Crowding youths in Tarrant juvenile detention isn’t ‘tough.’ Here’s how it makes crime worse

The most common myth about the justice system is that tough-on-crime policies are good for society. This is especially false for juvenile offenders, for whom we have a separate juvenile justice system intended to change behavior rather than punish.

Measures such as trying juveniles as adults or sending them to detention facilities overwhelmingly backfire. They tend to commit increasingly severe crimes, and our community becomes less safe.

On April 28, Star-Telegram investigative reporter Nichole Manna reported that Tarrant County’s juvenile detention facility was overcrowded and understaffed. This is harmful to the detained youth and our community, as well as unnecessarily costly to taxpayers.

Overcrowding in prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers can amount to violations of our Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Overcrowded conditions increase violence in younger offenders and even deaths while damaging the health and mental wellness of those detained.

For young offenders, who often grow out of these behaviors, these outcomes should be intolerable. Yet coupling overcrowding with staff shortages makes these harms all the more likely.

Manna also reported that detention admissions were dropping while sentence length was increasing. Keeping youth, especially low-risk youth, in detention longer harms them and costs taxpayers an exorbitant amount of money. Longer sentences are associated with an increased likelihood of recidivism and self-harm.

Beyond these serious concerns, the average cost of juvenile detention in the United States is more than $400 per day. Incarcerating more people generally means detaining increasingly low-risk offenders, and nearly half of the youth in detention in Tarrant County are charged with misdemeanor offenses.

It is fiscally irresponsible to spend hundreds of dollars per day to detain kids for behaviors such as getting in fights, shoplifting or possessing small amounts of marijuana. Tarrant County’s $10 million-dollar juvenile detention budget (funded mostly by the state and county taxpayers) is not being conservatively managed, and children are suffering the cost.

The hoops that low-risk kids have to jump through to be released from these conditions are unreasonable and costly. The juvenile detention facility requires eligible youth to exhibit perfect behavior for 10 days to earn release. I doubt any parent would consider that a reasonable standard for teenagers who are generally known to make poor choices. How then, can this be expected of detained juveniles who primarily come from disadvantaged, chaotic homes?

These tactics are designed to increase punishment and little more. The only reason this is allowed to continue is that the overwhelming majority of these kids cannot afford to hire an attorney to fight the use of these policies against them.

We should be actively skeptical of the argument that the best way to handle overcrowding in our juvenile facility is to expose more kids to these conditions. Rather than creating more juvenile detention beds — a throwback to the “get tough” era and one of the biggest failures in criminal justice policy — we should limit the use of costly detention beds to high-risk offenders and remand low-risk youth to community supervision, which costs less than $100 per day.

This will keep low-level offenders from experiencing harmful custodial conditions while freeing up funds to hire more staff and provide more social and therapeutic services for youth in custody, which was the original intent of having a separate juvenile system.

These services significantly reduce future offending and represent a better return on investment than tough-on-crime policies like those currently in use in Tarrant County.