PRESS RELEASE: New Juvenile Justice Report "The Keeper and The Kept" Available for Download Here

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact: Shadi Rahimi, cell: (415) 368-8007, srahimi@burnsinstitute.org

SAN FRANCISCO, CA | Dec. 1, 2009 – Today, the national nonprofit W. Haywood Burns Institute (BI) is releasing its second report about systemic problems in juvenile justice systems, The Keeper and the Kept.

On any given day, more than 90,000 youth are in custody of the juvenile justice system. A majority of these detained children are youth of color who are held for minor and nonviolent offenses undeserving of the deprivation of liberty. For this, our society pays a high moral and financial price, argues BI Executive Director James Bell.

“Youth of color and poor youth coming into contact with the law find themselves pulled deep into an ever growing industry of confinement,” Mr. Bell says. “These juvenile justice systems are upheld by ‘keepers,’ who believe that secure confinement is an appropriate response to nonviolent and first offenses, and to provide youth with services. We promote a shift in thinking – to using secure confinement as the exception, or the rare instance for all youth.”

Most nonviolent youth offenders are incarcerated because alternative services including mental health or counseling are no longer available in communities. When it comes to youth of color in particular, decisions to incarcerate are often driven by “zero tolerance” policies, and fear. In The Keeper and the Kept, Mr. Bell and his colleagues challenge this overreliance on detention.

Among the arguments:

• Local juvenile justice systems must account for the expense and outcomes of their operations. States spend about $5.7 billion each year imprisoning youth, even though the majority are held for nonviolent offenses. Instead, most youth could be supervised safely with alternatives to detention that cost substantially less and lower recidivism, particularly for youth of color.

• A key first step to transforming a local juvenile justice system is the creation of a governing committee that includes decision-makers and the community, for the purpose of analyzing at what decision-making points White youth are released whereas youth of color are detained.

• The second step to successful reform efforts is using data to ensure that policy and practice change is based on neutral and accurate information. By doing so the BI has successfully helped reduce by nearly half the incarceration of Black boys for school fights in Peoria, Illinois, for example, and have helped establish alternatives to detention for Latinos who were incarcerated to protect them from domestic violence situations in Pima County, Arizona.

Our executive director, James Bell is available for interviews about this report and other juvenile justice issues. He is a national leader in reducing disparities in the juvenile justice system. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE.