Recalibrating Juvenile Detention

Lessons Learned from the Court-Ordered Reform of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center

David W. Roush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429676000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Strafrecht

Recalibrating Juvenile Detention chronicles the lessons learned from the 2007 to 2015 landmark US District Court-ordered reform of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) in Illinois, following years of litigation by the ACLU about egregious and unconstitutional conditions of confinement. In addition to explaining the implications of the Court's actions, the book includes an analysis of a major evaluation research report by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and explains for scholars, practitioners, administrators, policymakers, and advocates how and why this particular reform of conditions achieved successful outcomes when others failed.

Maintaining that the Chicago Crime Lab findings are the "gold standard" evidence-based research (EBR) in pretrial detention, Roush holds that the observed "firsts" for juvenile detention may perhaps have the power to transform all custody practices. He shows that the findings validate a new model of institutional reform based on cognitive-behavioral programming (CBT), reveal statistically significant reductions in in-custody violence and recidivism, and demonstrate that at least one variation of short-term secure custody can influence positively certain life outcomes for Chicago's highest-risk and most disadvantaged youth. With the Quarterly Journal of Economics imprimatur and endorsement by the President's Council of Economic Advisors, the book is a reverse engineering of these once-in-a-lifetime events (recidivism reduction and EBR in pretrial detention) that explains the important and transformative implications for the future of juvenile justice practice. The book is essential reading for graduate students in juvenile justice, criminology, and corrections, as well as practitioners, judges, and policymakers.

Chapter 1

“He Walks with the Angels”

Introduction

The Hon. James C. Kingsley used these words to put in layman’s terms the legal significance of the authority granted to Earl L. Dunlap as the receiver or Transitional Administrator (TA) of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) by US District Court Judge John Nordberg in the Order on the Emergency Motion by the Transitional Administrator on May 8, 2008 (Doe, et al., v Cook County, et al., No. 99 C 3945). The Chicago Tribune (Editorial, May 14, 2008) described Judge Nordberg’s decision as “bold.” After all, not only had the initial Order to Appoint the Transitional Administrator on August 11, 2007 removed from the Cook County Board of Commissioners all operating and budgetary authority for the JTDC and placed it in the hands of Dunlap, now the Order on the Emergency Motion seemed to go one step further in a passage at page 3, which reads as follows:

The Court hereby suspends any and all laws of the State of Illinois and ordinances of the County of Cook that require compliance with any provisions of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (“CBA”) between Cook County and the Union, as well as said provisions of the CBA itself, including section 4.11 of the CBA, to the extent necessary and appropriate in the TA’s judgment to provide adequate security and safe conditions in the JTDC.

Judge Nordberg had shifted in Dunlap’s favor the balance of power over the trifecta of JTDC operations, finances, and now the unions.

Never having seen US District Court actions of this manner, the author sought an independent legal perspective on what it really meant. Kingsley, Michigan’s longest-serving Circuit Court Judge and a Northwestern University Law School graduate, was a reliable interpreter of higher-court decisions, plus he had kept a watchful eye on the always intriguing politics of Cook County since his law school days in Chicago. He was the first to foreshadow the significance of Judge Nordberg’s actions. From the beginning, legal observers used extraordinary words and phrases to suggest something special was about to happen.

“Significant” is also the word that captures the impact of Judge Nordberg’s selection of Dunlap at the TA, and many consequential events and outcomes would come to the attention of the public and the juvenile justice community over the following decade (Robinson, 2013). Only a few years into the TA reform plan, the University of Chicago Crime Lab (CL) began releasing reports describing research and public policy outcomes that showed statistically significant improvements in some young people released from JTDC (Heller, Ludwig, Miles & Guryan, 2011). By the time these analyses were completed, CL had published the research in the highly regarded Quarterly Journal of Economics (Heller et al., 2016), adding substantial credibility to what was the first, but hopefully not the last, true evidence-based research (EBR) in pretrial juvenile detention.

