JUVENILE JUSTICE ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Minutes of combined meeting of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee (JJAC)
and the Juvenile Crime Enforcement Coalition (JCEC)
Friday, Sept. 11, 2015 at 10:00 AM
The Latimer Library
90 W 4th Street, Saint Paul, MN 55102
651-266-7000
ATTENDEES
Members
1
Billy Collins
Freddie Davis-English
William Dykes
Richard Gardell
Cortland Johnson
Sheila Kiskaden
Scott Knight
Chong Lo
Samantha Loe
Mike Mayer
Shelley McBride
Sirxavier Nash
Hao Nguyen
Saciido Shaie
Kate Richtman
Kit Smith
Richie Smith
Antonio Tejeda
1
Ex Officios
MACCAC
Jim Schneider, MACPO
Curtis Shanklin, JDAI
Kathy Halvorson, DOC
Guests
Ryan Erdman, MACCAC
Mark Haase, Juvenile Justice 21 and the future
Josh Esmay, Citizen’s Council on Crime & Justice/2nd Chance Coalition
Kahlee Griffey, DOC Community reentry
Perry Moriarity, UofM
Kristi Cobbs, Girls Colaborative
Department of Public Safety Staff, Office of Justice Programs
Carrie Wasley, Juvenile Justice Specialist and Compliance Coordinator;
Greg Herzog, Grants Manager
Dana Swayze, Juvenile Justice Analyst
Rita Joyce, Office Manager
Tricia Hummel,
Meeting Materials
· Agenda, Minutes
· JJAC Administrative Funds Expenditures SFY2016
· Juvenile Justice Funding – Unobligated Grant Balances
Call to order: Welcome, announcements and Introductions – Chair Gardell
Our purpose today is to gather information from the field about current and future issues in juvenile justice so that we can use that as the basis of our report to the Governor and the legislature as is required of us by statute. I would like to introduce our new member Shiela Kiskadin. Tell us a little about yourself. I am a county commissioner for the past three years. I have had a consulting practice for 30 years working mostly with health and human services not for profit government organizations. I spent 13 years in the Minnesota Senate, 92-2006. I was a justice system volunteer coordinator in Olmstead County in our community corrections. I am serving on the AMC Public Safety Policy Committee and in Olmstead county I chair Human Services Committee which also includes the corrections element.
Announcments:
Carrie retired and her position is now open for application through the 17th. All JJAC should have gotten an email notice of it and the notice is available on the state website. We are looking for someone with Juvenile justice background and we’re hoping to fill it within two months.
We have a need for grant reviewers to help us review 130 Youth Intervention Program applications. The tentative date to begin review meetings is first week in Oct. 5-9th. It involves reviewing about ten grants, scoring them, and then meeting with a group of about seven people to discuss, rate, review and recommend 1 to 3 proposals out of that batch. Go on our website OJP.DPS.mn.gov and click in middle where it says if you are interested in reviewing and complete the information. Please forward this to anyone you think it interested.
M/S/P (S Loe/S McBride) Motion to approve July minutes.
Samantha Loe, CJJ Youth Conference:
The conference attendance was great. There was a lot of diversity and job shadowing; we needed more people to shadow and more tour guides to bring the youth around various buildings. However, the summit was supposed to be focused on how do youth perform, how to get youth more involved in the whole criminal justice, juvenile justice aspects. But with everything that is going on with law enforcement in the media, that became the focus for many hours and there was a lot of animosity, so we struggled trying to get people back on track. The youth committee also met, we have a Western Reps spot that still hasn’t been filled.
Financials: Greg Herzog
Reviewed financial spreadsheets.
Curtis Shanklin, JDAI, was asked if spending the $60,000.00 of JABG 2012 money by July 2016 will that be a problem. There are three potential sites, along with the continuation of Rice Co. Gardell asked that something concrete in writing be sent to Richard and Greg within two weeks from today. The other sites are Steele Co. Beltramy Co., Anoka Co., Olmstead Co., and Rice Co.
Email vote to extend a Dakota Co. Grant
M/S/P (K Richtman/F Davis/English) Motion to confirm the email vote to extend a Dakota Co. Grant today.
