Mandate Safe Confinement and Appropriate Service Provision

Conditions of confinement in youth detention facilities can significantly impact youth physically and emotionally and affect the extent to which detention can prevent future delinquent behavior and promote well-being.  Policymakers should require that youth are detained in a safe environment and receive appropriate services to meet their needs and prepare them for reintegration in the community upon release. Some of the strategies for mandating safe confinement and appropriate service provision include:

• Require access to counsel, courts, and family. While in detention, youth need access to counsel to ensure that they are represented at all delinquency proceedings, that evidence against them is properly challenged and that all legal issues are actively addressed.  Policymakers should ensure that youth’s constitutional right to counsel is being fulfilled. In addition, policymakers should require that detained youth have access to their families, enabling them to maintain these permanent supportive connections throughout their detention and through their reentry into the community. With the passage of 2007 SB 518, California legislators enacted a comprehensive Youth Bill of Rights outlining the rights of juveniles housed in a facility of the Division of Juvenile Justice.  One of the rights ensures regular contact through frequent visits, telephone calls, and mail with: parents, guardians, siblings, children, and other adults to whom they are related, as well as adults who youth have a family or mentoring relationship with (such as godparents, clergy, teachers, neighbors, and family friends). Additionally, youth have the right to make and receive confidential telephone calls, send and receive confidential mail, and have confidential visits with: attorneys and their staff, legal services organizations, ombudspersons and other advocates, holders of public office, and people who work at a state or federal court.

• Ensure youth have access to quality health, mental health and substance abuse programming. Policymakers should ensure that, throughout their confinement, youth have access to quality health and mental health care and substance abuse treatment.  These services should begin upon entrance into the juvenile justice system and continue through release with planning for continued services upon reentry into the community. New Jersey mandates comprehensive mental health services and suicide risk screening for juveniles in detention.

• Support opportunities for recreation, exercise and art therapy. It is important for juvenile facilities to provide the activities and support youth need for healthy physical and emotional development.  Youth need opportunities to constructively channel their energy, exercise, demonstrate competence, develop social skills and participate in social and art activities.[1] Policymakers should support the development and maintenance of these opportunities for youth in detention.  The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services established several regional youth centers that offer juvenile offenders various recreational activities and art classes, among other special services in an attempt to create a more enriching and productive environment for the youth.

• Ensure consistent and meaningful education. Many youth involved in the juvenile justice system face educational deficits, and arrest and detention only further disrupts educational progress.  Policymakers should ensure that, while detained, youth receive consistent, quality education that prepares them for the workforce and self-sufficiency.  Created in 1994, Arizona’s Juvenile Detention Education program provides juvenile detention education on a 12-month basis.  The state legislature allocates by formula County Equalization Funds to county juvenile detention educational programs; the state is one of only a few to allocate statewide financial support for detention education.

• Increase oversight.  Hawaii legislators appropriated over $1.3 million to improve operations and oversight at the Hawaii Youth Detention Facility.[2]