Reminder: J4F

Justice for Families Support Group meeting is tonight!

If you have been impacted by the juvenile justice system, join us to discuss issues that affect our youth and our communities.

199 Lincoln Avenue, Bronx, NY 10454
Third floor conference room
6pm-8pm

Dinner will be provided!

CCFY in the news!

Last month the Mott Haven Herald covered our June 21st Night Under the Stars graduation ceremony for SBCC youth who have completed their mandates.  It was a positive, fun, emotional night for families, youth, Community Coaches, Site Coordinators, and representatives of the Bronx Department of Probation and Corporation Counsel offices.
Read the full story here:  Mott Haven group helps teens stay out of jail.

This week, CCFY was featured in the New York Daily News after reporter Corinne Letsch spoke to parents, families, mentors, and juvenile justice experts during a presentation of SBCC community projects.  Youth in the program have started a Youth Leadership Academy based at Betances Community Center, cultivated plants in Brook Park's Urban Youth Farm, and are in the process of painting a mural dedicated to late community activist Joe Perez in the Mott Haven Community Garden.
Read the full article here:  South Bronx nonprofit offers ideas for the community to support youth returning from upstate detention.

Building Community Capacity for Juvenile Justice Reform: A community-centered approach to bringing New York City’s children Close to Home

Introduction

New York is in period of unprecedented juvenile justice reform, moving away from an incarceration-first correctional response to youth crime and delinquency in favor of community-based alternatives, therapeutic placements, and evidence-based interventions. “Community partnerships”, “Community Engagement”, and “Community Reinvestment” are phrases that increasingly appear in the conversation on juvenile justice reform. This brief paper seeks to define and operationalize what constitutes genuine community participation in juvenile reform, and to propose strategies that can achieve the goal of authentic community-system partnerships that keep communities safe and develop youth into pro-social community members.

The Centrality of the Community in Juvenile Justice Reform

The community is central to the work of juvenile justice reform. The term “community” in this paper refers to the diverse and interconnected stakeholders in the neighborhoods that make up a young person’s ecological environment, including family members, neighbors, faith-based organizations, schools, businesses, health services, and community-based organizations. “Community” stakeholders are defined here as distinct from “system” stakeholders in that juvenile justice interventions in the life of a young person are by nature coercive, interruptive, time-limited, and usually undesirable. The community, on the other hand, is always there. For better or for worse, it the natural environment of young people which produced them prior to their justice system involvement, where they spend the majority of their time when in community-based interventions, and to which they will return if and when they are placed out of home. Young people are attached to their communities, identify with their communities, and are usually far more responsive to community members then they are to system personnel. The failed correctional model of juvenile justice assumed that communities were either too weak to assist young people, or were criminogenic in and of themselves. This necessitated either the removal of youth from the community, or establishing juvenile justice and law enforcement personnel as the central figures in combatting youth crime and delinquency. Efforts to reform the juvenile justice system have correctly brought system stakeholders together to examine best practices, review data, and develop collaborations and coordinated approaches. But for the most part, these reform practices have happened separate and apart from the community. When community is invited to the table, it is often for a peripheral role in system-driven efforts. But the community is not peripheral to juvenile justice reform efforts – it is central – and without genuine community participation, juvenile justice reform efforts will always fall short of the ultimate goal of creating safe and healthy communities for youth.

The Community’s Loss

Several decades of failed juvenile justice policy have separated young people from their families and communities. In New York, sending young people away to remote parts of the state hoping they will come back reformed has been an absolute failure. We spend nearly $270,000 per youth to incarcerate children in a system where 89% of boys and 81% of girls are re-arrested, and 71% of boys and 32% of girls go on to spend time in adult prison. The children we send away come back in worse state than they were before they were placed in facilities. For too long, this practice has continued primarily for the benefit of communities that have become economically dependent on youth incarceration. While these communities benefit, the neighborhoods from which young people originate suffer loss in several ways:

· The Loss of Youth: when youth are incarcerated hundreds of miles from home, the community loses its young people. Children with the potential to be assets of the community are physically absent from their families and communities. The limited ability to visit young people and monitor the conditions of their placement leaves them vulnerable to abuse. The disconnection from local neighborhood organizations, schools, and faith-based organizations makes community reintegration exceptionally difficult.