Gold standard EBR of the quality of “effectiveness trials” in medical research is now part of the pretrial juvenile-detention knowledge base. Starting with “Think before You Act” (Ludwig & Shah, 2014), CL described statistically significant positive outcomes in violence and recidivism reductions for the mostly Black adolescent males detained at the JTDC. This once-in-a-lifetime research challenges some of the contemporary assumptions about all secure custody. Empirical evidence from elite behavioral economics researchers found program links between the type and quality of in-custody care and positive life outcomes for troubled youth. The large sample size, the effective random assignment of young people to control and program groups, the researchers’ painstaking efforts to control for validity threats and alternative explanations lend credibility to the full report (Heller et al., 2016), even though its results continue to invite additional interpretations. The significance of the research and the unanticipated findings require further investigation that could prompt a rethinking, even a recalibrating, of the core assumptions about youth custody facilities.

So, how did things get to this point? A key question, but there are more: What single event or series of events caused the US District Court to move substantially beyond just taking jurisdiction over the 2002 Memorandum of Agreement and appoint a receiver? How can the only EBR with Chicagoland’s juvenile-court-involved Black adolescent males go unmentioned in a community where solutions to the violence problems facing Black youth represent the collective top priority (Dixon, 2017)? The subtitle to this book could be “How to improve the effectiveness of juvenile court interventions with African-American adolescent males.” Why have the influential juvenile justice foundations remained silent (Kelly, 2015)?

In addition to answering these questions, what is the overall purpose of the book and who is the audience? The Desktop Guide to Quality Practice for Working with Youth in Confinement (National Partnership for Juvenile Services & Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2014) provides an overview of facility operations and complements the recent works of Heinz, Wise, and Bartollas (2010), Moeser (2014), and Reed (2016) to explain basic operational principles. This book might be the next in that series of “how to” resources, with two differences. First, this is the story of a specific reform of conditions of confinement at one of the largest juvenile detention centers within one of the most complex political systems, located in a community known nationally for youth violence. The JTDC reform success provides numerous examples of how and why change did and did not occur. Second, the book recommends some new specifications for various components of conditions of confinement reform, and new specifications are behind the rationale for recalibrating.

Equally important is what the book is not. This is not a description of “an experiment” in juvenile detention reform. Instead, the book details for the practitioner the nuts and bolts of nearly 50 years of successful juvenile detention reforms as applied to the single most intractable juvenile detention facility in the United States. Particular attention is paid to those challenges that required the imprimatur of the Federal Court. Next, the book is not a defense of the incarceration of children and youth, nor a defense of current deficits-based and flaw-fixing detention practices, nor a defense of well-intentioned, good people who do bad things to youth; and it is not an endorsement of every contemporary “best practice.” More importantly, the book tells a story of a successful reform, the unique ways that the reform evolved, and the implications related to daily juvenile detention operations and CBT practice going forward. The audience is the professional practitioner. The range of these professionals extends from the line worker in the small detention facility to the state director of institutional services to the university faculty who teach delinquency and juvenile detention courses.

However, if the underlying assumption in these explanations is that Dunlap did something fundamentally different from the practices of previous institutional reformers, “setting the stage” is essential. The core beliefs, assumptions, and values that Dunlap and associates brought to JTDC experience are an important part of the Cook County conditions of confinement reform. Finally, as a profession, we have a very poor memory. The turnover in leadership means that we confidently make the same mistakes repeatedly because of this isolation and our poor recall of what happened more than 10 years ago. This means that the Dunlap story will require some extra text periodically as a reset or reboot of certain basic concepts that have disappeared from our present awareness or have morphed into something slightly different. These resets will be called Re-Calibration Specifications, or RCSs.

Positional Versus Critical

Paul Shepheard’s (1994) book explores, among other things, life, aesthetics, and contemporary architecture through a running dialogue between a fictional wise and older male architect and his precocious female protégée. She serves to clarify his forceful deconstruction of traditional struggles, debates, and furor about architecture. As he readies a harsh critique of a rival’s work, she suggests:

“Think of yourself not as a kamikaze pilot, but as a flamenco dancer. Take up your position before you dance.” That’s what all this is, she has just reminded me: not critical but positional. (p. 75)

A strength of former Marion County (IN) Juvenile Detention Center superintendent DeShane Reed’s manual on secure juvenile facility operations (Reed, 2016) is his use of position statements or “Professional Mental Notes,” embedded throughout the introductory “Notes from the Author” section that carefully prepares the user with a better understanding of his Success-Centered Societal Model. Similarly, the preferred way to describe what happened in Cook County is more positional than critical and calls attention to the importance of identifying and defining at the beginning those assumptions, givens, and values that sustained the reform activities.

