Justice Department Cuts Role of Advocate for Juveniles

Publishing unflinching assessments of the state of the nation’s juvenile justice system has been a hallmark of the nonprofit Coalition for Juvenile Justice for two decades.

It has studied the mental health needs of young offenders, finding that more than half had severe but untreated emotional problems. It has examined the conditions of confinement for juvenile defendants, summing up its findings in annual reports, including one titled “Ain’t No Place Anybody Would Want to Be.”

Over the years, it has had its share of policy differences with Democratic and Republican administrations, but it has survived. Now, however, the coalition is in a life-and-death struggle with the Justice Department, which helps fund it.

Justice first slashed the coalition’s budget, then created a new advisory board to take over what had been the coalition’s role in representing state juvenile justice groups at a national level. The coalition had served that function since it was founded, drawing on the experiences of more than 1,500 volunteers from public and private agencies who are members of state advisory groups.

The new board held its first meeting this month.

The move to replace the coalition has stirred concern among juvenile-justice advocates around the country. They see politics at work and worry that the decision is a pretext for eliminating a point of view that on many issues is at odds with the more law-and-order agenda that the department has pursued under Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.

The coalition has been an ardent opponent of the death penalty for juveniles, for instance, and opposes giving prosecutors broad powers to try youth offenders in adult criminal courts.

“Tragically, it is a politicizing move by the administration to silence people who disagree with their policies,” said Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that operates community-based alternatives to prison for adults and youths.

The Justice Department strongly denies any such motive. It simply concluded that the states’ interests were better represented through “an independent body, rather than as a subordinate function of a private organization with a variety of grantee functions,” according to the department’s Office of Justice Programs.

Under a federal law passed in 1974, the Justice Department is required to fund an outside group representing state interests to advise Congress and the administration on federal juvenile justice policies. Until recently, the Bush administration continued to fund the coalition to meet that requirement.

Critics say it is too soon to say what course the new federal advisory committee will take. But the concern is that it will be less independent of the Justice Department.

Its new bylaws prohibit members from speaking to the media about the work of the advisory committee without the approval of the Justice Department. The Coalition for Juvenile Justice has never been shy about speaking about anything.

For about 15 years, the group has received money from the Justice Department to hold conferences for its state members, publish reports and advise the president and Congress on state perspectives on juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.

It has become an oft-quoted resource on juvenile justice issues. And with juvenile crime declining in recent years, “we feel that we have had at least played some role in that,” said Ken Schatz of Burlington, Vt., chairman of the coalition’s national steering committee.

The coalition’s troubles with the Justice Department started last year. Some coalition members and other attorneys trace the problems to a report the group had commissioned on the growing trend of states trying young offenders as adults.

Justice officials disagreed with many of the conclusions in the report and sought changes.

“There was a dispute about our position, and that became a lightning rod,” according to Nancy Gannon, the coalition’s deputy executive director. “This really tipped the balance for the first time. [Justice] wanted to have that editorial control.”

Justice eventually signed off on the report after the coalition made some changes, Gannon said, but last summer, shortly after the dispute was resolved, the coalition received word that the department was having second thoughts about its work.

According to a Justice Department memo supplied to The Times by the coalition, officials concluded that the coalition could no longer help represent the states before the department and Congress.

“At present, numerous CJJ activities create real and/or apparent inappropriate influences over its role,” according to the memo by William Woodruff, deputy administrator of the department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention since October 2001.

Among the activities he cited was the selling of memberships -- $45 a year is the going rate -- to individuals or groups that were not qualified to serve as advisory committee members.

“Such financial support for advisory committee activities, coming from sources outside of the federal government, creates a clear conflict of interest,” Woodruff wrote.

The Justice Department’s decision is cutting in half the nearly $700,000 in federal support the coalition receives each year. The coalition’s total budget in recent years has been about $1 million annually. Woodruff said the coalition would still be eligible for federal grants -- just not money to support its role as the states’ advisory agent.

More than money, however, the coalition is concerned that, by relieving it of its state advisory duties, its stature and authority have been undercut.

“By cutting them in half, they will inherently diminish the coalition’s capacity to be a powerful voice in the field,” said one veteran juvenile justice expert, who requested anonymity.

“It makes it difficult for [the states] to come together and be a national voice,” said Schatz, the steering committee chairman, who, like many who work with the coalition now, is an unpaid volunteer.