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Q&A
Concerns about rising numbers in juvenile detention centers and impact on decarceration plans
1:08:52
·
110 sec
Council Member Althea V. Stevens raises concerns about the increasing numbers in juvenile detention centers and how this affects the overall decarceration plan. She emphasizes the need to address both adult and youth incarceration simultaneously to prevent a revolving door of recidivism.
- Stanley Richards acknowledges the importance of focusing on young people as an 'upstream' issue to mass incarceration
- Discussion on allocating resources and support to prevent young people from entering the system
- Emphasis on developing strategies for young people similar to those for adults in the system
Althea V. Stevens
1:08:52
Hello, good afternoon.
1:08:53
Thank you guys for being here and all the work that you've been doing.
1:08:56
One of the things I just wanted to highlight and I guess get some feedback from you is I'm the chair of Children and Youth Services who oversees ACS and no one is talking about the rising numbers in the juvenile detention center, which is going to affect you know when we're talking about a decarceration plan and what that would look like long term right when we have rising numbers in the secured detention and we're talking about how do we get the numbers down at Rackers and so for me I'm just like we have to do this work simultaneously and be making sure that we're preventing it because we know once young people get in here, becomes a revolving door around recidarist.
1:09:33
So I wanted to one just ask really quickly around what your thoughts around that is, and then how do we work together to make this part of this larger plan because it seems very isolated and no one seems to be talking about it other than me, So definitely want to see how we can work together a little bit more around that.
Stanley Richards
1:09:51
Stan?
1:09:51
Yeah.
1:09:52
I I thank you for that, councilwoman Stevens.
1:09:56
You're absolutely right.
1:09:57
We tend to, as a city, focus on the thing that's most in front of us.
1:10:03
And what's most in front of us right now is mass incarceration, public safety, but we're forgetting that there's an upstream to that, and the upstream is our young people.
1:10:14
And so we need to, while we're not addressing that in this report, we need to, as a city, make sure that we have our eyes on both.
1:10:21
If we see youth incarceration going up, we need to be able to respond to that and allocate resources and supports so that we could prevent young people from going into those systems.
1:10:32
And for those young people who are in those systems, we need to be developing the same strategies we're developing for people in the adult system.
1:10:39
How do they come home?
1:10:40
How do they reconnect many of them?
Althea V. Stevens
1:10:42
And also how the families are being affected.