· The Loss of Resources: the cost of incarcerating a young person – almost $270,000 annually for one youth – represents dollars that could be spent on community programs that are effective in rehabilitating youth (proven community-based alternatives to incarceration), or even creating opportunities that prevent juvenile crime to begin with (job opportunities, youth development programs). A community that sends 10 youth to placement uses nearly $2.7 million in resources. Imagine what could be put in place in that neighborhood if that money were reinvested in resources to support youth and families in crisis.

· The Loss of Skill: when young people are placed far from home, and the dollars that pay for their incarceration follow them, communities also lose something else – the knowledge, experience, and expertise in supervising and supporting young people in trouble with the law. Neighborhoods that once had more robust networks of informal social control have forgotten how to hold young people accountable to community norms, as the responsibility for rehabilitation has been outsourced to the juvenile justice system.

The Opportunity

New York’s Close to Home legislation intentionally seeks to rectify some of the damaging practices that have been so detrimental to our young people and our communities. The legislation would allow New York City to keep young people it its own non-secure and limited secure placement facilities within the five boroughs, instead of sending them to state-run facilities far from home. Clearly this plan is a step in the right direction. When young people must be placed, keeping them close to home should increase family connectedness, make it easier to monitor their safety and the quality of their treatment, and to facilitate community reintegration. A good Close to Home plan could radically improve young people’s experience in the juvenile justice system and reduce many of the damages that youth, families, and communities experience under the current system of youth incarceration.

Yet for this plan to truly benefit New York City’s young people, their families, and their communities, several components must be present to restore to the community what the current system has taken away. Reversing the damage must address the losses that the community has experienced in the following ways:

· The Return of Youth: the Close to Home plan should clearly demonstrate ways that even further reduce the need to place youth outside the home. New York City has taken great steps to develop viable alternatives to placement for youth in the juvenile justice system – yet there are still too many youth who are placed because less restrictive options are not available. We should not settle for a plan centered around local facilities, but should demand a plan that puts a primacy on community alternatives and only uses placement as a last resort. Furthermore, we should expect that local facilities will provide an opportunity for an unprecedented level of access for the community.

· The Return of Resources: the Close to Home plan will bring dollars that previously flowed to rural counties back to New York City. Approximately $40 million in funding each year will underwrite the costs of creating this new locally run juvenile justice system. Over the long run, New York City and New York State will save money by creating a more cost-efficient system. These cost savings should be seen not only as an opportunity to close budget gaps, but to reinvest resources in the communities where most youth are arrested and prosecuted. A shift of this magnitude is an opportunity for New York City to re-invest dollars in resources that will help keep youth from juvenile justice involvement in the first place. The community should not settle solely for investments in facilities and formal programs, but should expect that a percentage of the cost savings are returned for community-driven programs.

· The Return of Skill: the Close to Home legislation provides an opportunity for an unprecedented level of community involvement in the juvenile justice system and the possibility of genuine community-system partnerships. The old paradigm assumed entire communities were at worst criminal or at best incompetent, and therefore irrelevant to the planning and administration of juvenile justice. The new paradigm must recognize the primacy of community involvement in addressing youth crime and delinquency. However, any attempts to effectively operationalize community involvement, must include a plan to build the capacity of directly affected communities. The disinvestment in community in favor of incarceration has also left a void in the specific technical knowledge and skills needed to effectively develop alternatives to juvenile justice processing. Communities are full of people and organizations that have deep commitment to youth and amazing ways of engaging young people, but often don’t speak the same language as juvenile justice stakeholders, or translate their work into paradigms that the system understands. The Close to Home plan should invest not only in programs in neighborhoods, but in developing the skill sets that local community members need to be viable partners for juvenile justice reform.

Sharing Information, Power, and Resources

Real community involvement should be front and center in the plan to bring youth Close to Home. But real community involvement is exceptionally rare and hard to come by. Community Advisory Boards that are thrown together after the real planning and implementation of juvenile justice initiatives are a poor excuse for community involvement. Community outreach presentations do little more than make community members aware of what is happening, but fail to create a vested interested in making system-community partnerships work. Funding a non-profit organization that works in a particular neighborhood is not the same as investing in community involvement, as many non-profits struggle to engage the very communities they serve. What then is real community involvement? What constitutes legitimate system-community partnerships?

