Dear Friends,
Earlier this month, I attended the inaugural meeting of National Conference of State Legislature's (NCSL) Youth Justice Fellows program. This year-long course is a peer-learning opportunity that allows a small bi-partisan group of legislators leading on this issue the chance to work together in a bipartisan fashion to solve some of the most difficult problems impacting youth justice policy. We are looking at issue like the “age of juvenile court jurisdiction, adolescent brain development, alternatives to detention and incarceration, racial and ethnic disparities, youth defense and other due process protections, diversion and reducing system involvement, funding and justice reinvestment, mental health, reentry, conditions of confinement, sentencing, and juvenile life without parole.” As a group, we are working with researchers in the field to create best practice models not only for our states but to serve as model legislation for other states to use. Through a grant with the Anne E. Casey foundation, we will also receive NCSL staff support and technical assistance during the program.
Pennsylvania has a dark history in the juvenile justice space. In juvenile justice circles, we are known for the “Kids for Cash” scandal, during which two Luzerne County Judges orchestrated a scheme to send children, some as young as 8, to two for-profit detention facilities (PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care) in exchange for millions in kickbacks between 2003 and 2008. They accomplished this, in part, by shutting down a county-run juvenile detention center to funnel as many children into the for-profit centers as possible. According to the Juvenile Law Center, in over 6,000 involved cases, over 2,500 children were unfairly adjudicated, with over 50% lacking legal representation and about 60% being removed from their homes. The judges were noted for their zero-tolerance policy for many first-time offenders (e.g. petty theft, jaywalking) for offenses that usually wouldn’t warrant delinquency. Their conduct was so egregious that in 2009, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed the cases of all youths who appeared before former Judge Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008 and ordered all of their records expunged. In 2011, the judges were found guilty of various related federal crimes. According to NPR, the “U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges,” which was considered a significant victory for the victims. In December 2024, much to my and many others’ consternation and rage, former President Biden granted clemency to the convicted judges. This decision has further eroded trust and healing for the victims of the Judges’ cruelty.
While I wish I could share that Pennsylvania has reformed significantly since the “Kids for Cash” scandal, I’m sorry to say that it has not. In 2022, a Grand Jury report was released regarding the conditions at the Delaware County Juvenile Detention Center (DCJDC). Children aged 10-18 were housed at the center, many before they were formally adjudicated, and treated badly. The report outlined a culture of violence, sexually inappropriate conduct by staff, and cover-ups. The report found that it was the “failure of many” which led to the conditions at DCJDC, “from the state’s failure to enact and enforce standards that would clearly prohibit the conditions that existed at DCJDC; to the officials who were under-engaged and thus unaware of the conditions that persisted there; to the management at DCJDC who permitted a lack of accountability and professionalism among staff; and to those staff members who created, perpetuated and tolerated that culture.”
A few months before the Grand Jury Report, the legislature released a report from their bipartisan, bicameral, inter-branch “Juvenile Justice Task Force” which conducted a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system and sought to make researched backed recommendations. The Task Force held 28 roundtables with nearly 450 participants over a two-year period, releasing their report in June of 2021. An executive summary may be found here. Highlights of the report indicate the need to strengthen due process and procedural safeguards, use evidence-based practices, raise the minimum age for when a youth can be tried in juvenile court and narrow the criteria for trying juveniles as adults in criminal court, the need to deploy diversionary practices to keep children in their communities and only using residential placement on juveniles who are a risk to public safety, and reinvesting cost-savings into evidence-based best practices to reduce recidivism risk. There were a total of 35 recommendations, only two of which have passed the House.
Both reports highlighted areas of improvement and legislative recommendations, yet we’ve seen little traction on those recommendations. I’ve been working on trying to implement two of the recommendations of the Grand Jury report since 2022 and have only gotten as far as moving them out of committee. Last year, we moved omnibus legislation proposed by the Task Force through the Judiciary Committee but it never received a floor vote. You can read a comprehensive discussion of that bill here. This year we are breaking up that package into individual bills hoping that at least some of the reforms can be made law.