A positional orientation offers an alternative to G. K. Chesterton’s observation that the critic is always right about what is wrong but generally wrong about what is right. (quoted in the Illustrated London News, October, 28, 1922) Advocates, reformers, and critics focus more on what is wrong with juvenile detention, paying little attention to what, if anything, helps youth. The critical approach lacks balance and leaves some critics susceptible to allegations that their condemnation comes from an inability to identify workable solutions. A recurrent theme in this book is how the deficits-based approach has failed youth and practitioners because knowing what is wrong only vaguely informs the understanding of what is right. Proponents of positive psychology and positive youth development (PYD) translate “deficits-based” to mean “problem free is not fully prepared” (Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, 2017: x). Dunlap’s prior experiences included direct appeals to end the negativity coming from the juvenile detention critics: Detention professional also know a lot about what is wrong with secure custody and need help to discover and do what is right.

One advantage of a small town with an excellent liberal arts college is that your neighbor might just be someone of rare wisdom. Such was the case with my neighbor, the Reverend Dr. Arthur Munk, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Albion College, who was quick to engage anyone in a discussion about politics, philosophy or the like. For all of his idiosyncrasies, he was remarkably knowledgeable about the most complex and difficult questions in philosophy and theology. He believed that when one struggled with new and challenging concepts, one’s understanding of life expanded and, hopefully, developed more fully. This does not mean that every challenge or every brilliant person’s critique is correct or even useful. What it does mean is that one ought not be afraid to open the mind to alternative perspectives to better determine what is true.

What was his message? Professor Munk believed that Western philosophy held out two points of view on the meaning of life (Munk, 1977). One was a message of hope and the other a message of despair. He would point to Arnold Toynbee as his exemplar of hope and to Friedrich Nietzsche and nihilism as the voice of despair. Both perspectives, he would add, are quite plausible. The meaning of life, therefore, depends upon the view you choose. Age and declining health caused a move for Professor Munk and his wife to a nursing home in upstate New York. Each year there was a Christmas card from Mrs. Munk. The card that arrived shortly after his death told his story. She wrote that for the last six months of his life, Professor Munk was blind, so she read to him daily. The years had deprived him of sight, but his mind remained sharp. The day he died, she read to him from Toynbee—his steadfast position to the end.

Positions

The National Partnership for Juvenile Services (NPJS) is a non-profit collaborative of professional practitioner associations representing the National Association of Juvenile Correctional Agencies (NAJCA), the National Juvenile Detention Association (NJDA), the Juvenile Justice Trainers Association (JJTA), and the Council for Educators of At-Risk and Delinquent Youth (CEARDY). NPJS devotes a portion of its resources and activities to the development of position statements that tell the juvenile justice community where NPJS stands on certain issues. Position statements serve as a commitment to the rest of the field that considerable time and thought, and multiple perspectives have gone into thorough research and discussion of a given subject. For NPJS, the process includes multiple drafts of the position statement with multiple disseminations to the field in search of support, feedback, additions, and corrections. The existence of a position statement preempts NPJS’s need to respond to certain questions and discussions arising from those unfamiliar with the position statement or from those who still disagree with it. Due diligence in the crafting of a completed position statement is a way of saying “asked and answered” to nearly all subsequent counterpoints, without the necessity to comment critically about any faults or weaknesses of the counterpoint. Here are the crucial positions that served as the pillars of the conditions of confinement reform in Cook County.

Values

Values are essential, and some can be a source of controversy. Harlan Cleveland, President of the World Academy of Arts and Science, presumed there are some values so “universal to the human mind, so fundamental to the human spirit, that they transcend the boundaries that sacred texts in secular philosophies have created to protect differing cultural identities” (quoted in Kidder, 1994: xi). Rushworth Kidder’s (1994) systematic conversations about moral values with 25 men and women from various cultures around the world led to his development of a universal code of ethics which includes eight shared values: love, truthfulness, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility, and respect for life. The list offers a set of values that is simple, direct, and fairly universal. Can they provide a code of ethics so basic that the concern about “whose values?” fades into a recognition of “our values?” The first lesson on values for conditions reform: There is long-term benefit to youth in recruiting adults and developing living unit teams that share these values.

