession occurred, we didn’t hesitate to arrest and lock up the youth. Our focus in avoiding an arrest was on first time misdemeanants, often arrested for misbehavior rather than a crime. I’m proud to state that 2 ½ years later we have saved over 2,500 kids in Pinellas County from having an arrest record, with about a 90% completion rate for the services ordered, and less than a 10% recidivism rate. Those are statistics to be very proud of, and it took the work of many law enforcement, court and clerk of court personnel to make that happen.

State of Florida: Juvenile delinquency in Florida fell by 10 percent from last year, the state Department of Juvenile Justice reported at the end of August. Referrals to the agency from schools are down 11 percent and the number of youth waiting in detention centers for placement in a residential facility is the lowest in DJJ’s history. (These figures are for a fiscal year beginning July 1, 2010 and ending June 30, 2011.)

“While it’s gratifying to see that the numbers are moving in the right direction, we must continue to work closely with our community partners to create alternatives to detention so youth don’t have to enter the juvenile justice system in the first place,” said DJJ Secretary Wansley Walters, citing Gov. Rick Scott’s support for her emphasis on “front end services” such as civil citation, diversion programs and community-based treatment.

“We cannot afford the financial or the societal costs of unnecessary juvenile incarceration,” said Gov. Scott. “By shifting our focus and our investments to the front end of the system, we will save not only money, but also the lives and futures of the young people in our care.”

Residential services are the most costly, and preliminary figures show that the number of youth committed to residential programs dropped substantially, from 5,442 in FY 2009-10 to 4,714 in FY 2010-11. The cost per youth varies from a low of about $30,000 per youth in residential, to a high of $100,000 per youth at the state’s Dozier facility, which was closed this year.

The Nation: Texas is a leader in the nation on closing residential facilities, but are the monies saved being pumped into the front end for prevention, intervention and diversion, community-based services? The verdict isn’t in yet. Missouri continues to lead the nation with the “Missouri Model” for holistic, community-based, humane treatment of juveniles in smaller commitment facilities. A new report from Jeffrey A. Butts and Douglas N. Evans from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, titled Resolution, Reinvestment and Realignment: Three Strategies for Changing Juvenile Justice, calls the Missouri model the “resolution model,” likely to sustain the ups and downs of budget variances due to its reform principles, also copied by Massachusetts and Utah.

The other models cited by Professors Butts and Evans are the reinvestment model, using financial incentives to reduce the demand of local jurisdictions for state-run commitment facilities, such as RECLAIM Ohio, Redeploy Illinois and recent reforms in Texas, and the Realignment model, replacing state facilities with local services, such as in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan and in California. The professors conclude that reforms based on financial incentives are probably the most easily reversed.

One of the rewards of serving as a juvenile judge is being involved with people who care about kids, who want to improve their lives and the juvenile justice system. I’m always amazed at the new, novel, evidence-based and effective programs that arise to meet the needs of at-risk youth. While there are many to be found on the websites of all the foundations that fund them, such as the Eckerd Family Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others, let me tell you about a new one I just learned of, that has an important focus: the crucial role of nonviolent communications.

John Lash, who served nearly 25 years in Georgia prison, released in 2009, is now a participant in Compassionate Leadership, a non-violent communication training program, and also a student in the Master of Conflict Management program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. In September, he wrote an article for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE), found online at juvenilejusticeinformationexchange.org, giving credit to Dr. Marshall Rosenberg’s book and program, Nonviolent Communication, used from inner city Chicago to Rwanda. While I could imagine many uses for the book and program, including high conflict divorce cases, I was most impressed with Mr. Lash’s suggestion that nonviolent communication should be taught to kids.

“ I am convinced that teaching these skills to kids, including those who are incarcerated, can decrease the occurrence of crime, especially violent crime. Preferably NVC, or some similar method, would be taught in schools before kids ended up in trouble. What is needed are people interested enough to learn the skills themselves, then willing to share them with kids, teachers, parents, institutional staff, and anyone else who is in contact with young people.” Mr. Lash came out of prison. That makes him unusual. But he’s not unusual in his concern and suggestions for reducing violence amongst our youth. It’s because of him, and those foundations and individuals like him, that I have more hope than concern that our juvenile justice reforms—locally, state and nationally—will survive.

Irene Sullivan is a recently retired juvenile judge in Pinellas County, author of the book, Raised by the Courts: One Judge’s Insight into Juvenile Justice, available at bookstores or at Amazon. Com. Her book contains many chapters on truancy and at-risk kids.