It’s Time To Do Something About the Youth In Our Juvenile Correctional Systems.

Preface: This article was written using an interview conducted with Aaron Poggi – a current BASIS Peoria dean and former correctional officer. Read the interview here: https://basisbugle.com/mr-poggi-interview-and-the-juvenile-prison-system/mounikamandhari/. The other interview mentioned was conducted by Nicolas Williams in an L.A. Youth Article.

What do you see in this picture? At first glance the baby blue wall paint, a cozy cloudy day reflected on the windows, and bold encouraging words, all paint the picture of a safe and welcoming center for our youth. But what happens beyond those doors? What happens inside the rooms, where the children are put, how bright is the wall painted inside, how welcoming and warm is it behind the scenes?

As Maya describes, the usual routine for these centers:

“Six o’clock in the morning we get up. We keep our clothes outside the room. We have to get up and grab our clothes. We have about 4 or 5 minutes to get ready. Breakfast is at 7 o’clock. That’s usually disgusting. Then we go to school for a couple hours, go to lunch, go to school again, come back, eat dinner, we get one hour of recreation, and take our showers” (Williams).

It’s apparent through Maya’s undescriptive and robotic speech that their daily routine seems tiring and quite useless. But putting physical conditions aside, the most concerning part of this system is the lack of proper education these juveniles receive.

The whole point of correctional systems is to educate and correct youth so that they don’t continue making the same mistakes in the future. It is scientifically proven and commonly known that it’s easier to engrain healthy habits into young individuals who are still in the process of growing into adults, rather than full grown adults themselves. In fact it is this concept that gives us hope for a better future generation. However in order to fulfill this, correctional systems must make an active effort to find and implement proper learning methods on these Juveniles. They must constantly look to improve their education systems, in order to receive better results. However, from Mr.Poggi’s experiences we are able to see that this effort is unfortunately lacking. He says that they receive most of their counseling from one correctional officer. This correctional officer is usually assigned up to 40 kids. This consequently implies that the quality of counseling that each Juvenile receives is relatively lower due to the high number of Juveniles. Not to mention the tiredness that the officer must feel, which would also result in lower quality of counseling. When it comes to the academic school system, it’s even more ineffectual.

“A lot of boys just had packets. This is a packet for you know student A[…] this is another packet for student B, and they have like 20 different packets sometimes.”

As any school student will admit, packets are the worst way to teach anything, as they always over complicate topics, and are unappealing to students. The mere use of packets to teach kids shows the lack of effort put into the education system in these centers. Its impacts are ridiculously ironic, as they contradict the whole purpose of a correctional system in the first place. Because Juveniles receive such poor education in schools, assimilating into normal society makes it even harder for them, leading to lower grades, and a serious danger to the state of their futures. If they aren’t able to acquire proper gardes, then their chance of graduating is much lower, and their future is quickly in danger. Then, in order to escape out of these poor conditions, juveniles feel a necessity to break laws, to steal or act out in order to survive. Now suddenly, they are back to square one, at the correctional center once again. This exact phenomenon explains the high recidivism rates, the highest being “76% within three years and 84% within five years” (Point Park University).

Its effects are extremely detrimental, and prevent any progress for the Juvenile. A test study conducted by Shelly Schaefer, Ph.D., Gina Erickson, Ph.D. proved that

“Three specific dispositions (responsibility, temperance, and perspective) associated with PSM, along with cognitive competence, impact an adolescent’s ability to make mature decisions. As individuals mature along these three dimensions, they are less likely to engage in antisocial or criminal behavior.”

However, under confinement the juveniles aren’t able to experience these three dimensions,and therefore it only leads to them engaging in more criminal activity. They gave academic and skill testing assessments to many teenagers, some from confinement and others from normal school, and the results showed how the system of confinement has failed these Juveniles. The juveniles in confinement placed lower not just in academic assessments, but also in tests concerning maturity and decision making. Not gaining these valuable skills, will only make their adult life so much harder to deal with. In order to prevent such detrimental effects to their lives, change needs to be made quickly, especially in the education system of these correctional systems.

Although it’s easy to demand for change, it’s important to realize that the process is extremely slow, and there are many complications that make it difficult to implement. For example, one of the first reforms that comes to mind is to acquire actual teachers. It’s almost impossible for any single officer to teach 40 kids, so specialized teachers must be present in order to make sure that the students are properly educated when they are released. However, acquiring teachers at such a desolate place is difficult. As Mr. Poggi explains,

“They don’t typically wanna work there. It is like all the worst kids in a class put together, that have broken laws.”

From the teachers’ perspective, they would be like “why would I want to do that?” It makes complete sense, especially considering the economic costs. Teachers already get paid a low amount of 17K per year, and correctional officers get paid even less at the minimum of 15 K according to ziprecruiter.com. If they did want to fix this problem and pay these teachers enough so that they are incentivized to teach here, there is the problem of funding. Receiving any type of money or extra funds from the government has become difficult due to the length of the legal processes that are required in order to achieve any type of reform. On top of that there isn’t a universal system of education between each state, making it even harder to analyze the system and make improvements.

However there are some improvements being made. For example, The Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative® (JDAI) has been working on a new educational system. According to the JDAI website, they bring in new equipment and systems, where they improve their system through “a data-driven, problem-solving approach and a series of tools that are rooted in core strategies” that seek to address racial inequality, and try to make a community for Juveniles. However they have been working on this project for 25 years, and although some systems have started to adopt their ideas and educational styles, this program hasn’t been adopted nationally.

It’s not enough. Implementing has become difficult because of a lack of universal code/rules for these centers, as well as a lack of interest shown by local governments. This is why it is more imperative than ever that we must keep pushing for legislation. It is imperative we do this, because our youth are suffering. It is important because young girls and boys like Maya and Elisabeth (interviewees from Nicolas Williams’ interview) have their life ruined because of it. When asked how it felt to have her freedom taken away, Elisabeth responded with:

“It hurts more than any kind of punch, slap, anything that was ever done to me.[…]. It’s not the fact I’m in jail that I’m scared. For a while I didn’t know when I was gonna get out. It felt like the whole world was going on without me, and I was stuck. I have a little sister born after I started running away and I don’t even know her.[…]. I can see what they’re doing to us. How kids are sent to jail when they just need a slap on the head or something.” (Williams)

We can’t let the juvenile system fall in the same circular trap that the adult system is stuck in right now. We must try to help these children before their adult lives turn for the worse as well.