By George Myers
Kokomo Tribune
HOWARD COUNTY, Ind. — In recent years, Kokomo attorney Erik May has worked to alter the philosophies and complications surrounding secure detention for juvenile offenders, a goal which is set to soon see major progress.
Next month, Howard County, in conjunction with Four County Counseling and Kokomo School Corp., will implement an evening reporting program for those in the juvenile court system, allowing youth otherwise destined for secure detention or other sanctions to receive after-school assistance and therapeutic services.
The program will be housed in Lincoln Elementary School, located on West Jackson Street, and will at first operate with four or five young people, according to May, who for over a decade has served as a part-time judge for the Howard Circuit Court Juvenile Division, where he presides over all juvenile delinquency and paternity cases in Howard County.
May said the maximum enrollment for evening reporting would likely be around 10 juveniles.
Notably, evening reporting, scheduled from 4 to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, will also offer various extracurricular activities for juveniles and require certain benchmarks, including part-time employment or an approved educational plan.
It’s a program, said May, that will bring relief and oversight to youth in desperate need of something other than secure detention, shelter care, electronic home detention or another penalty.
The program also could soon add a parental component, allowing parents to take classes to improve family interactions.
“We got to talking about the need ... to address those kids’ needs whose parents work or are going to school or otherwise occupied doing other things, and are gone in the evening,” he said, noting placement could happen as a condition of a juvenile’s release from Kinsey Youth Center or during a dispositional, or sentencing, hearing.
"[It’s for] those kids who are involved in the court system for whatever reason but need some extra help in school, some supervision in the evening and/or some level or counseling or therapeutic service,” May continued.
Interacting with the young people will be representatives from Four County Counseling, which is operating through a service contract with the Department of Child Services. Four County will also lease space from Kokomo School Corp. at Lincoln.
Currently, Four County already has 15 to 20 employees in Kokomo schools providing academic and therapeutic assistance to students.
“We are going to try to make it a positive experience for the kids and hopefully it’s a good thing from their perspective as opposed to just a punishment,” said Tim Gearhart, vice president of business development at Four County.
Gearhart also spoke about the importance of creating an atmosphere that children will find comfortable and the efforts Four County workers will put forth to prevent problems before they arise.
“We want a spot for them to do homework, but we also want a couple of couches and kind of a cozier environment for processing and talking about goals,” he said.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about what an environment looks like that a client or a youth or a family walks into because that impacts their experience, and ultimately the impact of the care ... It’s a really good thing for people to access care, and it’s unfortunate that in our system so many people access that after the problems are really huge and significant,” he later added.
In addition, Four County and Howard County officials have also started working toward a day reporting program that could potentially be housed in the Kinsey Youth Center and target youth in alternative schooling programs.
The program, which would also be done with Four County and Kokomo schools, would provide similar services as the evening reporting program.
An example given by May was a kid currently enrolled in alternative schooling and involved formally or informally with the court system that could go to day reporting to work on credit remediation.
Currently, details are being “ironed out” and a timeline hasn’t been established, according to May.
The philosophy behind detention alternatives embraced by May and other local stakeholders originated with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), a national effort focused on moving government resources away from mass incarceration and into treatment for juvenile offenders and their families.
Joining the JDAI movement in 2012, Howard County became one of the eight JDAI sites in Indiana. That number has since ballooned to 19.
In the original eight counties, admissions to detention dropped by an average of 44.7 percent and average daily populations in detention reduced by 40.7 percent by the end of 2012, according to the Indiana’s Division of Youth Services.
During the same time period, juvenile re-arrest rates remained steady at 18 percent and juvenile felony petitions filed dropped by 15.8 percent. By the end of 2013, Department of Correction commitments were down from 386 during the baseline year for the original eight JDAI counties to 284 -- a 37 percent reduction, noted the Indiana Division of Youth Services on its website.
From 2002 to 2012, Howard County saw a 37.4 percent decline in juvenile case filings, according to a 2015 Kids Count report.
May is hoping the evening reporting program -- a detention alternative that has been embraced by the Howard County prosecutor’s office, local hospitals and juvenile probation -- will further assist Howard County’s detention figures.
“It occupies this space where we have kids who just need something to do with their time, otherwise they’d be out on the streets getting into stuff we don’t want them to be involved with,” he said.
Playing a significant role in the decision of whether to detain a juvenile will also be a risk assessment instrument already being utilized by county officials.
The instrument, which operates as a scoring system, most effectively takes the subjectivity and guesswork out of the hands of intake officers when presented with various juveniles and certain criminal activities, said May.
For instance, a score of 0 to 6 would likely result in an outright release; a score of 7 to 14 would provide officials with an alternate detention option; and a score of 15 or above would most likely be immediate detention. The data can be overridden, specifically by judges, noted May.
As an example, the most serious offenses -- handgun violation, gang charge, child molest, burglary and more -- result in high scores, as do prior escapes or documented failure-to-appear charges. The juvenile assessment also places more emphasis on things like OWI charges and bomb threats, which were previously handled similarly to the adult system.
But lesser crimes that May and other juvenile experts don’t believe should result in detention are now given lower scores and giving intake officers a clear, black-and-white picture of what to do.
As May noted, the tactic will also allow officials to more efficiently study disproportionate minority contact and understand how groups are policed in relation to each other.
“If you have objective criteria, evidence-based criteria, and you assign values to that, it takes the guesswork out of it,” said May, noting the risk assessment technique helps to eliminate implicit bias in the juvenile system.
“And if you’re tracking the race, ethnicity of the kids in detention, you can go back and look and say, ‘OK, this is the story our detention center is telling us as far as which kids are in detention.’ And you can ask all kinds of questions based on what those statistics show. Are we underserving this community? Are we overserving this community?”