· Sharing Information: the best initiatives are always data-driven, drawing on what is actually happening. Real system-community partnerships are those in which system stakeholders and community members share information and evaluate and analyze data together for the purpose of identifying the best ways to solve problems. Sharing data means that system stakeholders make quantitative data available to community members, and community members share the qualitative data they accumulate from living and working in neighborhoods with system stakeholders. Ultimately system and community partners should sit around the same table sharing, analyzing, arguing, debating, and discussing the data that drives decisions.

· Sharing Power: real system-community partnerships are those where there is shared decision-making power. As community and system stakeholders draw conclusions about data, there must be shared authority to define what strategies and responses are chosen as interventions. Data revealing a sudden rash of juvenile assaults at a particular school could result in a strategy of assigning extra police officers to a school, or sending out conflict resolution specialists. The best decisions are made when community members have equal power to choose which strategies are employed to respond to these issues.

· Sharing Resources: these strategies can only work when there is financial support for the ideas generated from information sharing and joint decision making. System-community partnerships are meaninglessness until the analysis of data and the planning of responses lead to funded interventions. Innovative approaches to the problems of juvenile crime and delinquency can never bear fruit if there are no dollars available to underwrite the implementation of fresh new ideas.

The Implementation Question

Even when all these factors are present – the sharing of information, power, and resources – a very practical question remains: can communities actually pull off the implementation of the programs they propose? The high-profile failures of some community-driven initiatives have produced lingering questions about the viability of community-based organizations, their ability to handle funding, to collect data and track results, and to produce the results that system stakeholders and community members demand. The gamble of investing in community-driven initiatives is often too risky for traditionalists who are afraid of dramatic failure. Investing in more established approaches is a safer bet – one that might not produce amazing results, but will likely also not produce catastrophic failure. But choosing the safe route also guarantees that some of the underlying problems that keep communities stuck in the cycle of incarceration will remain unaddressed – and that too is a catastrophic failure. Community-driven initiatives can work, but require a deep commitment to the process of building community capacity, sharing information, power, and resources, and staying invested in the work of non-traditional partnerships between system stakeholders and community members.

For the last 18 months, CCFY has embarked on a quest to operationalize community-driven juvenile justice reform in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, involving community members in the process of developing and operating alternatives to formal juvenile justice system processing. The South Bronx Community Connections initiative (SBCC) is a community-driven project evaluated by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that seeks to discover what it takes to develop community capacity to serve youth in the juvenile justice system.[1] The goal is to demonstrate the efficacy of community-driven initiatives that divert youth from deeper system involvement in partnership with system stakeholders, with a primary focus on building the capacity of local faith and neighborhood organizations to develop effective programming for youth. CCFY serves as the lead agency in carrying out this work, using a process has involved requesting and analyzing data on juvenile crime trends from multiple juvenile justice agencies, subcontracting local faith and neighborhood organizations to serve as sites throughout the neighborhood, recruiting community members who “live, work, or worship” in the target neighborhood as volunteer mentors (“community coaches”), and developing and refining partnerships with the local police precinct, the Department of Probation and the Family Court prosecutors to manage youth referrals. The program is currently serving youth, ages 13 to 15 years of age who have been arrested but can be diverted from formal court processing via referral by either Bronx Probation or Corporation Counsel. The process has resulted in as many setbacks as successes, but is slowly but surely producing promising results. We are learning as much from our mistakes and our wrong assumptions as we are from what is working. The process of working with a hands-on evaluator is rigorous and demanding, but we are developing a base of knowledge, wisdom, and expertise providing lessons for “what works” when it comes to locally driven initiatives.

What follows are several practical suggestions for building community capacity for juvenile justice reform.

Five Practical Ways to Build Community Capacity

to Serve Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

1. Identify, Invest in, and Share Power With the Right Local Leaders: the key to building community capacity to serve youth in the juvenile justice system is to invest in local leaders who have the ability to mobilize community members and manage effective programs. Too often these skill sets are separate, but there are grassroots leaders who can balance these dual responsibilities. Bringing these leaders to the decision-making table with system stakeholders is the key to producing the best locally driven initiatives.

2. Develop Learning Communities that Bring Together System and Community Stakeholders around Quantitative Data and Qualitative Knowledge: the gap between the performance-based, numbers-driven approach increasingly adopted by system stakeholders, and the “in the trenches” knowledge of what is happening with youth at the street level can be bridged by creating learning communities where both forms of knowledge are valued and shared. Facilitated learning communities where stakeholders from public agencies and grassroots organizations use data to inform decision-making can produce effective programs.

