Juvenile reform bridges courts, welfare systems to help troubled youth

These stories were written and published in collaboration with the Center for Sustainable Journalism and the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange at Kennesaw State University and the Center for Public Integrity. More information about dual-status juveniles and national intervention programs is available at: http://www.jjgps.org/systems-integration.

Gary Gately is the Washington correspondent for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. Gately is an award-winning reporter and editor who has worked for The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and United Press International.

Virginia Lynne Anderson, a former reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has covered courts, sports, business, politics and medicine over her 25 years in journalism. She was the lead reporter on a six-part series on a thoroughbred breeding farm that went public and, later, bankrupt. The series was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Fulton County will become one of the latest jurisdictions in the United States to implement new strategies for helping a growing and vulnerable population: youths in foster or state care who commit crimes and land in juvenile court.

So-called dual-status youth, those in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, present enormous challenges. Many of the children are chronic runaways who have suffered from severe physical or emotional abuse, neglect and abandonment. They typically come from troubled homes often beset by domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness.

Historically, the juvenile justice and other child-serving systems have not worked together. That’s starting to change, albeit slowly.

Five states — Delaware, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont — now centralize administration of child welfare and juvenile justice systems to better coordinate services between the systems. Two additional states, Tennessee and Wyoming, integrate all facets except juvenile probation, and other states integrate juvenile justice and child welfare services within separate divisions of umbrella agencies.

Fulton's initiative is patterned after a successful effort in Newton County, which was the first jurisdiction in Georgia to link juvenile and child welfare caseworkers in the treatment of juvenile offenders, and builds on statewide juvenile justice reforms enacted in 2014. Those reforms, championed by Gov. Nathan Deal as part of a larger criminal justice overhaul, allowed juvenile judges to place more youth into community-based diversion programs instead of detention.

“We have a real opportunity to change the trajectory of some of these kids,” said John A. Tuell, executive director of Robert F Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice in Boston, which is providing the technical advice and support to both county programs with funding from the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Fulton’s juvenile court expects to have its new framework for youth in place by the end of the year, said Presiding Judge Willie J. Lovett Jr.

“I’m excited by this,” Lovett said. “I see duplicative efforts and wasted resources.”

In Santa Clara County, Calif., another local jurisdiction that has followed the RFK Center’s framework, social workers and probation officers work closely on the cases of dual-status kids, which often results in providing “trauma-informed” care rather than simply punishing them.

“Probation officers and social workers have never, ever worked together before — because it was a combative relationship, and now it’s a collaborative one,” said Neha Desai, an attorney who serves as policy adviser for the Dually Involved Youth Initiative in Santa Clara County.

Success story

The complexities of dealing with dual-status kids notwithstanding, success stories show how breaking down barriers between the juvenile justice and child welfare systems can make all the difference in a child’s life.

Consider, for example, the case of a 14-year-old in Omaha, Neb. After the latest of many fights, this one on a school bus in fall 2013, he was ticketed by a school resource officer, and his case ended up before the Douglas County attorney.

The youth, whose name is being withheld to protect his identity, had been severely abused by his mother, abandoned when he was 3 and placed in four or five foster homes by his teens. He had been arrested repeatedly on assault charges and failed to comply with probation requirements. In short, his prospects appeared dim.

“This kid’s an angry kid, which you understand when you hear about the circumstances of his life,” said Nicholas Juliano, the co-chair of Youth Impact! of Douglas County, a public-private organization shepherding the county’s dual-status reform.

The Omaha reform effort emphasizes sharing data between the juvenile justice and child welfare systems and bringing together representatives of both systems, along with parents or foster parents and, in this case, school officials, to improve prospects for crossover youths.

Thus, the county attorney, the boy’s foster father, social workers, school staff and a probation officer who had worked with the youth came together with an eye toward finding a solution that would keep him from being prosecuted for fighting.

The result: a written agreement that the youth would avoid fighting, attend school regularly, return to therapy for anger management and attend a program designed to help him resist the temptation to join a gang.

The agreement specified the assault charge would be dropped if the boy — an African-American, like a heavily disproportionate share of dual-status kids — complied with all requirements by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

He did. Now, he’s doing well in school and has a good shot at going to college.

“We have very likely changed this young man’s trajectory,” said Juliano.

A national problem

Each year, juvenile courts in the United States handle an estimated 1.7 million cases in which the youth was charged with a delinquency offense, according to the Washington-based, nonprofit Campaign for Youth Justice. And the Washington-based, nonprofit Child Welfare League of America reports an average of more than 2.8 million children a year are the subjects of reports of abuse and neglect.

Conservatively, tens of thousands of children a year are simultaneously involved in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.

“It’s a very difficult, difficult, challenging, often recalcitrant population of youth who come into the system that holds them accountable for their behavior — often without understanding the developmental aspects of that behavior,” said Tuell.

Like other experts, Tuell notes childhood trauma, often associated with abuse or neglect, can have far-reaching impacts on youths.

Among them: difficulty developing a strong, healthy attachment to a caregiver, problems with authority figures like teachers or police, lack of impulse control and violent responses to some situations.

“The big challenge for a lot of foster kids is keeping them out of the juvenile justice system and keeping them at least in shallow end,” said Joseph P. Ryan, an associate professor of social work at the University of Ann Arbor and an expert on child welfare and the juvenile justice system.

Pointing to research he did in metropolitan Los Angeles in 2008, Ryan said children with open child welfare cases are more likely to get pushed deeper into the juvenile justice system than other kids.

He also found that dual-status kids were more likely to be sentenced to group homes, youth detention camp or a juvenile detention facility and less likely to receive probation than those with no child welfare history.

“Such environments increase the likelihood of associating with deviant peer groups and reinforcing antisocial attitudes, values, and beliefs,” wrote coauthor Denise C. Herz of California State University, Los Angeles. “Moreover, youth leaving these programs are at an increased risk of recidivism and of entering the adult correctional system.”

Robert Anderson, a juvenile court judge in DuPage County, Ill., just outside Chicago, strives to keep an open mind about dual-status youths, but acknowledges a disheartening pattern.

“There’s a real different dynamic in my experience in these cases … first, they come with a kind of a unique set of challenges because typically there isn’t a lot of family support,” Anderson said. “There may be no family support of any kind.

“I couldn’t give you statistics on this, but my experience has been that in a first-time delinquency case, if a child walks in with two parents¸ statistically, the odds of me seeing them after this case go way down. They walk in with one parent, it’s a higher probability that I’ll see them several times, either for probation violations or new offenses, and if they walk in with no parents, which would mean the dually involved cases for the most part, they’re generally real troubled kids.