One aim of juvenile justice reform has yet to pan out.

Reducing costly incarceration was supposed to free up funds for community-based services to help keep youths on the right path.

“I think that’s something we are still trying to recapture, to allow more funding on the ‘front end,’” said Merton Chinen, director of the state Office of Youth Services. “That part has not been fully realized.”

When Hawaii’s juvenile justice reform law was passed in 2014, it was projected to save $11 million over five years by cutting costs at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility. In the first three years, Administrator Mark Patterson said he has returned $3 million to the state treasury in savings on the budget for the youth jail.

Spending at the Youth Correctional Facility remains relatively high given the dwindling number of incarcerated youths.

In January 2016 legislators called Patterson on the carpet for overtime at the youth jail, which had reached $1.2 million on an $11 million operating budget. At the time, the facility was projecting $1 million-plus in overtime again for the 2016 fiscal year.

Lawmakers were so frustrated that they chopped the HYCF budget by $1 million.

The message seems to have resonated. Patterson managed to rein in overtime in the 2016 fiscal year to $756,000, well below the projected amount. The figure went down a bit further to $667,000 in the fiscal year that ended in June.

The overtime spending galled legislators given what many considered an abundance of staff at the facility. In a recent presentation, Patterson noted that the facility is still staffed for 80 or more kids while the average daily census has fallen to just 20 to 25 youths.

As of July 1, HYCF had 118 staff positions ranging from auto mechanic to social worker, with the bulk of them correctional officers and supervisors. That’s down from a total of 124 in 2014 because the Legislature has trimmed several slots.

Patterson has continued filling vacancies as they occur. In the 2015 fiscal year, he hired 15 people, including 10 youth correctional officers, a registered nurse and a farm manager. He added six more staff in the last two years, including clerks and two “institutional farm activity leaders.”

Asked why he kept hiring as the youth population fell, he said, “I didn’t want to lose my staff because we were in the process of figuring out what we want to do.”

He added that a large staff is needed to keep the secured facility running because so many employees call in sick or are out on workers’ compensation. Under their union contract, correctional officers don’t have to produce a doctor’s note until their fifth sick day.

To reduce overhead, Patterson recently moved the girls, who were in a separate building, into the main complex with the boys.

Meanwhile, some community programs for troubled teens are foundering for lack of money. Marimed’s Kailana program, an ocean-oriented, therapeutic residential model that had been operating since 1993, closed in June.

Others need more support to grow. The Hoopano Mamo Civil Citation Initiative, a pilot program launched in Kalihi in 2015, aimed to get first-time teen offenders immediate help and counseling at a community assessment center rather than criminalize them. It is being continued with a new provider.

“The results were encouraging,” Chinen said. “What we’d like to do, which is going to require more resources, of course, is to replicate it in other districts on Oahu, but that’s going to take funding.”

State Sen. Jill Tokuda, who represents the Kailua-Kaneohe district where the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility is located, has been keeping a close eye on its budget.

“The big concern is that if you continue to bleed away funds to overtime,” she said, “you can’t properly allocate resources toward the kind of community-based care for our youth, which I believe was the whole point of juvenile justice reform.”