One State Gives Juveniles a Hand Instead of a Cell : Crime: Places studying reform look to Massachusetts’ good record of deterring offenses while cutting costs.

Across the nation, penalties for juvenile offenders are tougher, sentences are longer, facilities overflow as the percentage of young Americans behind bars reaches a new high, and the cost of keeping kids in lockup nears $3.2 billion annually.

But, in spite of all this, the number of violent crimes committed by children and youths has begun to rise.

So after seeking increasingly punitive measures for juvenile crime for nearly a generation, many states, cities and counties are beginning to re-evaluate their strategy and cast about for alternatives.

Dozens of innovative programs are being tested on small scales all across the nation. But justice officials are paying particular attention to Massachusetts, which has a statewide and long-running program that appears to be a success. While spending far less per delinquent than most states, Massachusetts has achieved one of the nation’s best records at deterring juvenile crime.

In the 1970s, as most states began to “get tough” on such crime and pass laws leading to more time in custody, Massachusetts took a different tack.

Today, the state offers what the vast majority of state juvenile justice operations do not. It deals with delinquents on the premise that they require less incarceration, not more, that they belong in smaller facilities, not larger, that they need more supervision, not less.

In Massachusetts only 15% of those sent to the state’s Department of Youth Services are held in secure, locked facilities. By comparison, nearly all of the juveniles under the supervision of the California Youth Authority are held under lock and key. Only 55 of every 100,000 youngsters in Massachusetts are in custody, contrasted with more than 450 of every 100,000 in California.

Massachusetts has no large prison-like facilities housing scores of juveniles. The small proportion of youngsters who are deemed a threat to society are held in 15-bed facilities where education, skills and behavioral development are emphasized, with a teacher-to-student ratio of one to four. The rest--about 1,200, or more than 80% of the total committed to the Department of Youth Services--are not confined but instead are either given intensive supervision at home or placed in a variety of small, community-based programs, such as group homes.

The result is that in Massachusetts only 23% of those committed to the state’s youth services programs are incarcerated as repeat offenders--contrasted with 63% for the California Youth Authority. And, despite the salaries required for intensive supervision of delinquents, the cost of running the system is nearly half the national average.

“We’ve cut costs, we’ve cut repeat offenders and we don’t have a juvenile crime wave,” says Ned Laughlin, director of Massachusetts’ Department of Youth Services.

The core of the Massachusetts program is the belief that most delinquent children do not require custody, but development.

“The public looks for quick and easy solutions,” Laughlin says. “Saying, ‘I’m going to lock up more people,’ is a quick and easy answer--but it’s not the solution. Our nation’s incarceration rate is right behind Russia and South Africa, and yet we have a higher crime rate than countries who don’t have the high lockup rate we have . . . .

“What we find is that when we offer a safe, caring environment that holds kids accountable, they respond. Kids are kids, I don’t care what they’ve been doing on the street. They look forward to a reward system. They like a system that is accountable and has positive feedback. It may sound like a small thing, but what a lot of people forget is that these kids are just that--kids.”

Many doubted the wisdom of the “Massachusetts Experiment,” as it was called by those inside the nation’s juvenile justice system, when it was instituted in 1972.

At the time, Massachusetts, like most of the rest of the nation, housed most of its delinquent youngsters in large training schools where more resources were spent on maintaining control than rehabilitating and developing the children.

But Jerry Miller, then director of youth services, argued that the vast majority of youngsters did not require custody. The money spent on keeping them in lockup could be better spent solving the personal and behavioral problems that led to delinquency. He abruptly closed all of the state’s juvenile detention facilities and moved the youngsters to small, community-based programs or sent them home under supervision.

Believing that more direct guidance and personal attention will get youngsters out of the juvenile justice system for good at a dramatically lower cost, the state has contracted with a private company to add an extra layer of attention for each child under its KEY Outreach and Tracking Program.

In this program, juveniles whose offenses are often serious enough to mean that they would be placed in custody in another state are kept at home under supervision of youth services officers. In addition, each youngster has a KEY “tracker” with primary responsibility for the child’s progress.

The state officer and the tracker meet with the delinquent youngster and his parents to create a behavioral contract that outlines expectations and goals, as well as sanctions and rewards based on keeping the contract.

What makes the program work is the extremely small caseload KEY’s trackers carry. Each tracker, whose job is to “shadow” the youngsters, has only eight charges. The program costs an average of $9,000 per juvenile annually, instead of the more than $40,000 it costs to keep a child in custody in Massachusetts.

“The tracker is the supervision without walls, because that person is seeing the youngster several times a week, calling the school, taking the kid to the ballgame, visiting and calling the house,” Laughlin says. “They’re not bound by a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule. So they act as part big brother and part cop.”

Trackers serve not only as monitor of the youngster’s movements, but also as broker and advocate for him in his efforts to resume a productive and law-abiding life. If specialized therapies or additional services are needed, KEY workers arrange them.

The KEY program has been so successful that Missouri, Hawaii, Arizona and Alabama are attempting to incorporate similar programs into their juvenile justice systems.

Though few states have been willing to try to match Massachusetts’ massive overhaul of the juvenile justice system--especially while the public was calling for tougher penalties--a number of states have gradually begun to experiment in smaller ways with alternatives to incarceration.

Derek Diggs, 17, is glad Louisiana was one such state. Slightly more than a year ago, Derek was sitting in the Louisiana Technical Institute, the state’s equivalent of prison for juveniles, where he had been sentenced to 3 1/2 years after his second arrest and conviction for selling crack cocaine.

Then, in walked Laura Axtel and Lionel Olmstead of the New Orleans Marine Institute, an operation that promises to turn around repeat juvenile offenders because it does not put them behind bars. They offered Derek another chance.

