Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 13, 1994 TAG: 9409130057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But, as a mass resignation last week from the state's Board of Youth and Family Services reminds, the Allen administration is going to have to address problems in juvenile justice it has inherited.
The overcrowding began several years before Gov. Allen took office. By 1992, it had already reached the point where a consulting team from the Youth Law Center of San Francisco was warning Virginia about a potentially explosive mix of jammed-in juveniles and health, fire and safety hazards.
The state did too little in response to the 1992 consultants' report. Expansions of some juvenile homes were authorized. But no significant effort was made to develop alternative facilities for nonviolent juveniles. Or to fund psychiatric programs for the seriously emotionally disturbed youngsters that are locked up in juvenile facilities. Or to strengthen rehabilitation programs for incarcerated juveniles.
The overcrowded conditions - kids sometimes sleeping in bathrooms - remain. In Coyner Springs, for instance, 39 youngsters were being housed, as of Monday, in a facility designed for 21. Elsewhere in the system, detention centers are operating at 300 percent capacity. And the overcrowding is only a symptom of a juvenile-justice system overwhelmed.
There has been much rhetoric, but no major push for prevention of juvenile crime.
What's changed is that now it's George Allen's watch, and the issue is how he plans to approach the problem.
Last week, six of seven members of the Board of Youth and Family Services, which oversees the juvenile system, resigned in protest of administration policies. The six, including chairman Frank Slayton, apparently believe that Allen intends to take the same hard line toward juvenile offenders that he's taking toward adult convicts with his parole-reform proposals.
Said Slayton, a former state legislator who has long championed reforms in juvenile corrections: ``The administration has abandoned all efforts at prevention and deterrence'' to focus on incarceration. ``The philosophy is lock them up and forget them.''
Slayton and the other disgrunted former board members may be right. If so, Allen's would represent a cruel and foolish shift away from a philosophy that holds that children remain malleable, and special efforts must be made to rescue them from behavior patterns that can lead to disastrous lives of crime.
At this point, however, it seems premature to brand Allen as either cruel or foolish. Though the report of his commission on parole and sentencing does not specifically address matters pertaining to juvenile corrections, it notes that laws dealing with juvenile offenders, facilities and programs need to be addressed as part of Allen's broader plans for criminal-justice reform.
Allen himself has at least spoken of the need for early-intervention efforts to direct youngsters away from criminal activities. And he says he is not abandoning prevention and rehabilitation programs, in the corrections system, for nonviolent offenders.
Virginia will learn more about the governor's intentions in this regard in future weeks, with the first telling signs when he offers his budget proposals at the 1995 General Assembly. Until then, we can only hope Slayton and his colleagues are wrong in assuming that Allen is incorrigible.
by CNB