Pennsylvania is not the only state failing in this arena. One of the things we hear over and over again is that we have created a system that is only punitive in nature and not one that is rehabilitative, which damages children and provides poor outcomes. The children in our system often feel set up for failure and like they are without hope. Children’s progression to success is not linear and cannot be stringent, sometimes seemingly unattainable metrics of success often required by the justice system simply don’t work for youth brains. Yet, for so many of them, rehabilitation is possible, it’s less costly in the long run and both individual children and our society benefit from giving justice involved youth the tools they need to succeed. A gap exists between how children can benefit from rehabilitation and our actual application of juvenile justice.
Science backs the concept that not only are children more able to be rehabilitated but also that their involvement in a justice system created for adults leads to greater rates of false confessions and poorer outcomes. While the adult recidivism rate is around 55%, the recidivism rate for youth offenders in the juvenile detention is around 11% for low level offenders and as high 31% for the highest-level offenders. For child offenders placed directly into an adult system, their recidivism rate is 75%. Even placing kids in a poorly functioning system is better than placing them in the adult system. Yet, there is so much more we could be doing to make this system better.
Research has demonstrated that the prefrontal cortex of a child’s brain is not fully formed, leaving juveniles more susceptible to peer pressure and more prone to impulsivity. In Roper v. Simmons (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court found that severe punishments, such as the death penalty, are unconstitutional for juveniles as they constitute cruel and unusual punishment due to juveniles’ ongoing brain development. Cognitive immaturity leads to high rates of false confessions among juveniles. In a study of 340 exonerations, it was determined that 42% of juveniles had falsely confessed in comparison to 13% of adults. The fact that there are no prohibitions on police to prevent them from lying to suspects to elicit a confession is one possible cause of this. I have introduced a bill to prevent officers from lying to persons with disabilities or autism and one of my colleagues has a similar bill to prevent lying to children to elicit confessions. Previously, I've met with a former “juvenile lifer” who falsely confessed only after he was told that if he just agreed he could have something to eat and go home to his family.
Public safety benefits from having a well-functioning juvenile justice system; ours is not. Children incarcerated in an adult correctional facility are 36 more times likely to die by suicide in comparison to those incarcerated in a juvenile correctional facility. Moreover, juveniles placed in adult correctional facilities are not only in danger of abuse by adult incarcerated individuals, but they are often placed in solitary confinement for their own protection, living weeks to months on end without any social contact. Often, justice involved youth are sent directly to adult jails, “direct file,” where they are placed in solitary confinement for months before later being re-adjudicated as youth offenders and moved to juvenile facilities.
My colleague Rep. Krajewski recently described a trip he took to the Juvenile Justice Service Center in his district in Philadelphia commenting, he “saw 10-year-olds...in shackles and gray sweatsuits being taken to facilities, being taken to holding cells...[that] didn’t even have beds. They were on the floor.”
Within the context of juvenile justice there are a myriad of options which still promote public safety that can be used instead of incarcerating children. While in some ways it’s easier to describe how juvenile detention centers are failing our kids, it’s often harder to envision the ways that we can work to keep kids accountable and while helping them rehabilitate outside of a detention center that would have greater benefit to children, their communities and in terms of cost saving. Creating this programming is where I believe we can best use NCSL's support.
We can and we must do better by the children of the commonwealth. My colleague from Pennsylvania Rep. Kinkead who joins me in the Fellowship and I are deep in research mode on how we can improve the system and what best practices in the country and others look like. At the same times, we are also looking at how to move the CARES package as well as my Grand Jury report bills. We remain hopeful that the work we are doing with NCSL will help us better convince our colleagues why is it so important to improve in this arena. We hope we can hold a public hearing on the issue for the Judiciary Committee in the early fall. I'll keep you updated as we make progress in this arena.