The Fifth Judicial District, which includes Lyon and Chase counties, soon will have a new comprehensive plan to deal with juvenile offenders and their parents.
A roomful of judges, court services officers and representatives of the school district and the county attorney’s office gathered at noon Monday at the Lyon County Courthouse to hear recommendations made by a consultant, John Paul Wright of the University of Cincinnati.
The Community Corrections Advisory Board voted in April to hire Wright to survey professionals involved in dealing with juvenile offenders. Wright analyzed the results, formulated recommendations and reported them formally on Monday.
Robert Sullivan, director of Community Corrections, said that the department’s current comprehensive plan is 10 years old and needs to be updated.
“Our comprehensive plan helps guide the funding,” Sullivan said. The proposed plan “deals with how our community is going to try to deal with troubled youth.”
Wright told the large audience that the goals of his work were to assess data on current risk and protective factors, determine how resources were aligned with effective service delivery, identify gaps in services and make recommendations on aligning services.
Survey data came from child advocates, mental health professionals, law enforcement, court officers, education and agencies that receive money from CCAB to provide services to youths, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters in Emporia and Chase County Mentors.
“The spreadsheets will tell us one thing, but to really understand it, you have to go to the source, and you have been very helpful,” Wright told the group.
The Fifth Judicial District is fortunate, he said, that crime is at “very manageable levels;” it is not widespread and pervasive as it often is the case in large cities.
“We were deeply impressed with the level of commitment” of the people who work with juvenile offenders here.
“Many places don’t have the depth of talent, the depth of people ... caring, knowledgeable and motivated,” Wright said.
The study found that most offenders were low to moderate risk to re-offend, and several programs were in place to deal with the juveniles and their families.
Some of the youths’ behaviors, he said, were “actually age-normal” though there were intervention protocols in place for those behaviors.
“With low-risk kids, it’s sometimes easy to over-respond,” Wright said.
The district is limited in services provided to high-risk offenders and their families. Wright suggested developing and implementing intensive services directed at families with multiple problems. Input on developing those services needs to come through suggestions “from the bottom up,” he said.
He emphasized that it would be important not to include the low-risk youths in programs with high-risk juvenile offenders.
“Those low-risk are no-risk. So when you mix them, generally what you see is they get worse,” he said.
Wright saw a need for graduated sanctions, and said those would be easy to implement. Accountability for actions would be a key facet of the sanctions.
He also recommended a “restorative justice” aspect to the low-risk process. That would include victim and offender mediation, victim impact statements, and community service and restitution.
“Most of the time, they don’t cost anything,” he said. “We strongly encourage the use of community service as part of the offender’s behavior contract.”
Under Wright’s comprehensive plan recommendations, drug treatment would have a more directed and central role in treating youths.
“The average drug offender takes about six or seven failures,” he said. A structured program that would be part of the treatment could “sort of help them connect the dots.”
“Swift, invasive, intense treatment” and holding parents accountable also were recommended.
Wright said that he learned during the survey that many social workers seemed to be hesitant or fearful to ask for child-abuse charges when necessary, while judges would encourage such reports.
“The judge would rather have someone more aggressive and trip up (occasionally) than not take action,” Wright said.
The county attorney’s office has strict guidelines for moving cases forward “and this seems to deter some caseworkers.”
Training, checklists for making cases and annual evaluations on caseworkers’ ability to work with the county attorney’s office were presented as options to achieve improvements.
Wright said that earlier reservations about the ability of DCCCA to handle youths may be resolved since the agency hired new management here recently.
“So I don’t see it now as a problem,” Wright said. “I see it as an opportunity.”
The district has an abundance of multi-disciplinary teams, often made up of the same people from team to team, and he recommended consolidating them where appropriate.
Early intervention also was recommended. The earlier the intervention, he said, the better the outcome. Under his plan, there would be more monitoring of the children and families and targeting of behavioral outcomes.
“It’s that accountability I harp about,” he said.
Wright said that he had been “very impressed” by Family Solutions, a program involving troubled youths and their families, and operated through the Mental Health Center of East Central Kansas.
Among his other recommendations were annual performance and financial audits of any agency or group that receives money through CCAB and implementing intervention programs at very early ages. Partnering with Newman Regional Health nurses and doctors could provide “an excellent way to intervene early.”
More consistent communication between school district personnel and the department of community corrections also were part of Wright’s comprehensive plan, as was a recommendation to add Spanish-speaking individuals to help develop strategies and implement them.
Sullivan said after the meeting that the advisory board likely will discuss Wright’s report section by section at future board meetings and adapt it as necessary for the district before the new comprehensive plan can be adopted.