Young People Need a ‘Truly Just’ Juvenile Justice System: OJJDP Chief

OJJDP Administrator Liz Ryan. 

The federal government  will accelerate a shift in focus from punishment to community-based programs aimed at helping young people “make good choices for the future,” says Liz Ryan, the new administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)

“Our children deserve better,” Ryan told a webinar Wednesday. “[They] need a juvenile justice system that is truly just.

“It’s up to us to create one for them.”

Ryan, former head of the  nonprofit Youth First Initiative, an advocacy campaign to end youth incarceration, was appointed to head OJJDP in May—underlining a shift in the government’s traditional policy towards juvenile justice.

Ryan’s comments came during a panel discussion, organized by the Columbia Justice Lab and Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice, as part of a series of special events to observe Youth Justice Action Month.

The nation’s youth justice system has already experienced major change. A recent OJJDP report found that 85 percent of youth residential facilities are operating below capacity, and the number of young people in residential placement fell 77 percent between 2000 and 2020, Ryan noted.

The drop in youth detention populations has been accompanied by a dramatic 84 percent decline in youth arrests between 1996 and 2020—from more than 2.5 million to fewer than 450,000.

Between 2019 and 2020 alone they fell 38 percent for youth under 18 years old.

Of the estimated 424,300 overall arrests of youth in 2020, fewer than 10 percent were for a violent crime, the data showed.

However, despite reductions in population and arrests, the traditional juvenile justice system still plays a formidable—and often harmful–role in the lives of troubled young people.

“Incarceration…does little to help rehabilitate youth,” Ryan asserted. “In many cases, it further traumatizes them.

“Research underscores the damage youth experience when confined, from disruptions in their education to delayed psychosocial development and sexual victimization.”

The U.S. spends an estimated $5 billion annually on incarcerating youth, but approximately 55 percent of confined youth are rearrested within one year of their release, Ryan noted.

At the same time, the changing landscape has created an opportunity to make a “transformational” change in how authorities deal with justice-involved youth, advocates and researchers agree.

The key shift, underlined by Ryan Wednesday, is to divert more federal resources into community-based services, which she described as “more effective and far less costly than incarceration, both financially and in the damage done to our youth, families, and communities.”

The program, called the Community-Based Alternatives to Youth Incarceration Initiative, will support states’ efforts to:

• • Close more youth correctional facilities and “repurpose” them.
  • Address the impact of closures on facility staff and the surrounding community; and
  • Reinvest the money saved into “trauma-informed, evidence-based programs that serve youth involved in the juvenile justice system and their families.”

“When a young person encounters the juvenile justice system, it should be a system designed to help them make good choices for the future, not one focused on incarceration and punishment,” Ryan said.

“Young people who break the law should be held accountable, but incarceration is seldom the answer.”

Instead, the feds will support the development of community-based alternatives to the youth prisons, Ryan said, providing “resources that enable young people to thrive while living at home, in their own communities, with people they know and trust. “

Under the new OJJDP mandate, states will be required to earmark at least 75 percent of Title II funding to evidence-based or promising programs “that promote positive youth development, including community-based alternatives to youth incarceration,” Ryan said.

“This country’s resources are better invested in evidence-based and evidence-informed programs that serve youth in their home communities: keeping them in school and at work, connected with their families. “

This summary was prepared by TCR Editor Stephen Handelman