MN- Hennepin County trying to rehabilitate its juvenile offender system

7-24-2009 Minnesota:

According to a 2008 report, some young offenders could be placed with local services for better and more cost-effective treatment.

A few years ago, when Hennepin County Commissioner Mark Stenglein questioned the growing expense of residential treatment programs for young offenders, a juvenile court judge told him that it was the judge's job to place young people for treatment and the county's job to pay the bill.

Stenglein's recounting of that story Thursday at a Hennepin County Board briefing drew snorts of disbelief from community corrections officials and the presiding judge of Hennepin County juvenile court.

After years of frustration over the cost and success rate of out-of-home placement programs for juvenile offenders, county officials believe they are finally moving toward a more cost-effective system that they hope also will put more troubled youth back on the straight and narrow.

New out-of-home placement programs for young offenders should be in place this fall after a year of planning by juvenile judges, corrections officials and other experts, county board members were told. The board approved the new direction last fall after years of exasperation with a system that to commissioners seemed bloated, with out-of-control costs.

According to a 2008 report, out-of-home correctional placements for juveniles cost the county $31 million a year, with $12.5 million of that spent on the Hennepin County Home School in Minnetonka. An average of $62,753 was spent on each of the 494 youths who were placed in 68 residential programs inside and outside of Minnesota in 2007. About one-fifth of those young people were not classified as high-risk and could have received cheaper community-based services, the report said.

The new plan will not necessarily save money, but county officials hope it will achieve better results.

Now, the emphasis will be on limiting the time that young people are removed from their homes and communities to about six months. Officials hope to cut the number of vendors they use for out-of-home placement from 68 to about a dozen. If possible, juveniles will be treated in community-based programs for most of the day and sent home at night, with the county keeping tabs on them by using electronic monitoring devices.

The new direction means big changes for the home school. In the past, juvenile offenders stayed at the school for an average of nine months, but some stayed up to 18 months. Experts say that except for youth who are in programs for sex offenders, those stays are too long for most kids.

"For adolescents, stays beyond nine months actually hurt," said Kathryn Quaintance, presiding judge for juvenile court in Hennepin County. "If we put a low-risk kid in a high-risk placement for months, they will be learning from more sophisticated criminals."

The county will send its most serious youth offenders to the state correctional facility at Red Wing. A long-term treatment program for sex offenders will remain at the home school, but the school's high-security unit has closed. Youth who need that setting will now go to the juvenile jail in downtown Minneapolis. Programs at the home school that used to last nine months or longer now will last six months or less.

In an effort to smooth the move back to home and neighborhood, one of the home school's cottages will become a transition site where offenders who have completed residential treatment programs will stay as they rebuild connections to schools, family and programs in the community.

Quaintance said that in the past, young offenders were placed in residential programs mostly through negotiations between lawyers and judges who decided what was best. Treatment programs actively marketed their services directly to those decision-makers.

Now, for the first time, treatment programs will have to apply to the county to become a treatment option for youth, and they will be measured on how successful they are in treating kids. Young offenders will be placed not by their offense but by what their needs are. Parents will be involved in placement discussions and will be told how much it is costing, Quaintance said.

"It makes clear we are making an investment in kids," she said. ..Source.. by MARY JANE SMETANKA, Star Tribune