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The Daily Record - 7/16/2018

WOOSTER — As the Wayne County Justice Center plans to expand its jail space for adult offenders, the Juvenile Court is looking to decrease its use of detention for troubled youth.

The Wayne County Juvenile Court was selected as a Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative site for 2018. The initiative is overseen by the Ohio Department of Youth Services.

The data-driven reform process was founded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 1992 and is a nationwide effort of local and state juvenile justice systems to eliminate the unnecessary and inappropriate use of juvenile secure detention and to reduce racial disparities.

According to JDAI national statistics, participating entities have decreased their detention admissions by nearly 50 percent after implementing the program.

Wayne County was officially accepted into the program in February and will receive a one-time payment of $70,000 to implement the initiative. The foundation and DYS already earmarked $20,000 of the grant for Case Western Reserve University to conduct ongoing studies of the county’s utilization of JDAI and a two-day systems assessment.

The assessment involves six assessors who will interview community partners and the courts to see how the juvenile court uses the detention center.

The county will then receive recommendations and use the remaining $50,000 to implement the changes, such as new screening tools, according to Misty Hanson, chief probation officer of Wayne County Juvenile Court.

“We’ll start implementing leeways of how we do things to make sure that the kids going to the detention center genuinely need to be there and there’s not an alternative we can do,” Hanson told the Wayne County commissioners in March.

“We haven’t committed to changing anything specific at this point by doing this. It’s more of them coming in and giving us tools and resources to look at. It’s more of a mindset shift.”

The JDAI model is built around eight core strategies, including using rigorous data collection and analysis to guide decision making; replacing subjective decision-making processes with objective admissions criteria and risk-assessment instruments to determine which youth are placed in detention; implementing new or expanded alternatives to detention; and instituting processing reforms to expedite the flow of cases through the system.

Another core strategy is a collaboration between juvenile court officials, probation agencies, prosecutor, defense attorneys, schools, community organizations, and advocates. Over the next several months, the Wayne County Juvenile Court will be working to create such a governance structure.

The collaboration will consist of a representatives from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, the Wooster Police Department, a representative for the local schools, Children Services, Mental Health and Recovery Board of Wayne and Holmes Counties, the Multi-County Juvenile Attention Center System, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office, a treatment provider and a representative for youth of color.

Jamey McKenzie will serve as the representative for MCJAS and Manny Stone of Wooster City Schools was asked to be the representative to work with youth of color. The other representatives have not yet been determined.

JDAI began in Ohio in 2010 with five of the largest counties — Cuyahoga, Franklin, Lucas, Montgomery and Summit. The initiative expanded in 2013 with Mahoning, Marion, Trumbull counties and has since added Ashtabula and Warren counties.

Stark County, which is part of MCJAS with Wayne County, also was named a JDAI site this year.

“Together, we are considering what changes should be made and studying what other JDAI counties like Ashtabula County are doing, which ultimately led to that county closing its detention facility for lack of need,” Wiles said.

At the end of April, Ashtabula County stopped incarcerating its juvenile delinquents at its youth detention center. High-risk offenders will be housed out-of-county but non-violent, low-risk juveniles are being diverted to a full-time intervention and diversion program.

Wiles doesn’t anticipate eliminating the need for a secure detention facility in Wayne County, she does hope to see a decrease in the number of children that need to be detained.

“Over the past several years, we have tried really hard to work with other community resources to reduce the number of children who enter detention. With JDAI, we hope to reduce those numbers even more,” Wiles told The Daily Record. “We will always have detention available for those children who need it and who present a risk to public safety.

For those that do need to be detained, the county will look at the conditions of confinement and what can be done differently to eliminate recidivism while meeting constitutional and statutory legal requirements for the confinement of youth. Monitoring and improving conditions of confinement in detention facilities is one of the core strategies.

As of 2016, there were 197 active JDAI sites reaching 10 million youth between the ages of 10 and 17 in more than 300 local jurisdictions across 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Of the 164 sites that reported in 2016, there was more than 3,800 fewer youth in detention on an average day than before those sites undertook JDAI — a reduction of 43 percent. There were roughly 93,000 fewer admissions per year to juvenile detention facilities in JDAI sites — a decrease of 49 percent — compared with pre-JDAI levels, according to the “JDAI at 25: Annual Results Report.”

The Linda Martin Attention Center in Wayne County, one of the four detention facilities operated by MCJAS and utilized mostly by Wayne County, admitted 136 juveniles over the first six months of 2018. Of those admitted, 81 were male and 55 were female.

The average length of stay in detention was 8.7 days and the average daily population at the facility was 6.6 inmates. The racial/?ethnicity breakdown of inmates was 79 percent white, 13 percent African-American or black, 6 percent other, and 3 percent Hispanic/?Latino.

The majority were admitted pre-adjudication for either misdemeanor offenses against a person or status offenses (i.e. truancy, violating curfew, underage drinking). The main technical reason for detention was a probation violation, and only two were committed to the detention facility post-adjudication for an average length stay of 24.5 days.

Reducing the number of youth detained for status offenses or because they’re awaiting placement, which was two in the first half of 2018, is another core strategy, along with combating racial and ethnic disparities.

“I think we’re going to see that we are doing some things well already. I think we’re going to see there are some areas that we can improve,” Hanson told the commissioners. “As we started discussing this process at the court, we already started identifying some things that we need to improve.”

Reporter Emily Morgan can be reached at 330-287-1632 or emorgan@the-daily-record.com.

CREDIT: EMILY MORGAN