The cheapest per-day rate was $127 in Louisiana and the most expensive was New York with a $966 per head, per day cost. Ohio came in 10th highest with a $554 daily rate and $202,502 annually per youthful offender housed in the state’s four correctional facilities. By contrast, it costs $115 to $120 a day to house a youth offender at the Butler County Detention Center.
Policy changes and redirected thinking on the wisdom of locking all youthful felony offenders up is a work in progress, according to the report. Experts here say Ohio has made great strides, and local numbers seem to bear that out.
In fiscal year 2009, Butler County had 39 children housed in Department of Youth Services facilities. In 2013, that number dropped to five.
In Montgomery County, juvenile court judges sent 87 juveniles into the youth prison system in 2009. That number dropped to 26 last year and they are projecting only 18 or 19 juveniles will go to the state facilities in 2014-15.
“In 2009, we had about 1,300 kids in our facilities. Today, we only have about 480. That’s a 63 percent decrease,” said Kim Jump, communications chief for DYS. “Along with that, it’s rather amazing, we’re actually spending $60 million less per year on facilities than we did in 2009.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, an advocate for juvenile justice reform, said there have been concerted efforts in the state to keep as many youthful offenders close to home in rehabilitative settings rather than locked behind bars in institutions.
State money saved by not sending offenders to DYS was funneled to the locals to move this effort along. Now, for the most part, only the worst of the worst offenders are in DYS. The high cost comes in because they need intensive treatment and highly trained staff at those institutions.
“The problem is now you have a concentration of the really bad eggs, so to speak — the kids who have really serious issues. It’s probably not even possible to put them into diversion programs, and because of the crime they committed, they probably really should be in that facility” Stratton said. “So you really need a higher level of staff and a higher level of staff training.”
Rob Clevenger, director of the Butler County Juvenile Justice Center, said there are currently 10 juveniles housed with the state, a place they believe “should be reserved for only the most violent, serious offenders.” He said six of the 10 are 18 or older, and they were 18 when they committed their crimes. Additionally, seven of the kids used a gun when they committed their offenses, one was involved in a sex offense and two others killed a girl in a car wreck.
In fiscal year 2013, there were 158 kids adjudicated as felons, and all but five were kept in the county to be rehabilitated. Clevenger said rehabilitation efforts always work better when the child can have contact with family and his or her community.
“There has been a recognition that kids do best when they are in their local settings,” he said. “When you rehabilitate, what your focus is on is this youth, and yet you do not take into consideration his family, his network.”
Montgomery County was one of the metro counties in the state that received state funds to create local rehabilitative programs. Court Administrator Jim Cole said they get about $800,000 annually and that money supports a 24-bed unit in the detention center for offenders who need cognitive behavioral treatment and they reserve eight beds for sexual offenders.
“We started our J-Care program which is basically a unit in our detention facility that we use for the kids that normally would be going to the Department of Youth Services,” he said. “We felt like still having that secured option but keeping them locally would be the most successful for them.”
Clevenger said there is a fine balance judges strive for when deciding where to sentence an offender. He said they need to consider public safety concerns, the victims and what will work best for the offender.
There are some factors in Ohio that can frustrate efforts to keep kids out of DYS, according to Erin Davies, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Coalition. She said there are still too many juveniles in DYS who should be held locally, partially because they are not considered a high risk to reoffend. Others may be there because there aren’t rehabilitation programs locally.
“Research shows that sending lower risk youths to correctional facilities is not only extraordinarily expensive, but it also actually increases the likelihood that they will reoffend,” she said. “That in turn can harm public safety by creating more victims, essentially. I look at this as not just how do we reduce costs at DYS, but how do we make sure we’re sending the kids that really need to be in those facilities to those facilities.”
The study also pointed out that states, such as Ohio, that have mandatory minimum sentences can also exacerbate the goal of reducing the number of youth being sent to DYS. The legislature a few years ago made sweeping changes to sentencing guidelines, designed to lower populations in the prisons, but Stratton said new laws have been passed in the meantime that have brought more stringent punishments back into play. She said the legislature recently convened a re-codification committee to look at the whole criminal justice code.
“What we have now is felony creep. Everything is enhanced; everything has gone up. You keep wanting to reduce your prison population, which is your biggest budget item, but then you keep passing laws that give judges less discretion and keep enhancing penalties,” she said. “They are going to take a look at the whole thing and bring back some sense of balance and order to it.”
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