By Jordan Fouts
The Elkhart Truth
ELKHART COUNTY, Ind. — Stephanie Stembel has nothing but kind words for the two boys who stole her car.
The Post youth center volunteer in Goshen even saw one of them there that night, on Oct. 19, before he and the other teen snatched her keys and drove off. But they were found and arrested pretty quickly, the 18-year-old sent to jail awaiting trial and the 15-year-old released to his parents.
“He seems like a bright kid,” Stembel said, noting that all the boys who come to the Post are regular Goshenites who ride there on their bikes to play basketball, lift weights or just hang out with their friends. “Quite a few of the kids have gone through a lot though. I’ve seen a few of them go through some pretty tough times.”
Most juvenile offenders don’t start off committing really serious crimes, said Sam Ludwig, director of juvenile services for the Elkhart County Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. They start out with just running away from home, skipping school or petty theft – and he believes there’s a chance to stop it there before it gets any worse.
It’s why the juvenile justice system is completely different from the adult system, say Elkhart County court officials. It’s also why, as the county has wrestled with the need for a new juvenile detention center over the past decade, the conversation changed somewhere along the way from incarceration to diversion.
No cookie-cutter court
“We need to prioritize children. Juvenile justice is not simply a cookie-cutter version of the adult courts,” said Deborah Domine, the circuit court juvenile magistrate. “We have the ability to rehabilitate them and encourage change, so they’re not being sentenced and having more collateral damage down the road. We can prevent children from becoming criminals.”
Michael Christofeno, circuit court judge-elect, takes a similar view.
“I favor diversion programs, particularly the ones that are very successful,” he said. “I think people who don’t understand the benefit of diversion programs don’t really understand the system.”
He said he expects some movement on the juvenile center after a meeting planned for January, which would involve him and Domine as well as other county elected officials and those in criminal justice, mental health and addictions fields. At the very least, he said one outcome of the discussion may be to close the paths they decide aren’t the best to follow.
“There are a number of community stakeholders we need to have a collaboration with, and come up with a consensus on what’s the best way to move forward,” Christofeno said. “What’s best for the community and for these children?”
One of the leading possibilities being considered for replacing the aging, costly facility in Goshen are to work with the Bashor Children’s Home for most youth, according to Elkhart County Councilman John Letherman, and to send the more serious cases to the St. Joseph County Juvenile Detention Center. The other is to build a new juvenile center next to the county correctional facility, at a cost he fears could quickly balloon from an estimated $5 million to $10 million.
Christofeno and Domine both said a center of some sort may be necessary, though Christofeno observed that diversion costs less than incarceration in the long run.
“Our goal, if we can, is to educate and rehabilitate youth so they don’t become adult offenders. If someone wants to look at it from a cost-analysis standpoint, what is the cost you would put on one youth? It’s pretty hard to do,” Christofeno said. “If we do it on the cost to house an adult, then we could spend quite a bit on diversion. It’s much more economic than to house adult offenders.”
Either way, Letherman said he would be happy to see the old center torn down and the county be able to move on to other issues in the justice system, such as the number of inmates with mental health problems for whom incarceration isn’t appropriate.
‘I don’t want that for them’
Christofeno said he’s heard support from all sectors for an intake center, which the county started looking at in June as part of a proposal involving JDAI and the Oaklawn Center. The timeframe for the plan calls for opening the intake function by July 2017, and to begin implementation of alternatives to detention and gathering data to plan for juvenile detention.
If it saw the same success as other JDAI programs, the plan for a 24/7 juvenile resource center could reduce juvenile felony arrests annually from 151 to 65, reduce the number of juveniles in the daily population from 15 to 10 and cut the average length of stay from 10 to five days, say proponents of the plan.
Since joining JDAI in 2012, the county has already seen juvenile detention numbers drop to half of what they were in 2011, Ludwig said. It’s due to guidelines that help identify which kids aren’t right for the criminal justice system or the detention center because they don’t pose a public risk.
“If you don’t detain the right child, you’re doing more harm than good,” Domine said. “You don’t put someone in detention because he didn’t do his homework, but because he’s a risk.”
“It’s the whole reason there’s a seperate system, because the purpose is to rehabilitate rather than punish,” said Ludwig. “If they can be rehabilitated at the lower level, they’re much less likely to escalate to more serious crimes.”
Stembel also said she wishes people were more concerned with rehabilitation for juvenile offenders and less concerned with punishment. If kids know the people around them actually care about them, she reasons, they might be more likely to listen.
She doesn’t know why the pair of teens stole her car, but guessed part of it was simply because it was easy to do. Whatever the reason, she said their decision just makes her sad because, in the end, they’re only hurting themselves.
“I could have been anybody, I could have been a single mom who had no other means of transportation to work and it could have been devastating to lose a car,” she said. “If this is the direction they find themselves in, they could live a life of not understanding that their actions affect people in a real way and they could possibly live a life in and out of jail. I don’t want that for them.”