The number of drug-related arrests reported by U.S. law enforcement agencies increased sharply between 1980 and 2010, with the largest growth occurring between 1991 and 2006. During that time, drug arrests jumped 87 percent nationwide, from just over 1.1 million to nearly 1.9 million arrests annually. The increase was restricted, however, to drug possession offenses rather than sales and manufacturing. Between 1991 and 2006, arrests for drug sales and manufacturing actually dropped 6 percent while arrests for possession climbed 139 percent. The same pattern was observed for arrests involving offenders of different ages, but the growth in drug possession arrests was sharpest among juveniles.

Preventing Youth Violence

Memphis, Tn – Memphis is part of a National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention.

The news is very promising for Memphis and the nation. According to figures from the FBI, the number of reported violent crimes nationwide fell 6.4% for the first 6 months of 2011 compared with the same time in 2010. And there is even more good news for Memphis surrounding the perception that others have about crime in Memphis. Dr. Jeffrey Butts, from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York is one of the Primary researchers for the justice department on this initiative. He joined Mearl Purvis to talk about youth violence.

Between 1995 and 2010, juvenile arrests overall dropped nearly 40 percent. The level of violent crime arrests in 2010 was half the level of 1995. Murder arrests declined more than 60 percent, while robbery arrests and serious (aggravated) assaults were down almost 50 percent. Taken together, arrests for the eight serious offenses included in the FBI Crime Index decreased nearly 50 percent between 1995 and 2010. Arrests for some of the most common, less serious offenses, however, increased substantially from 1985 through 2005, and they remained at higher levels in 2010 when compared with the early 1980s. As a result, offenses such as minor (non-aggravated) assaults, drug law violations, and disorderly conduct accounted for a much larger proportion of all juvenile arrests in 2010 than was true in 1980. Arrests by law enforcement appear to have shifted toward less serious offenses.

News Brief:
Governor decides—in juvenile justice, city kids belong near home

If Governor Cuomo gets his way, New York City will cut the number of children it sends to state-run juvenile justice facilities by more than two-thirds over the next two years, receiving more than $35 million per year from the state to create a new spectrum of services and incarceration facilities for juvenile delinquents within the five boroughs.

… Jeffrey Butts, a justice scholar at John Jay College who has worked with the city on analyzing its juvenile capacity needs, notes that a city-administered system could create new financial incentives to keep kids out of lockups altogether, since incarceration is many times more expensive than alternative programs that provide community-based supervision alongside services like family counseling and job training. “If you have $100 to spend and you can either use that money to put one kid in a facility or work with three or four kids in the community, you’ll find that the impulse to put kids in secure facilities goes way down,” says Butts.

< read the entire article >

Butts, Jeffrey (January 6, 2012). Reclaiming Futures Blog, News & Information. Portland, OR: Reclaiming Futures, Portland State University.

When casual readers of the news media search for stories about juvenile crime and justice today, they find a lot of good news. Other than the perennial media coverage of individual crimes and victimization, an online search about juvenile justice today generates dozens of stories about states uncovering abuses in their youth corrections systems, reducing their rates of juvenile incarceration and increasing their reliance on community-based programs for young offenders.

Many of these stories refer to the ongoing decline in crime and violence as possible proof that these changes in policy and practice are improving public safety. But, a prudent reader will stop to ask about the direction of causality in these explanations. Are we reducing crime by limiting the use of incarceration, or is incarceration down because crime is down? The question is more than a topic for academic study. We need to consider our answer carefully if we hope to sustain these recent improvements over the long term.

The number of juvenile offenders being held in secure correctional institutions has been falling nationwide. Advocates in the juvenile justice field welcome this reform because reductions in the use of secure confinement allow state and local jurisdictions to intervene with young offenders in their own homes and communities, which is less costly and can be more effective than incarceration in reducing recidivism and preventing crime.

My colleague Douglas Evans and I recently reviewed the most prominent juvenile correctional reform models from the past 40 years, and we concluded that some models of reform were likely to be more sustainable than others. Specifically, we recommended the “realignment” approach now being implemented in California and those established in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan since 2000.

Some of the reform models described in the report are well known to juvenile justice audiences, including RECLAIM Ohio and Redeploy Illinois. They created financial incentives for state and local officials to maintain an effective balance in their juvenile justice system so that secure confinement is used only for the most serious cases and does not consume a disproportionate share of budgets. In our report, we acknowledged that the financial reinvestment approach to reform appears to have been successful in these jurisdictions, but we cautioned that such reforms might be more easily reversed if conditions change.

What happens if and when violent crime begins to climb in the future? Have we really changed our collective thinking about youth crime? If we believe that these youth justice reforms are critical for public safety and for public budgets, shouldn’t we focus on reforms that are not easily undone? In our opinion, reforms grounded in structural change are likely to be more durable than those that depend on the changing views of elected officials or the vicissitudes of budget pressure.