City Is Urged Not to Add Jail Space for Juveniles
By Michael Cooper
Originally published in The New York Times, April 5, 2002
In the current climate of protests over city budget cuts, it is a man-bites-dog story: a group of advocates is pleading with the Bloomberg administration not to spend money.
They want an overhaul of the city's juvenile justice system, and they are asking the administration not to go ahead with a $65 million plan to build 200 more beds for children 10 to 16 who are accused of crimes. They argue that the city should reverse its recent policy of jailing more young people even as juvenile crime has dropped.
City officials have long said that they simply need more beds for youths accused of crimes. But a report to be issued next week by the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit statewide prison watchdog group, makes a kind of "Field of Dreams" argument against expanding the detention centers: If you build it, they will come.
"Once the city invests $65 million to build these 200 additional detention beds, the city's detention policies will become more geared toward filling those beds," said Mishi Faruqee, the director of the association's juvenile justice project and the author of the report.
The report, called "Rethinking Juvenile Detention in New York City," argues that the city has been locking up more young people than necessary, mostly for nonviolent offenses. It calls on the city to use its limited resources to create more alternatives to detention, including group homes and probation-like programs, which it says would be cheaper for the city and better for the youths in the long run.
Scott Trent, a spokesman for the City Department of Juvenile Justice, which runs the detention centers, said last night that department officials had met with groups opposed to the expansion project, including the Correctional Association, and that it would consider their concerns before making a decision.
The commissioner of juvenile justice, Neil Hernandez, testified before the City Council last month that he was looking at the project. "This aspect of our budget is currently under serious review by the department," he said.
The report notes that the number of juveniles being held in locked detention rose steeply during the 1990's. From 1993 to 2000, the average number of juveniles held in secure detention on any given day rose by 60 percent, to 379 from 237. At the same time, the report found, reports of juvenile crime fell by 28 percent.
Since then, the average number of young people in detention each day has been falling: the number was 357 in 2001, and was down to 287 in the first four months of 2002.
Judges take two criteria into account when deciding whether to send a child to secure detention: whether he is likely to show up for a court hearing, and whether he is likely to commit another crime.
City officials have said more children are being detained because they lack stable families who could supervise them until their cases could be heard. But the report charged that more children were being held in secure detention for less serious offenses because the city did not have enough viable alternatives.
And the report charged that the policy disproportionately harms black and Hispanic children, who make up about 95 percent of those entering detention.
Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association, said the city spends $358 a day, or $130,670 a year, to detain one youth in a secure facility. "There are better, smarter, less expensive ways," he said.
The question of what to do with young children accused of crimes has long troubled the city.
For years, the city operated only one detention center: the Spofford Juvenile Center, a 289-bed facility in Hunts Point, the Bronx, that opened in 1957 and came to symbolize official neglect. In 1989 the city approved a plan to shut it down and replace it with two smaller detention centers, with 124 beds each, in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
But by the time the new, better-designed centers opened in 1998, the surge in the number of juveniles being held made the city's 248 beds wholly inadequate. So the city leased a jail barge that had been used for adults from the Correction Department, and used it as a temporary admissions center for youths. Then, in 1999, the city closed the barge, renovated Spofford and reopened it under a new name: Bridges Juvenile Center.
The Giuliani administration first proposed the $65 million project to build 100 more beds at each of the two new centers in its 2001-02 capital budget. The plan never came to fruition. When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled his preliminary budget for 2002-03 in February, the juvenile detention project was still in the works.
