King County juvenile offense efforts lauded in new report

Associated Press

SEATTLE — King County is saving millions of dollars and straightening out hundreds of lives by changing the way it deals with young offenders, a study of juvenile justice systems has found.

The American Youth Policy Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on youth issues, examined eight youth justice programs around the country and released a report this week.

King County, the study found, cut its youth detention population by nearly one-third in two years by making better judgments about which teens to put in jail and by focusing more on keeping them out of trouble in the first place.

With fewer youngsters in jail, the county was able to avoid building a second new juvenile detention center, the report said.

"These programs don’t just work in a lab, they work with real kids," said the report’s author, Richard Mendel.

Despite a drop in juvenile crime from 1993 to 1998, King County’s average youth detention population rose from about 120 per night to about 200. Part of the reason was changes in state law in 1995 that granted courts wider authority to confine young people.

The county’s 160-bed juvenile detention center, opened in 1991, was already overrun, and the overcrowding forced the county to consider building an $11 million, 80-bed unit that would have cost $5.8 million a year to operate.

Instead, the county re-examined how it dealt with young offenders. Officers tried to stop jailing youths who weren’t dangerous, and when officials started calling youths to remind them of court dates, more started showing up for court, so fewer were arrested on bench warrants.

In addition, a little over a year ago, the county began tapping into state money to run three intervention programs designed to keep teens from reoffending. One is a class that places kids in lifelike situations to teach them to control their anger and make moral decisions. The others involve more intensive counseling with the offender and his or her family.

Since the changes began taking effect, the county’s juvenile detention population has dropped from about 200 per night to about 140, county officials say.