Fearmongering in the suburbs is not the answer to juvenile car thefts. Here’s a plan.
For more than 20 years, we have had direct experience working with countless youth who have gone through the child welfare and juvenile justice systems and who have been raised in under-resourced educational settings.
Some of these youth have been car theft offenders; others were victims in incidents. We have seen, up close and personal, how complex and interrelated the challenges are that these youth face, and how they are a direct result of their reliance on the systems that have often failed them.
Our responses, therefore, to the car theft issue that is dominant in the press, must be significantly more careful and measured than has been continually portrayed. We offer here an eight-point plan:
1. Reframe the dialogue and tamp the rhetoric. Instead of talking about “juveniles running rampant,” we must instead turn the discussion to one about children who rely on state systems for their care and development and the fact that we need to do better. Everyone wants our kids to thrive and our neighborhoods to be safe. But the current discourse is slowly turning into a demonization of urban kids and fearmongering among suburban residents. The polarization doesn’t help. In fact, it hurts and has the potential to undermine all reforms we have put in place over the past 10 years. It also badly misinterprets the data, ignores the underlying racial issues and masks any honest identification of gaps in service delivery.
2: Approach the problem with a prevention strategy by providing incentive funding to cities and towns to establish public campaigns to educate residents about the need to lock their cars. In Florida, some police departments blitz neighborhoods with flyers urging residents to get key fobs out of their cars when they are not using them. Other communities have conducted billboard and other campaigns urging the same. Unless this problem is approached from a prevention perspective, we will never tackle the problem at the front end.
3: Incorporate tutoring and afterschool programs, with transportation, for the sixth-to-eighth graders who show signs of chronic absenteeism. Truancy is the gateway to juvenile justice involvement. These kids are identified as early as middle school. Most of the youth engaged in car thefts have patterns of disengagement from school with persistent histories of school failure and chronic absenteeism. These patterns start in middle school and worsen particularly with the eighth- to ninth-grade transition. We need to put a prevention strategy in place to service these kids at an earlier point.
4: Provide employment programs and driver’s license programs for youth in urban areas in the year they turn 16. The young people we represent tell us they would like to have a job and a license. We should use our educational, child protection and juvenile justice systems to link young people with job opportunities and driver’s license programs. The current summer youth employment program is a good start, but its reach needs to be expanded and similar opportunities need to be available during the school year. The youth need individual job coaches and timely, fair stipends for all 12 months. They need access to driving programs and driver’s licenses without the current barriers to access both.
5: Initiate a response based in restorative justice to youth car thefts. Restorative justice initiatives in this state at the front end of the system have been minimal and inconsistent. Detention and juvenile justice facilities are just beginning to adopt this framework. We need a restorative justice diversion program where the person who stole a car is actually meeting with the owner — in a carefully constructed venue with trained facilitators. It needs to be about repairing the harm to the individual and the community. That’s what they have been successfully operating in places like Iowa, Philadelphia and Buffalo, New York.
6: Start services when the youth is arrested. Many have to wait to get services until their case is adjudicated and they are placed on probation. While there are issues to be resolved around risk screens and confidentiality protections, these barriers can and have been resolved in other jurisdictions. See Maryland. Youth should be able to access all services (state subsidized and community-based) immediately upon arrest.
7: Expand and initiate credible messenger programs and family-navigator programs. It has been proved that those with real experiences have credibility to engage justice-involved youth in those communities that are feeders to the system. While we have some programs that fit this bill, they are under-resourced and understaffed. The same need exists for parents. When parents decline services for their youth, they should have the opportunity to engage with family navigators to help understand and address barriers. Advocates have talked about these programs for the past three years, but they have yet to materialize.
8: Intensify services to the small number of high-end kids committing multiple car theft offenses. The LYNC auto theft suspended prosecution program operated by the Judicial Department is having success and showing low recidivism rates. But it is reserved for those scoring low and medium on their risk assessments. It is the high-end repeat offenders who need more intensive services, some of whom stabilize in a structured out-of-home setting, only to return home and re-offend. The reentry service delivery system needs to be reexamined and intensified.
Are these the right eight points? Maybe, maybe not. Some are prevention strategies and some are intervention strategies. But until we have a respectful dialogue focusing on these or others, the mutuality of interests will continue to be masked in hyperbolic rhetoric.