Meda Chesney-Lind, Ph.D.

Senate Committee on the Judiciary

House Committee on the Judiciary

Testimony on

The Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility

November 1, 2005

10:00 a.m.

Thank you Senator Hanabusa and Representative Luke for convening this extremely important hearing.

My name is Meda Chesney-Lind. I am currently a Professor of Women's Sts Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I am also a past Vice-President of the American Society of Criminology. Today, however, I am speaking as an individual.

I must say I approached this event with great sadness. I've bve been involved in juvenile justice issues in Hawaii for over thirty years, and for the vast majority of those years, I have felt deep concern that we were doing the right thing at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility. I know I am not alone in that sentiment, having spent many hours with individuals (many of them in this room this morning) who were trying to make a difference there, only to have to restart the effort almost as soon as the last one stopped.

Indeed, the conditions at the facility when I first saw it over thirty years ago were terrible. When my friend Rena Winslow, who was a former YCO at the facility wrote her 1978 book about a young boy who killed himself there, I read it with shame and distress.

I felt the same shame and distress when I read the recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice about conditions at the facility.

Sadly, between those two intervals has been no shortage of attempts to do right by Hawaii's kids, including those who spend time at our youth facility. In a quick run through my office, I found numerous reports from outside experts, an impressive array that include nationally prominent leaders in the area of youth policy including Ira Schwartz, Russell Van Vleet, Dan Macallair, Angela Wolf, Barry Krisberg, and Rebecca Maniglia, as well as a host of state reports. Even more depressing to read were the high hopes that we all shared when the Office of Youth Services was created in the early 1980s in large part out of a hope that a unit that specialized in a continuum of "youth services" including prevention, early intervention, and incarceration would solve the facilities problems, which been documented in an earlier ACLU review, when HYCF was still a part of the State&Mac185;s then Department of Corrections. The hope then was then that an administrative relocation coupled with a radically different approach to youth services and juvenile justice would reform HYCF.

Here's a s a partial list of what folks advised the state to create so as to avoid problems at our youth facility:

Basic system elements of a healthy system of juvenile justice include case management, assessment, planning, referral, monitoring, intensive tracking, and evaluation. Creation of a rich array of alternatives to incarceration including a Wilderness Challenge Program, an Experimental Educational Program, Employment Preparation and Vocational Training, Intensive Family Outreach and Monitoring, Supervised Independent Living, Extended Family Homes, Staff Secure Homes, Locked Residential Treatment, and various other community based alternatives to the current instinstitution-based system. By the way, this list was taken directly from a 1988 report prepared on HYCF by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives. We all know how few of these initiatives ever materialized.

When the Office of Youth Services first crafted a vision of a small, high quality facility to house thirty of the state's mos most dangerous juveniles, precisely this array of in-community alternatives to incarceration for the states' less serious, but chronic offenders was essential to the plan. As we all know, those vitally necessary alternatives were never funded. As a consequence, the facility continued to absorb a much larger number of youth, including a group of girls whose offense backgrounds clearly and repeatedly indicate that they not require secure custody.

Most troubling, here, is the role played by short term commitments which would simply be trouble for any facility. These constituted 63% of the commitments to the facility according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency's review of the facility prepared in 2004. Most of these youth do not require the kind of secure custody found at HYCF, and many could be adequately and more effectively helped in the community.

These observations are data based. My own research, and the research of the students who worked with me on various projects, has focused on the characteristics of those housed at HYCF. The profile is a sad one: many youth at the facility have been the victims of educational neglect, most come from backgrounds of poverty, many are Native Hawaiian (52%), many have extensive problems with substance abuse (for which woefully few treatment programs are available), and many are minor offenders (particularly youth from the Neighbor Islands). There are also too many girls whose offense profile clearly does not warrant incarceration, and who have histories of physical and sexual abuse as well as suicide and depression. The same profile emerges from countless other studies done over the last few decades. Virtually all the experts who reviewed our institutional population agree that these youth could be far better served by focused, intensive in community programs rather than incarceration

Now, we are again as we were several decades ago, back at the State Legislature attempting to seek a solution to a terrible crisis at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, one that involves deeply troubling and persistent allegations of abuse as well as other issues that often arise in over-crowded facilities. I would urge us all to avoid the blame game that invariably arises in such a highly charged setting. I would also caution against focusing too much attention to the youth facility, itself. The problem is more systemic than that.

Here instead is a modest list of suggestions that might make a difference, and I do not believe that these will necessarily cost a great deal more money, which is crucial. They will, though, require the political will to implement.

First, and foremost, the population at the youth facility must be brought down from its current size to a much smaller, manageable population. Some of this has occurred, I believe, as a result of this crisis, but without structural changes, after the attention is diverted, the old patterns will reappear, just as they have in the past.

First, the Public Defender's Office in each county must be given one to two staff social workers (depending on population size) whose sole responsibility is the crafting of alternative treatment programs for youth at risk of being sent to HYCF.

Second, we must end the practice of Judges being able to directly commit youth the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, particularly on these short term commitments. They can commit youth to the Office of Youth Services, but then the Office must be empowered to control the child's placement.

Thirdly, for youth at risk of commitment, we need to let the money follow the child rather than simply funding "beds" in residential programs. To do this, we need to establish a "wrap around" system that allows the redirection of money (such as Title 4e fund) which currently funds beds to permit the funding of non-residential placements and programs. Currently, money tends to be directed to specific agencies (like group homes) rather than being available to craft specific and appropriate interventions for each youth. This is what is meant by wrap around services plans

Finally, to insure that the HYCF population stays low, OYS needs to designate an office within their larger structure whose sole and only purpose is crafting such in-community interventions for youth that are placed in its custody and who have in the past been confined to HYCF. This group cannot be allowed to become part of the larger OYS bureaucracy, which is increasingly concerned with contract monitoring, but must instead work intensively, outside of the existing HYCF culture, to target youth currently at the facility for alternative placement while also seeking in-community alternatives for youth that would otherwise be committed to the youth facility.

Certainly, it is the management difficulties and the attendant, internal problems at HYCF must be addressed, but the other parts of the system are also in vital need of attention. Once the population is under control, many of the other issues (such as staff burnout, staff training and upgrading) can be addressed.

Again, many of the pieces of this system are in place. We have many community based agencies that could work with these youth, if they had the funds to do so. We also might need to explore other sorts of programs (particularly day treatment and wilderness programs as have been suggested for the girls currently being housed at HYCF), but I have proposed a mechanism for creating this within the existing structure. Again, we will save money once we get the HYCF population reduced. We will not need a staff to incarcerate between 50 and 100 youth if we are only holding 30.

We also do not lack for information about what we need to do; there have been stacks of studies (including some of my own) on this issue. Virtually all make the same point. There are too many minor offenders incarcerated in a system originally designed for very serious and dangerous youth.

We simply need to have the political will to move from an institution based approach to juvenile justice to a more modern system. We all know or should know what the missing pieces are, and we are the only ones who can see that the resources are given to those who now incarcerate youth to provide them with far more effective, in community treatment.

Then we will truly live up to a description of our state that appeared in a 1982 Center for the Study of Youth Policy booklet which pronounced Hawaii and Missouri leaders in youth correctional policy. Missouri like Hawaii was in transition in the 80s, but having taken reform seriously and undertaken it, Missouri continues to deserve that accolade today. Indeed, it widely regarded as the Nation's premier juvenile justice system. It's long past time for Hawaii to do the same.