Vision

Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Book of Proverbs

The vision statement reflects core values. For example, the NJDA vision declares that “[t]he most efficient way to return a juvenile to a healthy, law abiding lifestyle is through healthy relationships with healthy adults in healthy environments.” The Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators’ (CJCA) Performance-based Standards (PbS) vision statement says: “Every juvenile detention and corrections facility in America should be run as if your only child were the next youth to be admitted” (Loughran & Godfrey, 2001). These long-standing, “old school,” commonly understood, unspoken, solitary guidelines illuminate the quintessential “bright line” between adult and juvenile perspectives on secure custody and the nature of the standards that should guide their operations.

Let all things, seen and unseen, their notes of gladness blend… – John of Damascus

Rev. Dr. Leonard Sweet (1998), dean of Drew Theological Seminary, approaches vision differently. Visions are powerless without what precedes them. What comes before vision? Sweet calls vision the outward product of unseen forces: We hear visions first. Vision is what we experience when the soul resonates, the songs of the soul. These songs are made up of the chords of core values and beliefs. They vibrate, resonate, and finally illuminate. When we get it right according to Sweet, a vision statement sings the song of core values.

The DuPage Example

In February 2000, the DuPage County (IL) Juvenile Detention Center, a 96-bed division of the 18th Judicial Circuit Court’s Department of Probation and Court Services, implemented a comprehensive intervention program for its residents. The new program, implemented by director of probation John Bentley and detention superintendent Dr. Bernie Glos, had core vision and mission statements built on the following beliefs: (a) all human beings have intrinsic value and are worthy of respect; (b) no one loses the ability to make change; (c) we are all responsible for our choices, and therefore our behaviors; (d) actions speak louder than words; (e) before a behavior is expected, we need to make sure that it has been taught; and (f) working with juveniles is a challenging, sometimes frustrating, but always worthwhile endeavor. From this program philosophy, the following program principles emerged: (a) Optimism underlies program and staff efforts (we can find something worthwhile in every person and every situation); (b) We see ourselves primarily as agents of change (we radiate confidence and conviction in everyone’s potential for change); (c) Change is an individual process (change may not move along at the pace we would like, but we always celebrate the progress that has been made); (d) Personhood is sacred (we believe that to be involved in someone’s growth is a high and holy calling, with mutual respect underlying all interactions); (e) We are caring (we “able,” not “enable,” new behavior by empowering individuals to take charge of their life and make changes); and (f) How you think is how you behave (we see that irrational thinking leads to inappropriate behavior and poor outcomes; if we can change thinking we can change behavior).

Theory

A compelling causal interpretation requires a theoretical rationale. – Del Elliott, in Handbook of Criminal Justice Evaluation (1980: 510)

“Data in the absence of theory are vacuous.” University of Michigan political science professor James Morrow used this sentence to emphasize the role theory plays in ascribing meaning to data. A commonsense and understandable theory is the foundation of effective juvenile detention programs (Brendtro & Mitchell, 2015). The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges recommended an organizing principle that weaves together evidence-based programs through a clear, understandable, and cohere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 “He Walks with the Angels”
• 2 The Court Acts
• 3 Staff of the Right Kind
• 4 Preparations for Reform
• 5 Implementing a Helpful Model of Conditions of Confinement
• 6 Quality Assurance and Compliance
• 7 The Crime Lab Findings
• 8 Reverse Engineering by the Crime Lab and CBT 2.0
• 9 Reverse Engineering by the Transitional Administrator
• 10 Reverse Engineering by the Transitional Administrator
• 11 Recalibrating Juvenile Detention
• References
• Appendix A: On-the-Job Training (OJT)
• Appendix B: The Executive Team and the Key JTDC Departments
• Appendix C: Origins of the DuPage Model
• Appendix D: CBT Program Evaluation Form
• Index