Why Waste Money on Mostly Empty Juvenile Facilities?

Buffalo News Op-Ed: Another Voice / State spending

March 19, 2008 

By Mishi Faruqee

 In January, New York State’s Office of Children and Family Services announced the closing of six juvenile facilities because they are costly and ineffective. Yet State Sen. Catharine Young, R-Great Valley, and the New York State Senate leadership are fighting to keep these facilities open even though they are either mostly or completely empty.

In its proposed counter-budget released on March 12, the Senate included funding to keep three of these facilities open — Auburn Residential Center in Cayuga County, which has 24 beds and houses no children, Brace Residential Center in Delaware County, which has 25 beds and houses three children, and Great Valley Residential Center in Cattaraugus County, which has 25 beds and houses 11 children.

Each empty bed costs the state $140,000 to $200,000 per year, and the total cost to keep open these three facilities would come to more than $4.2 million in the next fiscal year. These facilities hold mainly non-violent juvenile offenders and are located hundreds of miles away from the children’s families. They also do not work. The state’s own research found that more than three-quarters of all kids who enter the state’s juvenile justice system are rearrested within three years of their release.

With the cost savings from these closings, Children and Family Services can create a network of community-based programs as alternatives to incarceration. Studies have long demonstrated that the most successful juvenile programs are those that work with an entire family rather than only with an adjudicated youth, addressing the reasons why the children committed crimes in the first place. Extensive research has shown that these programs can lower the rearrest rates by 25 percent to 70 percent.

So why is the Senate willing to throw away taxpayer money to operate under-utilized and unsuccessful facilities?

The answer is a few dozen jobs. In order to lock in the jobs in these facilities, the Senate budget resolution prohibits the transfer of staff or children from the three facilities, proposes to mandate a two-year advance notification of any facility closure (it’s now one year) and to convert the Great Valley center from a nonsecure facility to a limited secure facility.

Last year, the Senate successfully restored funding for the Gloversville facility, although the facility has not housed any children since April 2006. The Senate now would like to pay the 24 staff members at the Auburn residential center to report every day to an empty facility that doesn’t house any children.

Notably, when OCFS Commissioner Gladys Carrion announced the facility closures, she made a public commitment that her agency will work closely with the Department of Civil Services to ensure that all staff from the affected facilities will secure positions at other facilities or other state agencies.

Mishi Faruqee is director of the Juvenile Justice Project of the Correctional Associationof New York.

OCFS wants to close underutilized youth facilities

By Steve Francis - 3/26/2008 4:37 PM     News10Now

 

Watch the Video 

ALBANY, N.Y. -- "It was hard for me to transition back to the community when I was upstate," said Kyle Sullivan.

After being arrested at the age of 14 on a nonviolent charge, Kyle Sullivan said spending months in an upstate youth rehabilitation facility did little for him. He returned not once, but twice.

"We're here today to support the New York State Office of Children and Family Services' plan to close six underutilized youth facilities," said Juvenile Justice Project Director Mishi Faruqee.

Juvenile justice groups said Sullivan shares a common story that they said involves a system that for too long has been about filling beds and passing the high cost to taxpayers.

"The Senate has proposed keeping open the Auburn youth facility, the Brace youth facility, and the Great Valley youth facility," said Faruqee.

The Office of Children and Family Services planned to close six facilities to save taxpayers $16 million. But to their surprise, three of the facilities are in the Senate budget to remain open - even though there are few or no children receiving services at the sites.

"We are in a fiscal situation where the state has to close a gap of between four and five billion," said Queens Assemblyman William Scarborough. "Meanwhile, the department has to maintain facilities when in some instances you have two children and 25 or 26 staff."

This, as OCFS hopes to move to a more targeted community-based program that costs $15,000 per year, per kid - instead of using the facilities that can cost above $100,000 per kid, per year.

Officials said the alternative programs are not only cheaper, but they believe they're more effective.

