Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 31, 1993 TAG: 9303310328
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The teens, considered potentially violent while on the loose, are back in custody. But overcrowding at the detention home made it easier for them to overpower a counselor and to run away.
Coyner Springs is ranked among the 10 most overcrowded juvenile-detention centers in Virginia. To its credit, Roanoke City Council is moving to expand the center's capacity, as part of a bond package that also includes expanding the city jail. The bonds are to be financed with increases in the local cigarette tax and the city's auto-decal fee.
Meanwhile, the state - which shares with localities the responsibility for the detention centers - remains vulnerable to lawsuits over what a consultants' report in December called "horrendously overcrowded conditions" at the centers.
Much of the space crunch at the juvenile homes is the result of the saddeningly familiar story of increased rates of crime - involving drugs, gangs, handguns and violence - among young people. But as is sometimes the case with adult jails and prisons as well, there's also evidence that many youngsters are inappropriately incarcerated in the juvenile centers.
Says Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Virginia: "They're dumping kids into these homes that don't need to be dumped into these homes."
In 1991, for instance, 2,226 juveniles were sent to Virginia's detention centers as a result of parole violations, many of them minor. They far outnumbered juveniles sent to the homes for larcency, felonious assaults, drug-related crimes and the like.
In part, a task-force study concluded last year, this trend reflects not only public outrage over crime in general but also declining sympathy for juvenile delinquents, regardless of the seriousness of the offenses they commit.
Outrage about crime is understandable; lack of sympathy for young troublemakers, even if their offenses are relatively minor, can perhaps be explained as a symptom of "compassion fatigue." But with the building costs of juvenile-detention homes now running close to $100,000 per bed, society cannot afford to incarcerate every youngster who runs just slightly afoul of the law.
The task force wisely recommended adoption of a new, formal definition of the role of detention homes. The homes should be used primarily for pretrial detention, the task force said, and then only for youths that require secure detention. Following trial, those convicted of serious crimes should be promptly sent on to state-run "learning centers" - the equivalent of prisons for adults.
Emotionally distressed youngsters, including many who are suicidal, should be sent to a different type of facility where they can get professional help with their emotional problems.
The state, said the task force, must develop and expand alternative programs for other youngsters - especially those whose parole violations do not involve felonies or serious misdemeanors - who now end up in the local or regional juvenile homes.
As a response to the task force and the consultants' December report, the 1993 General Assembly appropriated $655,000 for alternative programs, such as electronic monitoring and outreach detention. That won't go very far, considering all the communities that have crowded detention homes, but at least is a start in the right direction.
However, new bed spaces, including those planned at Coyner Springs still will be needed - and they can't be built overnight.
The issue of overcrowding in juvenile homes (and, for that matter, Virginia's adult jails and prisons) is not simply a matter of making life a little easier for the incarcerated. It is also a matter of preventing endangerment to staffs and to the general public, and of reducing the role of incarceration as a school for further crime.
At least, officials are no longer ignoring the problem. Eventually, moves under way on both the local and state fronts should help defuse the situation.
Meanwhile, it must be hoped that overcrowding - at Coyner Springs and elsewhere in Virginia - will not erupt into dangerous crises. Might we also dare hope that more unincarcerated kids, those still on the outside, will make decisions to stay out of trouble?
by CNB