American Indian and African American youth, who together, comprise only 8.7% of our teenage population, make up 23% of youth in secure detention,” she said on a “Conversations with Al McFarlane” broadcast last month. “Our pilot sites push appropriate detention utilization and ask why we have disproportionate minority contact. We do that by being data-driven. In Minnesota, we have 40% to 60% of the youth in detention for either warrants or probation violations. So our question is what more can we do so we can eliminate using detention and get at those disproportionate numbers.”
Yet, how our community handles young people – the threat that some young people are to themselves and to community remains a major concern for the community and for legal and justice systems that serve the community, said Kedem. People need and expect safe and secure neighborhood and community environments. Our government, the police departments, the courts, the corrections department, ensure that safety and security. But safety and security, on the one hand, and fairness and justice on the other hand, must not be mutually exclusive in their presence and application in our communities, she said.
Kedem raised serious questions: “How do we not let our fears and biases marginalize a whole group of people – Black people, Brown people, Asian people? How do we apply specific and effective remedy to challenge and prevent, specific abusive or violating behavior, and correct that behavior, in a way that also protects civil and human rights?
Jerry Driesen runs juvenile services, including juvenile probation, the Juvenile Detention Center, and the County Home School for the Hennepin County. He said, “We have two charges in the department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation: The first is public safety, the second is offender rehabilitation and community restoration.”
Driesen said a key concern for the department is making sure the staff has the right tools to meet both of those missions. “We are cleaning up bench warrant policies and making sure we have other means to deal with kids who fail to appear for court, rather than using our most expensive resource, which is the Juvenile Detention Center,” he said. “There’s another warrant, though, that I don’t think we’ve talked about much, and that’s the arrest and detention warrant. When a child is put on probation, the court orders certain conditions – for instance, you must drop or must turn in a urine analysis on a regular basis; you must show up and meet with your probation officer. When a child doesn’t meet those conditions the probation officer issues an arrest and detention warrant, signed by the judge. We bring that kid back into the detention center. It’s not a new offense, but the kid didn’t comply with the orders of the court.”
“We created administrative sanctions grids that give the probation officers other tools, other things we can do to remind that child that they do need to comply with those conditions but that don’t resort straight to detention,” he said, Driesen said the county now engages volunteers, through juvenile probation, who are working with the courts to serve as court reminder clerks. “They’re calling whenever a child is due for court; they’re calling the family, calling the child, to remind them: ‘you’ve got a court date tomorrow. Don’t miss it.’ We have data that shows that we’ve increased the appearance rates dramatically, and thereby then decreased the number of kids who don’t show and then get thrown back in the JDC.”
Driesen said the county is creating a detention expeditor whose job is checking on a daily basis who’s in the detention center, how long have they been there, what agreements need to be worked out to get that kid through the system as quickly as possible.“The issue is how do we get these kids back in the community and keep them there,” he said.
The Rev. G. Allen Foster, is the executive director of the Center for Hope and Compassion, and he manages project called Citadel of Hope. He said despite the good sounding intentions of county bureaucracies, community resources and routinely ignored, unutilized, or marginalized.
“I represent one of the agencies that is being considered to host community coaching pilot programs through the Department of Corrections. However, we’ve been working on this for almost two years. I’ve got a contract that is on someone’s desk, but yet have not seen it nor signed it,” Foster said.
“As pastors, we do this all the time. But we’re still trying to figure out the depth of the department of corrections commitment to this type of programming. Even if a pilot program is implemented, if there is no sustainability, it’s just an exercise in futility. So we’re going through the motion of putting a band-aid on a real serious issue,” he said.
“We are sincere and we are committed,” Dreisen responded. “I do fully understand how that looks on paper – two years to process a contract. Actually it’s taken us a while to figure out what exact community resources we wanted to build, and that contract has, I think, been under development for about eight months. You would think, that just dropping the population at an institution would equal immediate returns of lower costs. But turning a bureaucracy around doesn’t just happen like that.”
When it comes to problem-solving in the community, our people get the misery and others get the money. So it seems like that our misery is something that’s nurtured and harvested as revenue stream for other people, said Al McFarlane, the shows host.
Jim Payne developed that idea further. He said, “If we do not have the communities at the table who are most affected, whose children are locked up, who are most often victims of crimes, we’re not going to succeed. Every place this has been successful, particularly urban places, like Chicago, we’ve had communities of color at the table, making decisions about what policies and practices should be implemented, what programs should be open, and where those programs should be open.
“I’ll give you a good example,” Payne said. “In Chicago, we have what we call a model site in this foundation. It was one of the early sites. I believe it was a 630 bed detention center when they started. On any given day there were more kids than beds, and they didn’t know why half those kids were there. They now, after 18 years, have fewer than 400 kids there. It’s well protected. Most of the kids, instead of being in detention, are in community-based programs, in communities where they live. Now, how did they get there? Community-based programs.”
That was a far cry from the original operating policy which was created without talking to the community, and without having people in the community at the table, Payne said. At first they assigned these kids to programs that were not anywhere near their particular neighborhood. The kids didn’t go, and the probation department and everybody got upset – ‘why didn’t you go?’ The kids would say, ‘I had to cross three gang territories and it was too dangerous.’”
“Then they got community people in who worked in each particular community. What we’ve done is encourage them to look at ZIP codes. What kids are being held on probation violations in what ZIP codes for what reasons, and look in those communities and you’ll see programs that are already existing that you could use, or contract with,” Payne said.
Explaining the difficulty of bureaucratic change, Payne agreed with Driesen. “I worked for the government too. I know it’s hard to divert money. But it’s not impossible. Hennepin County spends $324 a day to put a kid in detention. Now ask the Reverend what his per capita costs to run the program would be. You’ll get better results. Why don’t we do it and then take that money and re-direct it into community programs. And it can be done – it’s difficult, I’ll admit, you have to have the right listening for this, but it can be done.” Payne said.
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