3. Embrace Evidence-Informed Interventions and Local Wisdom: community-based organizations that are strong in social capital and effective in connecting relationally with young people, have a wisdom and a knowledge of the local context that cannot be ignored. They can also benefit from exposure to and training in evidence-informed interventions that provide the type of structure and quality control system stakeholders expect. Too often, the conversation about evidence-based practices stops with concerns over whether grassroots organizations can implement the most expensive and clinical interventions like MST. But there are plenty of other evidence-based programs that are appropriate for local community organizations to implement.

4. Increase the Administrative Capacity of Neighborhood Organizations: in order to execute effective programs for youth, local organizations need more than dedicated leaders. They need the administrative support that will enable those leaders to be effective. Providing the financial resources necessary to build up the operational capacity of community organizations is key. Funding formulas that allow grassroots organizations to develop a small stream of unrestricted revenue to hire an administrative assistant or a bookkeeper have a better chance at producing successful programs.

5. Start Small, Grow What Works: starting with small manageable projects that are relatively low-risk but provide rich learning experiences for the implementers, is the key to developing sustainable programming. In large cities, efforts to launch large-scale system-community partnerships often fall apart because of a lack of follow-through on the local level. Starting local and building on the lessons learned from what actually works produces the most sustainable, replicable results.

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[1] The South Bronx Community Connections initiative is funded by a JJDPA grant from the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) and several private foundations in New York.

Spofford is Closed! CCFY celebrates the closure of notorious Bronx juvenile detention center

On Wednesday, March 30th, NYC Officials announced their plans to close the Spofford Juvenile Detention center for good. For years, community activists and advocates have fought to close down the notorious juvenile detention center. Two years ago, a diverse coalition of youth, parents, clergy, advocates, activists and community organizations began organizing under the United to Stop Spofford Campaign to push for its closure. Today, we celebrate its closure and promise to remain vigilant to ensure that it is never again used to incarcerate children. You can watch video coverage of the closing ceremony on NY1 and read about the closure in the NY Daily News.

CCFY is awarding $7,500 to faith and community organizations in Mott Haven!

Community Connections for Youth (CCFY), a Bronx-based non-profit organization that works with youth in the juvenile justice system is making small grants to faith and community organizations in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. Selected partners will receive up to $7,500 a year to work with CCFY to divert youth from justice system involvement by matching them with adult mentors and engaging them in community building projects. In addition to grant money, CCFY will work closely with the selected partners to provide training and on-going support for youth and mentors, along with additional funds to support youth-initiated community-building projects.

To request a copy of the RFP, fill out the following form: SBCC RFP Request.

Please email info@cc-fy.org or call Rosanne Placencia at 347.590.0940 with any questions. Applications are due March 15th. (Toda esta información, incluyendo el RFP, está disponible en español, favor de solicitarla si la necesita).

CCFY Board Member Rachel Carrion Testifies Before Congress

On March 11, 2010, CCFY Board Member Rachel Carrion testified before a congressional subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities concerning her experience in New York's Juvenile Justice system. Watch her testimony here:

New York Finds Extreme Crisis in Youth Prisons

New York Times (Read the original article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/nyregion/14juvenile.html)

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December 14, 2009

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY — New York’s system of juvenile prisons is broken, with young people battling mental illness or addiction held alongside violent offenders in abysmal facilities where they receive little counseling, can be physically abused and rarely get even a basic education, according to a report by a state panel.

The problems are so acute that the state agency overseeing the prisons has asked New York’s Family Court judges not to send youths to any of them unless they are a significant risk to public safety, recommending alternatives, like therapeutic foster care.

“New York State’s current approach fails the young people who are drawn into the system, the public whose safety it is intended to protect, and the principles of good governance that demand effective use of scarce state resources,” said the confidential draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report, prepared by a task force appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and led by Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, comes three months after a federal investigation found that excessive force was routinely used at four prisons, resulting in injuries as severe as broken bones and shattered teeth.

The situation was so serious the Department of Justice, which made the investigation, threatened to take over the system.

But according to the task force, the problems uncovered at the four prisons are endemic to the entire system, which houses about 900 young people at 28 facilities around the state.

