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| Missouri hailed for juvenile justice plan |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 05/16/2005 |
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Cynthia Cheever did her time at a juvenile detention center with strict rules but no cells, no officers, no electric fences. There was frozen pizza in the fridge, and the right to call other offenders into a circle to talk about problems before they could erupt into violence. At the Missouri Division of Youth Services' Rosa Parks Center, a former college dorm, Cynthia and about a dozen other girls balanced chores with schoolwork in a home-like setting where she kept her stuffed animals neatly arranged on her wooden bunk bed's pink comforter. "I have to keep my mind clear, make better friends, do what I need to do to be responsible," Cynthia said in an interview at the center a couple of months ago. "It isn't hard to be good if you just keep trying." Her effort paid off, and 15-year-old Cynthia was released to family members on May 3. The teenager who had stolen money and a car from her grandparents, and eventually ran afoul of juvenile authorities, continues to receive help from a caseworker. Missouri's model of placing juvenile offenders into nurturing settings has such a successful track record -- for example, a recidivism rate of 8 percent, versus upwards of 80 percent in California -- that other states are lining up to copy it. "Other states use the prison model, where they go into a cell and have three hots and a cot," said Mark Steward, director of Missouri's Division of Youth Services since 1988. "We tried it that way in Missouri for more than 100 years, too. It didn't work." More than 15 states have sent representatives to Missouri, including California, which is faced with legal challenges to its scandal-plagued juvenile prison system. California officials were astonished to learn they are spending nearly double Missouri's outlay of about $43,000 a year per juvenile offender. "Missouri has been the Show-Me State for us," said California state Sen. Gloria Romero. Violence and abuse were once so pervasive at what Missouri called training schools that judges balked at sending young offenders to the prisons. In 1971, Steward set up a pilot project with two dozen of the toughest boys. They were given responsibilities instead of shouted orders, bedrooms instead of cellblocks, and supervisors whose most effective weapons were quiet persuasion and peer support. "Some ideas didn't work, some did. But the important thing was the setting and the approach, that treating these kids like bad people did nothing to make them good people," Steward said. By the 1980s, with bipartisan backing, Missouri had replaced its training schools with smaller settings and therapy. Today there are dozens of Youth Services homes, staffed around the clock by supervisors with college degrees. At the Rosa Parks Center, a large common bedroom, with wooden bunks and individual closets, is personalized with stuffed toys and family pictures, along with posters drawn by each girl as therapy, laying out their own challenges and solutions. "They are learning how to get along, to resolve problems without fighting," said Mary Finn, who helps supervise the Rosa Parks Center. |
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