Kristi Cobbs-Hennepin Co. Girls Collaborative.
My role as the Girls Service Coordinator with Hennepin Co. is really looking at helping Human Services as well as our Department of Corrections in how we can improve services for girls. As part of that role I am the co-chair of the DOC Girls Collaborative which is a network of community based agencies that come together monthly at the DOC to talk about promising and best practices for girls, what’s working across the state and what’s not working. Kristi shared: The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline. Website: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/centers-institutes/poverty-inequality/upload/2015_cop_sexual-abuse_layout_web-2.pdf
This report does a really good job of describing who the girls are in the juvenile justice system and what some of the best practices are for working with this population. The number of youth in the juvenile justice system has steadily declined in large part to JDAI over the last few years, but girls have not been a part of the decline. The proportion of girls detained continues to increase and the number of racial and ethnic disparities amongst girls in the juvenile justice system is stark. Girls of color are detained and sent to residential placement at higher proportions that their Caucasian counterparts.
Some of the recommendations that I would have and that would look for support from JJAC would be:
· Support of the reauthorization of the JJDP Act. Specifically looking at the valid court order exception, the loophole in the system that allows judges to lock up status offenders who are running away or not following court orders. The VCO really exacerbates the disparity for parole in the system.
· Have at least one state advisory group member to have expertise on gender specific issues such as sexual abuse and domestic child sex trafficking because those the issues that we mainly see involved with girls in the juvenile justice system.
· Have states be required to have validated and comprehensive standard trauma screening and assessment tools for youth entering the system.
· Look at data collection; overall nationally we don’t do a great job of collecting data on girls that that’s disseminated by race and ethnicity.
· Providing comprehensive reproductive health care for system involved youth, based on this report we know that a large number of girls come into the system with sexual abuse histories and our systems do a really inadequate job of expressing what sort of sexual health trauma these girls have had and what sort of things can help them better take care of themselves. Because we don’t have routine healthcare screens specifically designed for girls we sometimes miss things that can have long term impacts on their reproductive health.
I believe that sexual trauma and sexual victimization for girls involved in the system is really a unique predictor of recidivism. Girls who go into programs are at most risk when they transfer out of a program. Intentional aftercare services that really address the healthcare needs of these girls is important; there has been a lot of research that said if you treat girl’s health as a holistic picture it has proven to have great results on frequency of recidivism. Also to fully fund Safe Harbor, looking at youth that have been sexually exploited and looking at them as victims and survivors of a crime and not criminals. Continue to work on prevention of sexual exploitation.
Perry Moriarity, U of M & Josh Esmay, Citizen’s Council on Crime & Justice/2nd Chance
Council on Crime and Justice is continuing work from last year: voting rights restoration initiative which allows people to have their voting rights returned to them as soon as they are no longer in custody; drug sentencing reform; a lot of discussion around prison space, which will provide an opportunity to look closely at our states drug sentencing laws, compared to many other states is uncommonly harsh and include long sentencing periods; eliminating mandatory prison sentences for repeat offenders and changing the threshold weight amounts that are required to trigger the higher level drug offenses, thereby reducing the number of people who will be charged with those higher level offense.s A package of Juvenile Justice reforms are being continued:
· A change to one word in the purpose clause of the juvenile code, to emphasis the rehabilitative nature of the juvenile justice system by recognizing in the interest of public safety to reduce juvenile recidivism.
· Create language specifically authorizing police departments to create a juvenile diversion programs. By creating specific statutory language authorizing those diversion programs more police departments would be willing to take that step.
· JDAI- Curtis will cover this later
· Create some discretion for district court judges when juveniles are facing mandatory minimum sentences after being certified into adult court, a special exception from the mandatory minimum for juvenile certification cases.
· Elimination of Juvenile Life without Parole; we would like to have it apply retroactive, but it has significant opposition.
· End indiscriminate shackling of juveniles when they are brought into court; require a judicial finding that there is a courtroom safety or a flight risk reason for juveniles to be shackled.
