Philadelphia’s prized plan: Juvenile justice hub
Nine U.S. cities get $1M each to test innovations
PHILADELPHIA — The idea for a juvenile justice hub started with a handful of Philadelphia police officers who knew the way they interacted with juveniles had to change. The judges of the Bloomberg Philanthropies U.S. Mayors Challenge are willing to bet their idea will work.
Bloomberg announced the nine winners Monday of the challenge that tasked cities to develop innovative solutions to their biggest problems that other cities might copy. Each winner will receive $1 million to implement the ideas.
Los Angeles plans to develop a program under which people build homes on their property and rent them to the homeless. Georgetown, Texas, plans to become the first energy-independent community in the country by installing solar panels and battery storage on its buildings.
With its prize, Philadelphia plans to build a juvenile justice hub, where young people will be taken upon arrest instead of being taken to the police districts that are built to process adults. The juveniles can spend up to six hours in the small, cold, dank and antiquated cells, with minimal contact even with police — partially to prevent them from incriminating themselves accidentally.
The hub will be designed to make juvenile contact with police less traumatic, but police and a host of other partners are hoping the center also can keep more children out of the criminal justice system with faster connections to diversion programs and referrals for at-risk juveniles to intervention services for housing, food, mental health counseling and other areas of need.
Stephen Clark oversees the city’s 24th police district, based in the Port Richmond neighborhood near the epicenter of the city’s opioid epidemic. He was one of the officers who came up with the seed idea to address how juveniles are arrested, and he has told everyone on the planning team for months that Philadelphia’s idea would be chosen.
“Where I work now, there’s a lot of violent crime. Our shooting victims tend to have significant arrest records dating back to their youth, so ideally also we can intervene sooner so they don’t become that statistic of a shooting victim,” he said. “I didn’t join the department to watch people die.”
City officials recognized the potential impact of the hub as well.
“You only need to see a 10- or 12-year-old, sitting alone and scared in a dank jail cell because he did something dumb like shoplifting, to understand that a child’s first contact with the justice system is crucial, that this Juvenile Justice Hub is needed,” said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney.
The other prizes were awarded to Denver, to place air-quality sensors around schools; Durham, N.C., to create incentive programs to get drivers into public transportation; Fort Collins, Colorado, to help landlords make low-income housing safer and more energy-efficient ; Huntington, West Virginia, to embed mental health professions with first responders to address the needs of opioid users; New Rochelle, New York, to implement virtual reality technology during public planning processes; and South Bend, Indiana, which will help low-income and part-time workers find reliable commuter transportation through ride shares.