The juvenile incarceration system is wrecked, and there are no easy solutions. An excerpt from this morning’s New York Times:
Standing to address Judge Daniel Turbow in Family Court in Brooklyn, a city prosecutor confidently listed the reasons why the 16-year-old boy in the courtroom should be sent upstate to a juvenile prison.
He was a member of the Bloods, the prosecutor said, and he later joined another gang. He was arrested once for grand larceny and twice for assault. He went to school drunk and spat on the dean of students.
“He admits to going out to Bergen Beach to rob people,” the prosecutor continued, as the courtroom fell silent. “He stated that this is the way that he gets his money.”
Judge Turbow, looking anguished, was still reluctant to issue the harshest penalty: sending the teenager to a juvenile prison run by the state.
A recent series of reports on the grim conditions at upstate juvenile prisons has made the decisions of Family Court judges even more difficult. The reports detailed violence, broken bones, suicidal behavior and deficient mental health services at the prisons, which recently had a combined population of 777.
As a result, the state official in charge of juvenile prisons, Gladys Carrión, pleaded with the judges who handle juvenile delinquency cases to place young people in the prisons only in the most extreme of circumstances.
Some judges have said they are now in an excruciating position: armed with the knowledge that the prisons are unacceptably dangerous places, but unable to stop sending young people there. And so they send them, one judge said, “every day.”
… The 16-year-old boy in Judge Turbow’s courtroom, who was accused of offenses that included grand larceny and assaulting his mother with a stereo speaker, received a last-minute placement at Martin de Porres, a small, well-regarded group home in Queens.
“He is in some ways a very lucky young man,” Judge Turbow said, addressing his parents. “This is like one of those movies about someone who’s about to be strapped into the electric chair and the governor calls at the very last minute.”
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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.
Excessive physical force was routinely used to discipline children at several juvenile prisons in New York, resulting in broken bones, shattered teeth, concussions and dozens of other serious injuries over a period of less than two years, a federal investigation has found.
A report by the United States Department of Justice highlighted abuses at four juvenile residential centers and raised the possibility of a federal takeover of the state’s entire youth prison system if the problems were not quickly addressed.
. . . “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs,” the reportsaid. “This one-size-fits-all approach has, not surprisingly, led to an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures” (bone fractures caused by twisting).
. . . In one case described in the report, a youth was forcibly restrained and handcuffed after refusing to stop laughing when ordered to; the youth sustained a cut lip and injuries to the wrists and elbows. Workers forced one boy, who had glared at a staff member, into a sitting position and secured his arms behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken.