While some prisons for violent and dangerous offenders should be preserved, the report calls for most to be replaced with a system of smaller centers closer to the communities where most of the families of the youths in custody live.

The task force was convened in 2008 after years of complaints about the prisons, punctuated by the death in 2006 of an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old boy at one center after two workers pinned him to the ground. The task force’s recommendations are likely to help shape the state’s response to the federal findings.

“I was not proud of my state when I saw some of these facilities,” Mr. Travis said in an interview on Friday. “New York is no longer the leader it once was in the juvenile justice field.”

New York’s juvenile prisons are both extremely expensive and extraordinarily ineffective, according to the report, which will be given to Mr. Paterson on Monday. The state spends roughly $210,000 per youth annually, but three-quarters of those released from detention are arrested again within three years. And though the median age of those admitted to juvenile facilities is almost 16, one-third of those held read at a third-grade level.

The prisons are meant to house youths considered dangerous to themselves or others, but there is no standardized statewide system for assessing such risks, the report found.

In 2007, more than half of the youths who entered detention centers were sent there for the equivalent of misdemeanor offenses, in many cases theft, drug possession or even truancy. More than 80 percent were black or Latino, even though blacks and Latinos make up less than half the state’s total youth population — a racial disparity that has never been explained, the report said.

Many of those detained have addictions or psychological illnesses for which less restrictive treatment programs were not available. Three-quarters of children entering the juvenile justice system have drug or alcohol problems, more than half have had a diagnosis of mental health problems and one-third have developmental disabilities.

Yet there are only 55 psychologists and clinical social workers assigned to the prisons, according to the task force. And none of the facilities employ psychiatrists, who have the authority to prescribe the drugs many mentally ill teenagers require.

While 76 percent of youths in custody are from the New York City area, nearly all the prisons are upstate, and the youths’ relatives, many of them poor, cannot afford frequent visits, cutting them off from support networks.

“These institutions are often sorely underresourced, and some fail to keep their young people safe and secure, let alone meet their myriad service and treatment needs,” according to the report, which was based on interviews with workers and youths in custody, visits to prisons and advice from experts. “In some facilities, youth are subjected to shocking violence and abuse.”

Even before the task force’s report is released, the Paterson administration is moving to reduce the number of youths held in juvenile prisons.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, the agency that oversees the juvenile justice system, has recommended that judges find alternative placements for most young offenders, according to an internal memorandum issued Oct. 28 by the state’s deputy chief administrative judge.

Ms. Carrión also advised court officials that New York would not contest the Justice Department findings, according to the memo, and that officials were negotiating a settlement agreement to remedy the system.

Peter E. Kauffmann, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said the governor “looks forward to receiving the recommendations of the task force as we continue our efforts to transform the state’s juvenile justice system from a correctional-punitive model to a therapeutic model.”

The report contends that smaller facilities would place less strain on workers, helping reduce the use of physical force, and would be better able to tailor rehabilitation programs.

New York is not unique in using its juvenile prisons to house mentally ill teenagers, particularly as many states confront huge budget shortfalls that have resulted in significant cuts to mental health programs. Still, some states are trying to shift to smaller, community-based programs.

The report by New York’s task force does not say how much money would be needed to overhaul the system, but as Mr. Paterson and state lawmakers try to close a $3.2 billion deficit, cost could become a major hurdle.

Ms. Carrión has faced resistance from some prison workers, who accuse her of making them scapegoats for the system’s problems and minimizing the dangerous conditions they face. State records show a significant spike in on-the-job injuries, for which some workers blame Ms. Carrión’s efforts to limit the use of force.

“We embrace the idea of moving towards a more therapeutic model of care, but you can’t do that without more training and more staff,” said Stephen A. Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, the union that represents prison workers. “You’re not dealing with wayward youth. In the more secure facilities, you’re dealing with individuals who have been involved in pretty serious crimes.”

Advocates have credited Ms. Carrión, who was appointed in 2007 by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with instituting significant reforms, including installing cameras in some of the more troubled prisons and providing more counseling.

But the state has a long way to go, many advocates say.

“Even the kids that are not considered dangerous are shackled when they are being transferred from their homes to the centers upstate — hands and feet, sometimes even belly chains,” said Clara Hemphill, a researcher and author of a report on the state’s youth prisons published in October by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.