State budget cuts, to a large degree, have reduced the number of group homes and treatment programs that kids in trouble with the law can go to. "There were caseworkers driving around with kids in their cars not able to find a place to put them," says Maine's Chief Justice Leigh Saufley. With nowhere to send the kids, judges end up placing them in one of the state's two youth correctional facilities.
Last fall, the rate of youth being detained at these facilties as they awaited trial reached an all-time high. "When I heard it could get that bad we all got together started working very, very hard to find a quick solution," Saufley says.
Saufley is one of the chairs of the Juvenile Justice Task Force, which was formed in February to keep kids out of the court system.
Summit-goers will discuss the group's top goals. They include raising the state's high school graduation rate from about 80 percent to 90 percent by 2016.
"Children who don't graduate from high school have much higher rates of homelessness, suicide, they're victims of violence, they end up in jails and prisons," Saufley says. "The best predictor for a good life for Maine children is a high school diploma. And we know too many of them are dropping out, they're being expelled, they're getting lost."
To help keep kids in school, the task force is stressing that more state funding be shifted to younger age groups. "Most of the cognitive development of kids happens between the ages of two and five, yet when we look at the dollars we're currently investing in our state, a very minimal amount of our resources are going to that population," says Erika King, a Policy Associate at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.
King says there are low-cost ways the cash-strapped state can help children. The state could change its approach to foster care, for example. "More supervision, also consistent limits, there are swift sort of consequenes for kids that break the rules, but there's also a lot of support and mentoring," King says.
But those goals are longer-term. More immediately, the task force hopes to reduce the rate of young people held in correctional facilities by 20 percent over the next three years.
The state doesn't have the money for community-based programs to hire more staff to serve more youth. So the task force is urging the state to be more flexible about the money it does have.
Right now there is strict critieria about which teens can go where. "We've been told repeatedly that youth need to meet a level of medical necessity - it needs to be medically necessary for them to be placed in a community-based residential progam," says Assistant District Attorney Christine Thibeault.
Thibeault is at work in Cumberland County District Court. Also a member of the task force, Thibeault says one group home she knows of has the capacity to treat 12 girls with substance abuse, but sometimes only has two. "Decisions are made by the Department of Health and Human Services based on their mandates and their regulations and the standards seem to be greater than they were a few years ago," she says.
Also in the courthouse is another task force member, Chris Northrup. As Associate Clinical Professor at UMaine School of Law, he and his students represent juveniles. This day's case involves a 17-year-old girl whom he said could benefit if the task force is successful.
Rather than stay on a waiting list to get into a residential program, the girl decided to go to Long Creek Youth Development Center, so she could get out of the legal system sooner. "We feel that incarceration of youth is damaging," Northrup says. "You have a number of kids in a small place all locked up all learning from each other. It is a really tough environment to improve yourself."
Northrup says the girl is bright and social, but has been using drugs at Long Creek and was in court for an act of vandalism -- further validation that she shouldn't have ended up there.
The task force plans to get feedback at the summit, and then refine its recommendations, and present a preliminary report to the Legislature in February.