Ruben Austria, a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow said, "You know what happens when we put young people upstate - 81 percent of the boys reoffend within three years."

A spokesman for the State Senate Majority told us why the facilities would remain open under their budget saying, "Three would be kept open for a number of factors, including economic factors, and we are trying to find alternative uses for the facilities."

 

The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain (NY Times Article)

March 26, 2008

New York Times: ABOUT NEW YORK

By JIM DWYER

The public pays about $500 a night for each of the 25 beds in the Auburn Residential Center — a place for teenagers who have gotten into lower-grade trouble with the law, a junior-varsity jail. For the last two weeks, the beds in Auburn have been empty. And state officials expect them to remain empty, permanently.

But even with no one under the sheets, each bed will continue to cost as much as $200,000 a year, the officials say.

Auburn, near Syracuse, is one of three state facilities for teenagers that are becoming high-priced ghost jails. Brace Residential Center, in Delaware County, with 25 beds, has just two teenagers staying there, watched over by a staff of 24; Great Valley in Cattaraugus County has 10 young people and a staff of 24. Soon, Brace and Great Valley, like Auburn, will no longer have teenagers staying there.

Yet if the State Senate has its way, all three will remain open until at least January 2010.

“I believe the number of juveniles was deliberately reduced this year and the kids sent elsewhere” to justify closing Great Valley, said State Senator Catharine M. Young, a Republican from Cattaraugus County, which is in the western part of the state, near the borders of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Senate has passed a resolution that requires Great Valley and the others to remain open.

Nearly all politicians fight to keep jobs in their districts. Prisons, jails and juvenile facilities have been a source of political and economic power to upstate areas that have little other industry. Most of the inmates came from the five boroughs and the metropolitan area.

In the battle over the ghost jails, though, the fight is not simply about the local economy, but also about a system of juvenile corrections that has been in a quiet state of collapse for nearly a decade, particularly for teenagers who are not in trouble for serious offenses.

New York City has found better, cheaper ways to move teenagers onto safer ground, said Ronald E. Richter, the city’s family services coordinator.

For offenders whose home lives are filled with problems, the city now provides intense programs for the entire family, buttressing the role of adults in the lives of the teenagers. Last year, about 275 teenagers and their families were sent into these programs rather than the state juvenile system.

So instead of sending the teenagers off to state facilities that cost $140,000 to $200,000 a year per person, the city is spending about $17,000 a year, Mr. Richter said. And while the state’s juvenile recidivism rate is 80 percent, the city program had a rate of about 35 percent in its first year, he said.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, which administers the juvenile centers, says straightening out teenagers who have committed minor offenses is a job better done in community-based systems. The juvenile centers, she said, should be reserved for “young people who are a danger to themselves and their communities.”

“For most of the kids, we don’t need these facilities, and we don’t need to be shipping them hundreds of miles away from their families,” she said. “That money can be reinvested in programs that work better for these young people.”

The prison economy is a central feature of New York’s political economy. The state Public Employees Federation, which represents some of the employees in the juvenile centers, has bought advertisements in small newspapers in towns near the centers, arguing that the state is jumping the gun.

“We think it’s premature,” said Darcy Wells, spokeswoman for the union. “The police say that juvenile arrests are up by 8 percent in New York City.”

Ms. Carrión said that there would be plenty of space if serious juvenile crime rose sharply. “Even after I close the facilities, I will have 20 to 30 percent excess capacity, so I have the flexibility in the system,” she said.

Senator Young said that the community-based programs like the one in New York needed to be studied before the existing system was shut down. The current data, she said, is not adequate.

Ms. Carrión says there is no need to wait: The current juvenile system catapults needy youngsters far from the families they will eventually return to, with no changes in the households that they left.

“Almost all of the kids are black and brown,” she said. “This is the alternative boarding school system for children of color. We can do better than this.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

White Paper on Community Based Alternatives to Incarceration for Juveniles

A draft in progress of my atiwhitepaper. Updated drafts will be posted periodically.