Don’t jail youths for misdemeanors, group advises

Juveniles convicted of misdemeanors should no longer be sent to the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, a working group recommended Friday, a policy change that could reduce the facility’s average daily population by 60 percent and save the state $11 million over the next five years.

The working group urged the state to use the savings to invest $2 million a year to strengthen juvenile probation and reduce recidivism.

Juvenile crime and incarceration rates have declined nationally and in Hawaii, but the working group on juvenile justice found that youths who are incarcerated stay in the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility for longer periods and that 75 percent of the juveniles who are released commit new crimes within three years.

Hawaii Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald, state House and Senate lawmakers, and Abercrombie administration officials guided the working group — a partnership with the Pew Charitable Trusts — and presented a report with two dozen policy recommendations to Gov. Neil Abercrombie at a news conference at the state Capitol.

It costs the state $199,320 a year to house a juvenile at the 56-bed Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility.

"We don’t even spend $19,000 a year on our kids in our educational system," Abercrombie said.

Abercrombie, a former probation officer, said his administration and state lawmakers would consider the working group’s recommendations during the session that opens in January. A similar project two years ago — the Justice Reinvestment Initiative — was aimed at the criminal justice system.

"We want to catch them early and let them catch themselves early," the governor said of troubled juveniles.

The working group found that 61 percent of admissions to the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility for new offenses in fiscal year 2013 involved misdemeanors, compared with 47 percent in 2004. The money saved from not sending juveniles convicted of misdemeanors to the facility could be used for better probation services and for mental health and substance abuse treatment, the group recommended.

Admissions to the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility declined by 41 percent over the past decade. But the average length of stay was 7.2 months in 2013, up from 2.5 months in 2004. An estimated 80 percent of juveniles in the juvenile justice system have substance abuse problems.

"Some youth are serious offenders who have high risk of re-offending and need that level of security," Recktenwald said. "But for others who have committed less significant violations of the law, we can obtain better results in the long run by providing them with services that will help them to deal with the issues that brought them into the system."

Family Court Judge R. Mark Browning said the working group’s report is "a statement that we care about our kids, that our kids belong to all of us and that we as a community have a responsibility — a moral duty — to help them, and that incarceration is simply not the answer.

"That we can do better, that we will do better."

State Rep. Mele Carroll (D, Lanai-Molokai-Paia-Hana) said the working group’s recommendations, if implemented, would both protect public safety and help ensure that "each dollar invested in our juvenile justice system is being used to achieve a better result."