Records offer picture of youth arrests
Report to JPs notes racial disparity, sees need for shelter as alternative to jail
Pulaski County data on youth arrests reveal two things most stakeholders agree on: The county needs a shelter as an alternative to jailing children who get into fights at home and there are wide disparities in the races of the children arrested.
Other conclusions officials see in the data are being debated.
Chastity Scifres, the chief deputy county attorney, collected the data from intake records between June and December 2018 and presented the information to members of the Pulaski County Quorum Court last week.
“It [the data] points out areas that need work and reform, but taking it to the next level would be actually making policy decisions,” Scifres said in an interview Friday.
Data collection began after the county became a Juvenile Detention Risk Assessment site in 2017. The program was founded in the early 1990s by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national group that advocates for the well-being of children.
Scifres is the county’s program director.
The program has eight core goals to improve the juvenile-justice system. Goals include reducing unnecessary jailings, decreasing racial and ethnic disparities and speeding up the flow of cases through the system.
When children have their first run-ins with the law in Pulaski County, they undergo a risk assessment that helps intake officers determine whether they need to be detained. Sometimes, even if
the risk assessment concludes that children don’t need to be detained, officers put them in lockup because they have no other place to go.
That process is called “override up,” and 43 of the 98 overrides up into detention over the six-month period came about because the children were involved in domestic incidents that couldn’t be resolved without removal from the home, according to the county’s data.
“If we’re going to spend money, we need to be spending money for a teen shelter,” said Dorcy Corbin, a longtime Pulaski County public defender for youthful offenders. “That’s the biggest problem we have right now.”
Corbin recalled the story of a boy who was jailed because he got into a fight with his mother’s boyfriend. The boyfriend had eaten the two pieces of chicken the boy had saved to make sure he and his little sister had something to eat that day.
Scifres spoke to Quorum Court members Tuesday about the need for a shelter and said in a later interview that the county was “at the beginning” of the process of establishing a shelter.
Her office has met with Michael Crump, the director for the state Youth Services Division, about the idea, she said. The division is under the Arkansas Department of Human Services.
Scifres added that the county was still figuring out the number of beds it would need and where to put them.
Eighty percent of the children arrested during the sixmonth period were black, according to the data. Of the 786 arrests, 628 were of black children and 148 were of white children.
Pulaski County’s overall population is 36.9% black.
“The racial disparity is real, but it is not a problem that the court or the probation officers can solve,” Corbin said. “That is a problem of our schools, of our police system and possibly of the prosecutor’s office if they are charging people based on race, which I don’t think they are.”
She thinks the problem starts at school, where, she says, black children often receive harsher punishments than white children for the same offenses.
“The racial disparities are huge in the data,” said Rich Huddleston, the executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. “You have to wonder for white and black kids who are basically committing the same type of offense — are they being treated differently?”
Arkansas Advocates, an advocacy and research group, published a series of reports in 2018 on systemic barriers that black men and boys face in education, health and wealth.
Almost 300 offenses occurred at schools, Scifres’ report shows. The nextmost-common location was in neighborhoods, with 146 arrests.
Most school-based arrests were related to charges of disorderly conduct, the data show.
Scifres’ presentation included a breakdown of the schools with the most arrests. John L. McClellan High School in Little Rock had the most with 52 arrests. J.A. Fair High School was next with 48.
Pamela Smith, the Little Rock School District communications director, said in an email that the district was aware that two of its schools have the highest number of youth arrests. The district has been “aggressive in our approach to provide intervention and prevention services to help students struggling with challenges, both at school and in the community,” she said.
The number of arrests has been trending down, she said. The district’s director of safety and security met with Little Rock police last week about the issue.
School resource officers are set to get more training to decrease arrests, and school safety and security officials are working with the police chief to rewrite their memorandums of understanding, Smith said.
Lt. Michael Ford of the Little Rock Police Department said the school resource officers have worked to establish mentor relationships with students
Scifres said she also helped to institute a mediation program at McClellan High School to resolve lower-level offenses without going to court.
Both high schools also have conflict-resolution programs to help mitigate issues with families that start outside school, Smith said.
Ford said that most of the arrests officers make at schools are for incidents like fighting or cursing at a teacher — “anything that disrupts the school atmosphere.”
“Our goal is not to arrest, but if we have to do something, the security officer or the teacher notifies us, then we have to make an arrest,” Ford said.
The Little Rock department had the most arrests of children in the county at 384 out of a total 786. Ford said that’s because it’s the largest police agency in the county.
Little Rock had the second-highest rate of youth arrests at 0.82% of the city’s under-18 population. The Jacksonville Police Department had the highest arrest rate at 1.82%.
April Kiser, the spokesman for the Jacksonville department, said officials aren’t sure why that is.
“I like to believe that the [Jacksonville department] is highly vigilant in managing quality of life issues in our city,” Kiser wrote in an email. “Being so means that occasionally our officers will have to detain and arrest juvenile offenders.”
In an effort to reach children in the community, the department has created a Family Movie Night twice monthly and a Junior Citizen Police Academy, she said.
Scifres said the data collection has sparked conversations about ways to decrease arrests of children, both by working with schools and with police departments.
Of 100 randomly selected youth cases, Scifres found 45 were detained. Twenty-one of those detained were released within three days.
“This begs the question of whether they should have been detained in the first place,” her presentation to the Quorum Court states.
Corbin said that she disagrees with this conclusion and that she can often argue for the release of clients on certain conditions.
“Concluding that this is evidence that the child should have never been arrested is just illogical,” Corbin said.
Laura Robertson, a juvenile intake officer, said she’s seeing more judges releasing children to their parents or with a monitor because the county lost 23 beds for children with the creation of the crisis stabilization unit last year.
She added that sometimes, in domestic issues, the parents and child just needed to calm down.
“It wasn’t that they shouldn’t have been locked up in the first place, it’s that they needed some time,” Roberts said.
Scifres said research shows that kids who are arrested are more likely to reoffend and drop out of school.
“Decreasing the schoolto-prison pipeline is beneficial to the entire community,” she said.
The data also show that, of the 100 cases studied, the average number of days between when a petition was filed in court and adjudication, youths who were detained waited just over 108 days and youths who were not detained waited just over 141 days for adjudication.
This is about three months longer than recommended by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
John Tuell, the executive director of the Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice, said cases should be resolved within 60 days at most. He said that a “swift” adjudication is best for young offenders.
He added that most jurisdictions across the country say the disposition hearing should be happening more quickly — from 10 to 21 days.
“Nearly 90% of all juvenile matters can be resolved at the first initial hearing,” Tuell said. “Even if it’s outliers, these lengthy times are often for the convenience of the system.”
Corbin said that she often needs longer to prepare a defense for a child, and that sometimes the youths aren’t served their papers until weeks after the petition is filed in court.
“They want from the time a petition is filed until the child is an adjudicated delinquent shortened, but kids have rights, including due process rights, so you can’t shorten those to the point that they infringe on a child’s rights,” she said.
She said that children sometimes will improve their behavior after she explains the consequences of what they’ve done.
“If that happens because I’ve delayed the process by legal maneuvering, then we have done what we needed to do without constant court interference in the family’s life,” she said.
Robertson said that she worries that in looking at the data, the focus is no longer on the kids.
“I think the most frustrating thing is that everybody is so caught up in the numbers that the kids are getting lost,” she said.
Eighty percent of the children arrested during the six-month period were black, according to the data. Of the 786 arrests, 628 were of black children and 148 were of white children.