We need to have a conversation more broadly on where we have been with these initiatives in the last two years and what opposition there is and where there are places to compromise. We would welcome thoughts on the import of what we are proposing, any foreseeable opposition, and where JJAC stands. The package of changes was heard and passed through the Senate judiciary committee, was included in the judiciary omnibus bill that made it to the Senate floor, and passed. Unfortunately that is a far as it got. We did not receive a hearing at any part of the House. The most significant piece of opposition was opposition from the County Attorney’s Association. We have been working really hard as a group to come to a compromise with them and I think we do have a potential outline for a compromise that’s in place. The big point of compromise on Juvenile Life without Parole would mean losing the retroactive part of it. It would leave that for the courts to decide. The other point of compromise would be the number of years before we look at parole. The number would be 20-25. Legislatively there are 29 states in our situation. 15-17 states have done something. 7 states have abolished juvenile life without parole outright. Some have replaced it with something still pretty stringent, like 35 to 40 to life at first look. Other states have not abolished but are looking at somewhere between 25 to life. Other states have been much more progressive. Somewhere between 12-15 years. First look at review, not release for all of these states. All three most progressive legislative proposal states have a retroactivity provision. A number have not touched it waiting to see what the Supreme Court says. Certain members of the U.S. Supreme Court believe it should be at the state level. I think there are those who are really not in favor of touching another Juvenile Court issue right now. There was opposition on the shackling issue, too. We are hoping if we make some compromise on the Juvenile Life without Parole portion, like retroactivity and coming in at 22-23 years for the first look, we would get their full support for the whole package, including shackling.
Ryan Erdman-MACCAC
MACCAC has been and remains supportive of the package that Josh just described. That is our primary juvenile focus. We do have a provision that will remain in our platform related to revisions of juvenile registration requirements. Supportive of the Shackling issue, in general, and the concept of drastically reduced use. We are in support of revising juvenile life without parole and do support retroactivity. Overall funding for corrections and field services is a long term focus. A new initiative related to families and children of parents who are incarcerated which could be a tie back to juvenile justice.
Break
Laurel Endinburgh MCRC… RIP
Title II money is an example of public and non-profit worlds coming together to create an intervention for runaway youth. Runaway youth are often considered to be status offenders or bad youth or incorrigible youth. Runaway youth are youth with health issues. Children who run away are sexually abused at very high rates. 16 % of boys who runaway have a history of sexual abuse. 1 in 3 runaway girls have a history of sexual abuse. This abuse most likely happens after they have left home committed by extra-familial perpetrators. Once children are abused they have a host of risk behavior such as truancy and school failures. This is a perfect opportunity to intervene early. It is also an opportunity at that time to find out if the child is truant because most truant kids do not run away from home. In Ramsey Co. if a youth is running away from home and truant for 10 or more days from school and we don’t know where that youth is going they have a referral to the Midwest Children’s Resource Center, the largest Child Youth Clinic in the upper Midwest region. We see ~1200 cases a year, about 1/3 are teenagers. 60% of the teens who come in are diagnosed with some form of abuse. 1/3 of the 60% have experienced multiple perpetrator rape, gang rape or have been sexually exploited. It is those kids that the Runaway Intervention Program focuses on. The program is developed and run by advanced nurse practitioners. Research has shown where you have a complex health condition that there is more bang for your buck by using someone with more education. The Nurse practitioners see the kids once a week for 3 months and every other week for 3 months and every 3 weeks for a year. We see youth for a year because change takes time. We focus on building resilience, decreasing risk behavior. We do that for harm reduction, for motivational interviewing and focus a lot on health education. We have youth complete MN student survey, UCLA PTSD trauma screen, and use questions about sex from Canada. All youth do that at baseline, at 3 months, at 6 months and 12 months. What we see over time is increases in self-esteem, to connectedness to parents and with other adults, decreases in: runaways, truancy, and self-harm symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation and problem substances. When you think about a legislative agenda public non-profit partnerships are important. They can change the outcomes of youth, parents, of the way our youth are treated. We really do need money for evaluation. Boys are hidden stigmatized victims of sexual crimes and that a lot of our focus on sexual exploitation is focused on girls and we don’t hear much about the boys in our conversation, or transgender or GLTB in our conversations.