Decline in youth cases accelerated in pandemic

Number of children referred to juvenile court in Connecticut dropped 75% since 2005, data shows

The number of children referred to Connecticut’s juvenile courts has dropped almost 75% since 2005, new data show, charting a steady decrease in the number of juveniles entering the state’s criminal justice system that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s sprawling impacts over the past 18 months.

Just 4,216 children were referred to juvenile court in the entirely pandemic-impacted 2020-21 state fiscal year, which ended in June, compared to 15,603 children referred to the juvenile court system in the 2005 state fiscal year, the data show.

During that same time new admissions to the state’s two juvenile detention centers dropped 87% to just 379 in the fiscal year that ended this summer as the state has increased its efforts to shift more young offenders away from incarceration and into more successful diversionary programs.

Those decreases track with drops in the rate of overall crime across Connecticut over the past decade — including a 37% decrease in the rate of violent crime and a 29% decrease in the rate of property crimes — even as both murders and auto thefts increased this year, sparking a political debate about whether the system is too lenient on repeat juvenile offenders.

The new data come from the state’s annual report on juvenile justice statistics, presented in November for the first time in two years because of the pandemic’s interruptions last year, as state experts prepare a new online dashboard to present juvenile justice metrics publicly for the first time next year.

The new dashboard will be similar to tools available to study other states’ juvenile court systems and takes some inspiration from the state’s online COVID dashboard in the ways it will present town-bytown and regional data with colorful, interactive graphics, officials said.

Even accounting for those increases, the overall rate of violent crime in Connecticut fell 37% from 2010 to 2020 and the rate of property crimes fell 29% over that decade

Legal experts, lawmakers and advocates hope the dashboard will increase transparency about the inner workings of the complex juvenile justice system, especially after a year of intense scrutiny following several high-profile teen crimes this summer, including the fatal hit-and-run of a New Britain jogger by a teen with a lengthy prior record speeding in a stolen car.

“The project really gets at the heart of what our workgroup is designed for, as it will be an opportunity to share data between the agencies and distribute to the public important information about the juvenile justice system that hasn’t always been readily available,” said Maurice Reaves, assistant director of the state’s Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division. “It is a project we are very excited to be working on and also conscious of the importance of doing it right.”

The new juvenile justice data covering the past two years, including the second half of 2019 and early 2020 before the pandemic impacted Connecticut, show the yearslong decline of children entering the system further accelerated through the disruptions COVID19 wrought on the entire criminal court and support services systems.

The number of juvenile referrals to court increased only around the years in which the Connecticut’s “Raise the Age” laws went into effect in 2010 and 2012, adding 16and 17-year-olds to juvenile jurisdiction instead of adult court, the data show.

The data also show that over the past two years most juveniles whose cases went to juvenile review boards, a process outside of the juvenile court that offers some young offenders a chance to avoid an arrest record by completing diversionary programs, successfully completed those program — 83% in 2020 and 73% in 2021, according to the data presented to the Juvenile Justice Policy and Oversight Committee in November.

Interestingly, experts noted, the rates of re-arrest and re-conviction for the juveniles who do wind up on probation have remained relatively consistent over the years, despite the declining number of juveniles reaching the probation level of the system now. That is not because the probation programs are failing but because those fewer children involved are at higher risk of reoffending, officials said — mirroring what state police Commissioner James Rovella and other police leaders across the state have repeated throughout the year about their recent struggles with repeat, harder-to-help young offenders.

“As more diversion programs have diverted lower risk kids out of the probation system, it has resulted in cohorts of young people on probation who are at significantly higher aggregate risk, as measured by the actuarial risk tools employed by the probation department,” said Brian Hill, a judicial branch administrator and co-chair of the group that produced the data analysis. “The research indicates, and the same has been found here in Connecticut, that the higher the risk of the child the higher likelihood that child is to either be rearrested or reconvicted. You can see that phenomenon of the shrinking probation population.”

Many of the data that go into the annual analysis also will be featured in the upcoming public dashboard, which has been in the works all year, officials said.

The dashboard is inspired in part by the usefulness of the state’s online COVID dashboard, which has allowed anyone to quickly access information about the pandemic’s impact statewide and in their specific town, plus a litany of helpful links and explanations for people seeking out more information, the working group said.

New Haven Democratic state Reps. Robyn Porter and Toni Walker, who chairs the Juvenile Justice Police and Oversight and Committee, both noted the dashboard will need both context for the overall dashboard and some specific data points, such as the disproportionate rate of children of color involved in the system, to make it most useful for the public to examine the system from the outside.

But not every stat will be available in the dashboard, and that’s how it should be, said Hector Glynn, COO for The Village for Families & Children that offers programs to help children in need in the Hartford area.

“It’s also a racial equity dashboard, so presenting just raw numbers fails to tell the story and that’s why it may be a little more complicated ... because rates now become very important,” Glynn said. “A numerator or denominator is really how most of the information is going to be presented because that makes a difference in what the system looks like ... but we did want to make sure we told the story of race and equity and the raw numbers don’t do that.”

The working group developing the dashboard will continue to revise what data will be included, how to share data across agencies and how those numbers will be presented over the course of the winter before finalizing the project to post next year.