Juvenile justice needs reform

The language is dry and bureaucratic, yet the core message in a new report on juvenile justice comes through with devastating clarity: Hawaii is failing to rehabilitate most offenders because it uses the wrong approach, relying on expensive incarceration even for those convicted of misdemeanors and failing to provide timely access to the drug and mental-health treatment these troubled youths desperately need.

This failure is evident not only in the wasted potential of young people who spiral into more serious crime as adults, but in the cost to taxpayers who are denied a return on their major investment in this flawed system.

Perhaps the biggest loss: diminished public safety in a society that can and should do better.

The Hawaii Juvenile Justice Working Group — a 20-member panel of judges, state legislators, police, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers and social workers, educators, health experts and youth advocates — was charged last August with developing policy recommendations to improve our juvenile justice system. Now the group has delivered its grimly accurate assessment to the governor, chief justice and state House and Senate leaders, pointing a clear path forward with concrete suggestions grounded in proven best practices, data and research.

We urge state and county officials to move quickly to adopt the report’s recommendations, which will require revising relevant statutes, redirecting financial and human resources, and boosting collaboration among government agencies.

A large burden will fall on the state Department of Human Services’ Office of Youth Services, so it’s encouraging that its leadership was an influential part of the working group.

Among the most urgent of the report’s 24 recommendations are two that are intertwined: the clarion call to stop sending youths convicted of misdemeanors to the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility (HYCF), and to redirect some of the savings to improve access to substance-abuse and mental-health treatment.

The 56-bed HYCF on Oahu’s Windward side was intended as a facility of last resort, reserved for the most violent and dangerous juvenile offenders who threaten public safety. But it’s become a holding center for minors convicted of nonviolent misdemeanors — and they end up being held for nearly as long as those convicted of felonies.

Seventy-two percent of the youths sent to HYCF in fiscal year 2013 were incarcerated for property, drug, status or other nonviolent offenses. They remained at HYCF an average of seven months, only six weeks less than the average time for felony offenders. And although overall commitments to HYCF have fallen 41 percent over the past decade, youths are staying longer: The average commitment time is up 188 percent since 2004.

These troubling trends reflect the harsh reality that young offenders who should be in less costly, more effective community-based residential or outpatient treatment programs are incarcerated because those options are not widely available.

About 80 percent of youth involved in Hawaii’s juvenile justice system abuse drugs or alcohol, the report emphasized, yet there is only one residential substance-abuse facility in Hawaii. Left untreated in juveniles, substance abuse becomes a long-term scourge on society, leading to joblessness, homelessness and higher crime rates as young offenders grow up unrehabilitated.

Prohibiting misdemeanor placements at HYCF would force the state to use the facility as originally intended and free up resources for local jurisdictions, to expand treatment programs and provide better sentencing and supervision options for the family court judges and probation officers who oversee these offenders.

HYCF costs $199,000 per bed, per year —taxpayers’ money that could be better spent, for all but the most dangerous offenders.

Incarceration clearly isn’t working: 75 percent of youths face new charges within three years of leaving HYCF.

All told, the working group’s recommendations are projected to save taxpayers at least $11 million over the next five fiscal years, and reduce HYCF’s average daily population by 60 percent by 2019.

Most profoundly, the report shifts the government’s focus to where it belongs: effective intervention for a population that it shouldn’t be too late to save.