Mayor Menino acts now for safer summer

Crime prevention, putting youths to work are top priorities

Mayor Thomas M. Menino is expected to outline a preemptive push to stanch summertime violence Wednesday, seeking to stop crime now with the hope of preventing retaliation in July and August.

The effort, which has been the subject of City Hall meetings for the past two months, will incorporate police, public health officials, the School Department, and youth workers. It will include police detectives walking beats in high-crime areas, an initiative to provide summer jobs for young adults over 19, and coordination with prison officials to visit inmates slated for release.
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Summertime violence is an age-old problem for urban areas after school ends. Thousands of young people face unstructured days and idle time that can often lead to trouble.

“It’s what any parent of a 14-year-old faces every summer: How are we going to fill up this time?’’ said Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “It makes sense to have multiple approaches because there is no single answer.’’

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Read entire article in The Boston Globe

Does race matter in the juvenile justice system?

1. use the word “jail” as a synonym for juvenile incarceration, or use the word “detention” as a synonym for all forms of juvenile incarceration

2. use the words “juvenile justice system” when what they mean is juvenile corrections or incarceration facilities

3. assume that because someone says that juvenile records are “confidential” that it’s a waste of time to ask for those records, even people working in juvenile justice do not always know what confidentiality laws actually say

4. assume that all private and even for-profit agencies are evil and that all public agencies are incompetent and wasteful – there are good and bad public agencies and good and bad private agencies

5. habitually insert the modifier “only” in front of descriptions of juvenile court sanctions (e.g., the youth could be confined for only one year)

6. always note the offender’s race, ethnicity, poverty status, and family configuration, whether or not it’s pertinent to the story

7. assume that something must be true, accurate, and/or credible simply because it was said by the judge, or prosecutor, or police chief

8. assume that psychologists are the ultimate experts about everything to do with crime

9. assume that because economists are often unintelligible that they must be experts on crime

10. assume that because sociologists are often irritating that their ideas are not practical

11. forget the fact that arrest statistics do not measure the incidence of crime, but rather the combination of reported crimes and police decision-making

12. use the word “youth” as a synonym for “juvenile” without clarifying the difference (e.g., more than 40 percent of all violent crime arrests involve “youth” under age 25, but just 14 percent involve people under age 18, and even fewer involve young people legally defined as “juveniles”)

13. contrast the per capita arrest rates for juveniles versus “adults” without clarifying that the denominator for adults includes a lot of retirees and people in nursing homes

14. even worse, report the juvenile arrest rate using a population denominator that has been truncated to exclude very young children (e.g., under age 10) without also truncating the age range of the adult denominator

15. contrast the crime rate of one city against another without considering how those cities might be very different (i.e., more or less urban, rural, dense, diverse, developed)

16. contrast the crime rate of one city versus another without at least reading the FBI warning about cross-city comparisons

17. believe that numbers about “recidivism” are valid and meaningful without additional scrutiny

18. accept on faith someone’s claims about the recidivism numbers of their program or their jurisdiction

19. or forget to ask, “and how are you defining recidivism, exactly?”

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Transfers to adult court don’t explain drop in youth crime

The state of Florida transfers far more juvenile offenders to the criminal (adult) court system than any other state in the nation. In this sense at least, Florida can rightly claim to be No. 1.

Florida’s population is roughly half that of California’s, but it transfers youths to adult criminal court at a rate that is eight times that of California.

According to FBI statistics, the rate of violent youth crime in Florida dropped 57 percent between 1995 and 2010. Juvenile arrests for murder fell 69 percent.

The Orange County State Attorney’s office recently connected these dots and claimed that the falling rate of violent juvenile crime in the Orlando area was caused by the large numbers of youth tried in adult courts.

Like most easy answers, this easy answer to youth violence is wrong, and here’s why.

Orange County and the state of Florida are not the only places where juvenile violence has plummeted in recent years. Violent youth crime has declined nationwide since the 1990s. According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, rates of youth violence across the country are half what they were in the mid-1990s. In fact, juvenile violence is lower than at any time since the 1970s.

So, Orlando cannot claim the prize for declining youth violence. In fact, compared with other states, Florida’s crime drop is about average.

The Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City recently examined the uses of criminal-court transfer and the scale of declining crime in Florida and five other states where the data allow for a fair comparison — Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon and Washington.

While juvenile violence dropped 57 percent in Florida between 1995 and 2010, it fell in these other states as well.

The largest drop was in Ohio, where violent juvenile crime plunged 74 percent since 1995, followed by Arizona’s decline of 65 percent and Oregon’s dip of 63 percent. California and Washington saw juvenile violence drop nearly as much as in Florida — 50 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

If Florida prosecutors were correct, these variations in the falling rate of juvenile violence would follow a pattern. Namely, we would see the largest crime declines in the states that transferred the most juveniles to criminal court.

Florida’s use of transfer (approximately 165 transfers per 100,000 youth population) is nearly double that of its closest competitors, Oregon and Arizona (96 and 84 per 100,000, respectively). Yet, both of those states beat Florida in the crime drop.

In fact, the state with the lowest use of transfer was Ohio at 20 per 100,000, but Ohio’s crime decline of 74 percent was the steepest of all six states.

If Florida transfers far more juveniles to criminal court than any other state and yet the state’s crime decline is about average, then it is simply wrong to credit criminal-court transfer for recent reductions in youth violence.

What did cause the nearly 20-year drop in violent crime across the United States? We will likely debate this for years to come. Some criminologists say it is related to changing social attitudes and economics, or the preventive effects of community policing. Others argue that crime-reduction programs are more sophisticated now, following more than 20 years of investment in research and evaluation.

Experts may never agree on the exact causes for the crime decline, but there is one thing we can all agree on: There is no evidence to suggest that the falling rate of youth violence was caused by states prosecuting greater numbers of youth in adult court.

Criminal-court transfer is an idea of the 1980s. We can and should do better. Policy makers should realize that the juvenile-justice system has more to offer than the adult system in terms of effective programs and sound solutions. We need to rely on a mix of strategies other than simple punishment, including investments in youth employment, educational development and family-support programs.

The nation is ill-served by public officials who respond to fears of youth violence by dusting off old policy ideas from the 1980s, especially when those policies were never proved effective.

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Jeffrey Butts is the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Copyright © 2012, Orlando Sentinel

Juvenile court cases involving charges of obstruction of justice, simple assault, drug law violations, vandalism, and disorderly conduct combined accounted for 48,200 new placement cases in 2008, or more than 90 percent of all growth in out-of-home placements between 1985 and 2008.