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player ready...“Valley View” may sound like a vacation retreat or scenic highway lookout stop. In reality, it is a much more serious place–a 300-bed juvenile correctional center in St. Charles.
Valley View is in the news because Gov. George Ryan proposes to close it, saving $19 million of the nearly $1.3 billion now spent to run the Department of Corrections (“2 prisons to close earlier than expected,” Metro, April 10).
Would this closing be a profile in courage or a sloppy way to use the budget to make public policy?
Unfortunately it is impossible to answer that question. Illinois has inconsistent and contradictory policies with respect to the punishment or rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. Today, there are programs to keep non-violent youths out of prison in Illinois and contradictory economic incentives to lock them up.
Other jurisdictions have instituted effective policies to reduce crime and serve the needs of youth. In Illinois, neither the General Assembly nor the governor can reference a consistent set of public policies to guide their decisions. We need to establish a set of such principles, designed to keep our communities safe while diverting non-violent kids from institutions that may make them into criminals.
Illinois has established successful programs reducing the number of incarcerated non-violent youth. The governor has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in after-school and family-support services to prevent kids from becoming criminals, and has retained many of those resources in his proposed budget for the next fiscal year. This system of “continuum of care” makes services avail-able at various levels of intensity, depending on the needs of the youth and their families.
The number of juveniles in correctional facilities decreased last week to 1,819, down from almost 2,200 in 1999. Still, kids who don’t belong are currently locked up in correctional centers. About 450 youth annually are incarcerated for 90 days or more for assessment, a function better done at local assessment centers, were there enough in Illinois.
Also, statistics indicate that about 100 of those locked up have serious mental-health problems, youth who are less likely to commit crimes later if treated with mental-health services rather than incarceration.
Some of these kids are locked up because in Illinois, counties send kids to the Department of Corrections and the state pays the bill. Therefore counties have an economic incentive to send them to corrections, for punishment or assessment.
Ohio has addressed this issue by changing the economic incentives. Counties can pay to send non-violent kids to correctional beds at $36,000 per year, or they can buy less expensive services locally. Not surprisingly, over the 9-year life of the program, crime has gone down, more services are delivered locally and the corrections population has been dramatically reduced.
While both youth crime and the population in correctional facilities are down in Illinois, state government is still building new facilities. Recently Illinois opened a 360-bed facility at Kewanee and another 360-bed facility is being built at Rushville. These are maximum-security, large facilities. Illinois is building more secure beds, suggesting a policy that violent youth are the ones who should be locked up; yet we still house non-violent youth in our facilities.
This recent building surge and programmatic direction argue for closing Valley View, a low-security center, not designed for seriously dangerous kids. Yet its residents will be moved to secure facilities, inappropriate for them. Further, opponents to closing Valley View argue that it has strong programs to get kids straightened out, which will be dismantled when it closes.
One Department of Corrections goal is to house each youth in a single room, which can only be accomplished if Valley View remains open.
Those are only the policy arguments. There are also practical issues of layoffs, travel times for families to visit youth in more distant facilities and fear that the dip in crime and the current population may reverse.
Illinois needs to determine which crimes or circumstances require youth to be locked up, based on what has been proven to provide the best outcomes for kids.
We must adopt an economic disincentive to locking up non-violent kids, as Ohio did, thereby freeing up money to develop more local services to help non-violent or mentally ill juveniles.
Facilities should be designed to serve the needs of the youth (Missouri only builds small-group settings with intensive services–not 300-bed prisons).