The News-Times

Funding increased for juvenile justice programs

The bulk of the money was there, said Appropriat­ions Committee Co-Chairwoman Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, it was just a matter of shifting it from one agency to the next. Osten said she believes that by the time the budget is negotiated in the coming week

- By Lisa Backus

HARTFORD — Advocates were encouraged by the Appropriat­ions Committee’s decision to increase funding for Judicial Branch and state Department of Children and Families juvenile justice programs in its two-year budget proposal.

But most realize that budget deliberati­ons are far from over.

“We saw the $11 million as a big win,” said Christina Quaranta, deputy director of the Connecticu­t Juvenile Justice Alliance. “But there’s a long way to go before the budget is finalized. It’s been a long fight to get Judicial what they need.”

According to figures compiled by the CJJA, the legislatur­e has moved forward with several juvenile justice reforms in recent years but provided little or no funding for the programs.

The bulk of the money was there, said Appropriat­ions Committee Co-Chairwoman Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, it was just a matter of shifting it from one agency to the next. Osten said she believes that by the time the budget is negotiated in the coming weeks, the additions the committee made for juvenile justice programs will remain intact.

“I believe it will all still be there,” she said.

In its biennial budget released last week, the committee agreed to give the Judicial Branch Court Support Services Division an additional $10.7 million in fiscal year 2020 and $10.2 million in 2021 to support juvenile programs transferre­d to the agency from the state Department of Children and Families in July 2018.

CSSD was assigned the task of housing and providing appropriat­e programmin­g for juveniles on probation who needed residentia­l placement and other services. The juveniles were formerly under the purview of DCF, which ran the now closed Connecticu­t Juvenile Training School.

The goal was to close the school, which was a large institutio­nal setting, in favor of placing the juveniles in smaller, community-based residentia­l programs. While DCF received more than $50 million a year to run the school, Gov. Ned Lamont offered Judicial only $17 million in his

2020 budget proposal to deal with the transfer.

Chief Court Administra­tor Patrick Carroll III had asked for $28.7 million in

2020. “To be clear, we cannot provide the intensive community-based secure programmin­g this population requires with the amount of funding the governor has recommende­d,” Carroll told the committee in early March.

The move required CSSD to “repurpose” separate units within the Bridgeport and Hartford juvenile detention facilities to house kids on probation who require a locked residentia­l setting, CJJA said. “This is a stop-gap solution that neither system insiders or advocates see as an appropriat­e ‘solution’,” CJJA said in their document outlining juvenile justice cuts that have taken place over the past few years as legislator­s have pushed for reforms.

The detention centers were meant for juveniles who are awaiting court proceeding­s on a shortterm basis. CSSD officials said the $28 million was needed to find communityb­ased providers for juveniles who require a locked residentia­l setting, those who need to be in “staff secure” unlocked settings and those who need community-based programs while living at home.

Some of the additional $19 million that the Appropriat­ions Committee added for the transition came from DCF. “We also added additional money,” Osten said.

The committee also gave DCF $1.3 million to be dispersed to juvenile review boards throughout the state. The boards deal locally with juveniles who get into trouble without sending the kids through the court system, CJJA said. “They are widely seen to be one of the key reasons the size of the juvenile court has been shrinking over the past decade,” the organizati­on said.

The funding for the programs was one of the “casualties” of the transfer of at-risk kids from DCF to CSSD, CJJA said.

In the 2019 fiscal year, the Office of Policy and Management cobbled together federal money to keep the boards funded until August. The Appropriat­ions Committee agreed to provide $1.3 million in 2020 and 2021 to keep the boards going. Osten said that there was never a break in funding even though CSSD did not fund the programs in fiscal year 2019.

“As we’ve been moving juvenile justice out of DCF we’ve been moving the funding,” she said.

The additional funding for juvenile services will save the state money in the long run by helping children before they wind up in adult prison, Osten said. “In the long-term taking care of children is cost effective and it’s the right thing to do. You can take the morality out of it, although I do believe it’s the right thing to do, but you can’t ignore that it saves money down the line.”

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