Young People Involved in the Juvenile Justice System Deserve Rehabilitation, Not Incarceration
All young people deserve opportunities to grow and succeed in a supportive environment. In particular, young people involved in the juvenile justice system need access to alternative, community-based programs that have been proven to help them change and improve their behavior. Incarceration should be used only as a last resort.
Incarcerating young people causes them further harm. Far from rehabilitating them, youth who are incarcerated are more likely to recidivate than youth who remain in a community-based setting or not detained at all. In Illinois, 86% of youth held in custody by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice are arrested again within three years of their release. Policies focused on incarceration decrease public safety, as detention increases the likelihood youth will re-offend.
The experience of incarceration leads to many other harmful outcomes that predispose incarcerated youths to a life in poverty.
Youth who are incarcerated are 39% less likely to graduate high school than their peers. And criminal records often follow them to adulthood, severely restricting their ability to secure meaningful employment, housing, and educational opportunities.
Moreover, incarceration is incredibly expensive. It costs $172,000 to incarcerate one young person for one year in a juvenile facility in Illinois, 29 times more expensive than the cost of a community-based alternative. And that cost is increasing. At Illinois’s largest juvenile facility, IYC — St Charles, 174 youth are incarcerated at an annual cost of $26.2 million.
It is time to take a step back and confront the reality that Illinois’s juvenile justice system makes everyone worse off. Although Illinois has made significant strides towards reducing the number of young people held in custody, further policy change is needed. Youth incarcerated in juvenile justice facilities are less likely to be successful later in life and more likely to re-offend. And taxpayers are footing the bill for an incredibly expensive, inefficient system.
There is a better solution: community-based programs that treat young people close to their homes.
Programs such as Functional Family Therapy and Multi-Systemic Therapy engage youth and their families, increase public safety, and are cost effective. Specifically, Redeploy Illinois is a community-based alternative to incarceration run by counties to meet the unique needs of their kids. Redeploy Illinois provides mental health and substance use treatment, programs that address trauma and abuse, and other services to meet the needs of the youth and their family.
Youth who participated in Redeploy Illinois had a 27% lower recidivism rate than youth who did not participate in the program. Additionally, counties that participate in Redeploy Illinois have significantly reduced the number of youth they are sending to juvenile justice facilities; between 2005 and 2014 nearly 1,800 youth remained in their communities, saving the state over $88 million. This is possible because the cost of a youth participating in a Redeploy Illinois program is only $6,000 annually, versus the $172,000 to incarcerate that same youth.
Unfortunately, the ongoing failure of Illinois’s Governor and legislative leaders to pass a fully funded budget has led to uncertainty and reduced funding for Redeploy Illinois and other community-based programs. Twenty-four Illinois counties that previously served 285 youth in FY 2015 have lost services under Redeploy Illinois alone.
Illinois needs to reduce reliance on incarceration and provide youth involved in the juvenile justice system the chance to be rehabilitated in the community closer to their families.
Three concrete steps should be taken to promote rehabilitation and restoration for justice-involved youth: (1) invest in community-based response to juvenile delinquency, not buildings, (2) fully support and expand Redeploy Illinois, and (3) create a dedicated state youth investment fund that redirects resources from reducing use of incarceration towards community-based approaches.
Incarceration is harmful to youth and expensive for taxpayers, while community-based programs are better for youth, improve public safety, and are significantly cheaper. It is time to make community-based alternatives the standard for youth in Illinois and continue to close costly and ineffective youth prisons.