Today, Derek, who completed his high school requirements in the program, is enrolled to start school next month at Southern University, majoring in engineering.

New Orleans Marine Institute is one of 30 facilities operated by Associated Marine Institute, a private, nonprofit organization founded 23 years ago in Tampa, Fla., with the idea that delinquents can become positive members of society as their self-esteem and respect for others grow. Associated Marine Institute now operates in Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Most marine institute programs function like the one in New Orleans in which Derek was enrolled. Juveniles already in custody are selected with a judge’s consent and put into the program for up to six months, with the understanding that if they fail they go back to custody.

Students live at home and go daily to a site near the city’s shipyards. After a daily pep talk and discussion session to iron out student problems, they attend morning classes, where they work to complete a high school equivalency degree. Then they spend the afternoon learning challenging marine activities such as scuba diving or sailing. Participants earn points each day toward promotion to new levels in the program with greater responsibility and more privileges.

“We have a program that’s structured for success,” says Olmstead, executive director of the New Orleans facility. “We help them set goals and achieve those goals through hands-on work.”

Participants spend their nights and weekends at home--where they face the temptations of the streets--for two reasons. First, it cuts costs of the program to $40 a day per youth, contrasted with $120 in lockdown facilities. Second, and more important, institute officials say, it teaches youngsters to live successfully in the home and community that first landed them in trouble.

“You’re working with the kid within the environment that he’s struggling in,” says O. B. Stander, executive vice president of operations of the national office in Tampa. “That’s where he’s going when he gets released. What’s there may be bad, but we can’t change that right away. He has to be able to function in that environment without getting in trouble.”

After completing the program, youngsters are assigned for three months to “aftercare,” a transition program in which a designated worker helps them stay on track.

“What we’re trying to do is wean those kids so they are totally responsible for their own success,” Stander says. “I don’t believe you can drop them off cold turkey and expect them to succeed.”

After completing the program, Derek landed a job as a computer clerk. His take-home pay was $283 every two weeks--in contrast to his dope-selling days when, at 14, he sometimes made $700 to $1,000 a day peddling crack cocaine.

Didn’t the difference in pay bother him?

“It actually made me feel normal,” he says. “When I had as much money as I had and as young as I was, I thought I wasn’t even human. You have that on-top feeling. When you’ve been raised and come up in the lower class all of your life . . . you think you’re rich. It’s rags to riches in a couple of days. But it all ends. Now I have my mind focused on getting an education and thinking about a future.”

The program, Derek says, taught “me that there’s more to life than drugs and violence, and that I had what it takes to succeed. I learned that I didn’t have to go down the wrong path to get the better things in life.”

But most of all, Derek remembers that “if I hadn’t gone into the program, right now I’d still be in jail.”

Some Juvenile Court officials have made dramatic changes simply by altering their attitude about dealing with juvenile offenders. In Philadelphia, presiding Juvenile Court Judge Frank Reynolds has put his personal stamp on how the city’s young offenders are handled.

By dealing swiftly and sternly with hard-core offenders, while offering alternatives to custody and more intense follow-up for new offenders, the city has cut its caseload nearly 10% in each of the last three years.

“One thing is certain now about Juvenile Court,” Reynolds says. “When a child comes through here, he will be dealt with. When I say he will be ‘dealt with,’ that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to lock him up. It means that we are going to find out exactly what his problems are, what are the issues that led him to commit a crime in the first place. We’re not just going to see him and send him away.

“I believe you have to take that approach because, if you ignore children at the outset of their young criminal lives, you’re going to have to send them over to adult court when they get to be 15 or 16.”

Reynolds’ first order of business was to instill a more professional and compassionate attitude among the Juvenile Court judges.

“For a long time Juvenile Court was a dumping ground. There were some good judges, but a lot of them were just serving time before their retirement. We’ve changed that. You have to have a certain attitude in Juvenile Court. You have to love kids. If you don’t love kids, you can’t do this job.”

Reynolds has sought to expand the list of options that judges have after hearing a case by adding an office whose job is to identify or create the appropriate placement for delinquent youngsters.

Now, in addition to custody or probation, judges can choose in-home detention, in which children are confined to home except during school hours; intensive probation, in which they are seen three to four times a month instead of only once, or restitution, which requires them to repay crime victims or perform community service.

Naomi Post, director of the unit that seeks the most appropriate placement for individual juvenile offenders, gives an example of meaningful restitution:

“Community service used to mean kids would go and push a broom or pick up trash, but that wasn’t really doing anything in terms of helping turn children away from their activity. It was just time served. We’ve tried to make that a more meaningful experience, something that deals with the behavior that brought them here.

“For example, we had a white kid who was adjudicated on ethnic intimidation for running after a woman and her baby screaming, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger!’ We made him do volunteer work at the Martin Luther King Center. We wanted him to see black people in a different light.

“It seems to have worked. His attitude changed dramatically. On his own, he went out and found a black Baptist church, started doing cleanup, going to the service.”

“In some ways, the court can be the first ‘parent’ that these kids have had,” Reynolds says. The fact that you live in a house with people who stand in a position of authority over your life doesn’t mean you have a parent. A parent is one who nurtures, who advises, who stands as someone to protect you. Most of the kids who come in here are here because they don’t have that nurturing, they don’t have a person who understands the system well enough to instruct and advise and guide.

“The core issue is the family, or the lack thereof. That is the problem that has to be dealt with. The failure or success of a city in dealing with them is reflected in the number of children it has in those maximum-security institutions and the intensity with which the children have adopted crime as their vocabulary.”