Cuomo, don’t leave these kids hanging
About a decade ago, juvenile corrections in New York State was a mess. In 2006, a Bronx boy in a state youth prison died of suffocation after staff restrained him. This led the U.S. Department of Justice to sue the state’s Office of Children and Family Services for excessive use of force and inadequate mental health care in their youth prisons.
The OCFS commissioner described conditions in the facilities as “toxic,” warning judges not to send youth there because the state could not keep them safe. Twothirds of boys were rearrested within two years of release from OCFS facilities, which housed young people at a cost of over $200,000 per youth every year.
In 2012, state and city leaders joined together to enact the Close to Home initiative, moving all city youth out of violent upstate facilities, expanding community programs and creating small, local facilities for the few requiring confinement.
Ironically, despite lower youth crime, improved educational outcomes and reduced incarceration — and lower cost than the bad old system — Close to Home has been zeroed out of the governor’s proposed budget.
This is a huge mistake.
A paper we coauthored in 2016 showed the youth prisons in New York suffered from the same high costs, poor outcomes and debilitating conditions that have plagued such facilities throughout the country since their inception in the 1800s.
We recommended states shutter these prisons and put youth either home with services or, for the few who need to be removed, in small homelike and rehabilitative facilities nearby.
Close to Home, enacted with bipartisan support, did just that, requiring that all youth placed out of home by the city's Family Court judges go to small six- to 18-bed facilities operated by nonprofits in or near the five boroughs, rather than upstate youth prisons far from their families.
Before that, counties, and the city, covered half of the costs of housing youth in OCFS prisons. Under Close to Home, the city and state similarly shared the costs, but the city oversaw the contracts, and the young people stayed, well, close to home.
The city’s Department of Probation also dramatically expanded rigorous alternative, communitybased programs and worked with judges, prosecutors and defenders to structure probation’s recommendations to focus residential placements on youth at greatest risk of reoffending, while using the alternative programs for those posing less risk.
Close to Home — which is only for city youth — has yielded results that other jurisdictions should pay close attention to. According to recent data from the Columbia University Justice Lab, between 2012 and 2016, the number of youth placed in a facility declined by 68%, more than twice the decline in placements in the rest of the state (20%).
Youth in Close to Home facilities pass an astonishing 91% of their classes and earn an average of 9.3 credits in about six months’ time. And in the four years after Close to Home passed, city juvenile arrests plummeted by 52%, double the decline of the four previous years (24%).
Close to Home does exactly what state and city leaders hoped when they initiated it — and what we know is best for getting kids back on track and on a path to a successful adulthood.
And the need for it is about to grow.
Last year, state legislators raised the age of New York’s Family Courts so that most 16- and 17-year-olds will now be tried as juveniles. This means the number of youth tried in family courts and housed in Close to Home facilities will expand substantially.
While it is good that young people will be in better facilities than Rikers Island or upstate prisons, those facilities require the right resources to succeed.
In other words, it’s an awful time for the state to be yanking its support.
Six years ago, New York policymakers forged a bipartisan citystate agreement to take youth out of horrific youth prisons and treat them better. The youth, the city and the state are reaping significant benefits from that decision. Lawmakers must not turn back the clock.