Structural Reform in Juvenile Justice

Written by J.D.

In recent memory, American law enforcement agencies have faced controversy from both the public and the mainstream press, and for numerous breaches of public confidence. These breaches of the social contract are particularly evident in under served neighborhoods. Moreover, these controversies have forced Congress to consider numerous policy reforms that would otherwise be considered dead on arrival in the previous session of Congress. These policy considerations include a federal ban on police choke holds, the creation of a national database of excessive force incidents, and prohibition of certain no-knock warrants. Whether or not any of these proposals are likely to pass both houses of Congress, remains undetermined. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that any of these proposals will receive approval from the current administration. This emphasizes the importance of achieving structural reform in juvenile justice in the next administration. This is particularly clear in the aftermath of the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

From a broader contextual framework, we will find that these policy recommendations are neither new, nor do they fall outside of the mainstream in today’s political discourse. Support for bans of chokeholds and strangleholds, policies that require the use of de-escalation tactics, and the requirement of warnings before shooting, are only a few examples of policies that have been deployed by police department training divisions, while seeing a suboptimal reduction of excessive force incidents. Police academies have also trained and re-trained members of law enforcement in field practices intended to exhaust all alternatives before shooting, as well as the duty to intervene when a fellow officer is abusing his authority, not to mention department bans on opening fire on moving vehicles, yet a number of videos began and continued to circulate on social media in the early days of protests, demonstrating breaches of these very policies. Furthermore, efforts to establish a use of force continuum in the carrying out of traffic stops, or responses to domestic violence calls, and requirements to report all uses of force when they occur, are just another set of tactics that have failed to reduce the continued breaches of public confidence.

Despite the implementation of these policies, we have continued to see the perpetuation of this cycle in which protests erupt after yet another unarmed black person is killed by armed members of law enforcement. Procedural reform advocates in academia, have long touted these policies as a progressive response to systemic racism in criminal justice, however, an internal report from the Minneapolis Police Department entitled “Focusing on Procedural Justice Internally and Externally,” found that none of the procedural reforms recommended to their department worked. Lawmakers we’re puzzled by the failure of these procedural reforms, but for many blacks living in the twin cities, these failures come as no surprise. That’s because for many of the residents in these underserved neighborhoods, they’d lived their entire lives with the fact that every social problem in their neighborhood has been turned over to law enforcement.

Many of these predominantly minority-majority neighborhoods are home to schools that are underfunded, whose students under-perform on standardized testing, and are thus perceived as ‘broken’; the policy prescription has been to introduce and expand school policing. Defunding of mental health services such as the deployment of crisis evaluation teams in medical emergencies, information and referrals, gate-keeping of acute inpatient psychiatric beds, interpreter services, and patient transport, have left mental health patients without access to services, and the same unskilled, armed members of law enforcement to address mental health emergencies. Restriction to funding for overdose prevention training, needle-access programs, and commercial licenses for methadone clinics, also yet again leave the same untrained, armed members of law enforcement to address opioid overdoses.

Let’s examine the example of school policing, leaving Minneapolis and going back in time to Los Angeles in the era of school desegregation. During the mid-20th century, amidst efforts to dismantle de jure forms of racial segregation, new law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles School Police Department, were designed to patrol public schools in increasingly integrated neighborhoods. This program of social and economic control was decidedly implemented, as part of a punitive framework to police young people of color in low-income neighborhoods. Today, while these public schools face a shortage of mental health providers, alternatively, school boards and state legislators are voting to increase funding for police in schools, while under funding available resources to build up school-based mental health professionals. This has created a real and devastating racial disparity in school arrests and law enforcement referrals.

Having turned these schools into sites of increasing criminalization, strategies to stop the criminalization of our youth must include the removal of police from these schools, and the growth of diversion programs that would allow young people of color to avoid arrest for misdemeanor offenses. The removal of school resource officers, and an effective policy of diversion in low-income neighborhoods, including curbside warnings and stationhouse adjustments, would be particularly beneficial for young people of color who are disproportionately in contact with the criminal justice system. It is also an instrumental precursor for curtailing mass incarceration and the racial disparity in the rate of incarceration.

It is unacceptable that young people of color are disproportionately deprived of access to stationhouse adjustments for drug, alcohol, and tobacco offenses; theft-related offenses; or disorderly conduct, where those stationhouse adjustments would otherwise result in a juvenile being diverted from the juvenile justice system altogether. According to the ACLU of New Jersey, “The underutilization of stationhouse adjustments has potentially resulted in thousands of youths having a juvenile record in addition to unnecessary, extensive contact with the juvenile justice system – contact that can leave lasting trauma.” Rather than expand and improve school-based mental health services, we have alternatively turned these schools, and the communities of color they serve, into pipelines to prison, exacerbating multigenerational traumas and maladaptive behavioral problems.

It is critical that law enforcement agencies utilize tools to keep young people out of the juvenile justice system. Writes Barry Holman and Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute, “The increased and unnecessary use of secure detention exposes troubled young people to an environment that more closely resembles adult prisons and jails than the kinds of community and family-based interventions proven to be most effective.” If the Attorney General of California formalized and effectively implement policies of diversion, which make use of the curbside warning and stationhouse adjustment as the default option for addressing misdemeanor offenses by juvenile offenders, and if all POST-participating agencies in the State of California institutionalize those diversionary programs, and comply with a comprehensive and transparent reporting system, then we can provide young people of color with effective alternatives to incarceration, because with limited access to curbside warnings and stationhouse adjustments, the number of young people of color involved in the juvenile justice system remains unacceptably high.