MIRACLE IN YOUTH CORRECTIONS?

Colorado should consider adopting some features of Missouri’s system, but research hasn’t proven it to be the panacea some seem to believe it is.

It is seldom wise to believe in miracles, especially when they involve complex issues of public policy.

Take the question of reforming Colorado’s youth corrections system, a priority goal these days because of violence and coercion in state facilities. A recent Denver Post op-ed by Rep. Pete Lee, D-Colorado Springs, extolled an alternative model in Missouri, where youth “are never placed in solitary confinement, shackles or straitjackets and are never subjected to pain techniques to enforce compliance. Indeed, the only mechanical restraints used in Missouri are handcuffs,” the last instance of which occurred “six years ago.”

Missouri simply “does not permit staff to do anything that hurts children.”

It’s enough to warrant a round of cheers. And yet … how do the Missouri jailers handle a teen who engages in violent or dangerous behavior? How is he stopped? You would search Lee’s commentary in vain to discover the answer, which is this: Staff and his youth peer group subdue and immobilize him. They grab him and hold him down, two on every arm and leg.

“We listened to reports from the youth where at times they were held down more than two hours,” says Anders Jacobson, director of Colorado’s Division of Youth Corrections, who visited Missouri recently with Lee and a representative from the ACLU of Colorado. “We heard reports that at times they need an additional youth who takes a piece of paper and holds it over the face of the youth on the ground if they’re spitting. “

So it’s not quite paradise even for incarcerated youths in Missouri.

This is not to discount the virtues of Missouri’s approach, which a coalition that includes

the ACLU, the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, and the Colorado Juvenile Defender Center are pressing this state to adopt — as soon as this year. As the coalition explained in its recent report, “Bound and Broken,” “In Missouri, young people sleep in dorm style rooms with comforters, wear their own clothing, decorate their personal spaces with items from home. The common spaces are attractive and comfortable. This stands in stark contrast to the prison-like atmosphere in Colorado DYC facilities, where youth wear institutional scrubs or uniforms, are placed in locked cells with prison blankets, and gather in bleak and institutional common areas.”

All true. Photos contrasting conditions in the two systems are stunning. In terms of humane considerations alone, Missouri wins the eye test hands down.

And yet the biggest single difference between the two systems in terms of reducing violence and fear — which the coalition’s report argues are pervasive in Colorado — may be the mundane fact of staffing. The staff-to-youth ratio in Missouri is one to six, while it’s as bad as one to 11 in Colorado. (The federal standard is one to eight during daytime.)

After several ugly incidents at the Spring Creek detention facility in Colorado Springs, Jacobson last year decided on drastic action. He redeployed staff from elsewhere and adjusted the number of youth in each pod, resulting in a one to five ratio. “We changed no training, nothing around philosophy or physical management,” he told me. “We didn’t change anything that we do except the staffing pattern … and we had a 73 percent reduction in fights and assaults [over a five-month period], a nearly 50 percent reduction in restraints, and a 58 percent reduction in the use of seclusion [solitary confinement].”

But Jacobson simply doesn’t have the staff to replicate the Spring Creek experiment throughout the state’s 10 facilities.

Although staffing is key, the truth is we don’t know which other elements of Missouri’s approach are most effective because of a surprising dearth of research. Professor Beth Huebner of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri at St. Louis surveyed the field for National Academies Press a few years ago and noted that “only one outside assessment of the Missouri model has been conducted,” by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and yet key conclusions were flawed by “fundamental methodological weaknesses.”

Huebner concluded that despite widespread support for the Missouri approach, “there is no credible scientific evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. Much is still to be learned about how the program model affects long-term youth trajectories and to whom this model is most applicable.”

I asked Huebner if that was still the case, and unfortunately it is. She herself is a fan of the Missouri approach because “they employ the least restrictive environment possible, and we know that least restrictive tends to produce better outcomes.” But empirical reinforcement is sparse.

Jacobson maintains, for example, that Colorado’s youth recidivism rates are actually marginally better than Missouri’s in two of three recent years and educational attainment in Colorado’s system “is a lot better.”

Colorado DYC officials find themselves on the defensive these days nonetheless because of the frequency with which staff resort to “physical management” — including pressure points and knee strikes, and a full-body straitjacket known as “the wrap” — as well as solitary confinement in order to enforce compliance. Even discounting the lurid spin pervading “Bound and Broken,” which gives every benefit of the doubt to what it calls Missouri’s “miracle,” its underlying message is credible: Colorado could do a great deal more to reduce violence and physical coercion in state facilities.

But should current compliance tactics be eliminated altogether, as the report demands? Is an hour of solitary or a knee strike to the thigh less humane, for example, than having eight people tackle and hold you down for an hour?

Jacobson says leg strikes are to be used only when a staff member is being assaulted or rescuing someone who is attacked and can’t control the assailant. If implemented faithfully (which may not be the case), is that really intolerable?

Colorado has one of the most rigorously regulated policies on solitary in the nation thanks to a law passed last year. No youth can be put in seclusion for more than eight hours total over two consecutive days without a judge’s approval. With proper staffing and a shift in culture, is the occasional use of solitary really never justified?

The answers to these questions are not as obvious as the advocacy coalition insists. That’s especially true given that the average age of youth in DYC facilities is markedly older than it is in Missouri, and that even Missouri doesn’t apply its model to youth who are in detention but whose cases have yet to be adjudicated. Detained youth tend to be short-timers, and half of Colorado’s facilities serve them exclusively.

Jacobson admits that over the years “we layered more and more things on and got away from group practice” — in short, the sort of “peer-engaged culture” in which Missouri excels. It’s time for Colorado to move in that direction and to learn from Missouri’s rejection of a sterile penal atmosphere for teens. Both Rep. Lee and Jacobson want to bring a Missouri-type pilot program to Colorado, although they disagree on how soon it should begin.

But lawmakers need to get involved, too, not in micromanaging every aspect of policy but in providing an infusion of staff and the type of facilities critical to reform. Even without supporting data, there are features of Missouri’s system that are too appealing to ignore.