Santa Barbara County has been working for years to better aid at-risk youth and their families through its juvenile detention system. Now the Probation Department is getting help in that work—it recently announced that its staff were chosen to attend a national training dedicated to reimagining juvenile justice.
On April 17, the Santa Barbara County Probation Department announced that it’s among 16 organizations from across the nation chosen to participate in this year’s Reimagining Juvenile Justice program, a staff development initiative dedicated to improving America’s juvenile correction system.
Historically, the U.S. juvenile justice system has been carried out in a punitive framework, according to Holly Benton, Santa Barbara County’s deputy chief probation officer. That has led to the incarceration of troubled youth who may be struggling with mental health issues or family problems, she said, and often pushes young people deeper into the system and worsens their issues.
Santa Barbara County is no different, and Benton said the Probation Department recently launched an evaluation and overhaul of its practices in an effort to detain fewer kids and connect them with the services they really need.
The Reimagining Juvenile Justice program will give staff the tools and skills necessary to achieve that goal, Benton said.
“It fits in well with the approach we’ve been taking over the last one and a half to two years,” Benton told the Sun.
In August 2017, the Probation Department launched an internal investigation into its juvenile justice system. The project included months of auditing juvenile cases, comparing county data, and researching possible policy and practice reforms, and the department found that Santa Barbara County kids were being detained and put under county supervision at disparately high rates.
While opportunities exist within the juvenile justice system for lower-level, less intensive behavioral correction options—the most restrictive being declared a ward of the courts—the department’s research indicated that Santa Barbara County often failed to adequately utilize those less intensive options.
The department found that low-risk kids with misdemeanor offenses and behavioral problems rooted in untreated mental health issues, unaddressed abuse, and trauma—who posed little or no threat to public safety—were often listed as wards. Once declared a ward of the court, the possibility of entering a detention facility is greatly increased, an experience that Benton said can cause children “serious harm.”
Department officials wanted to reverse this potentially harmful trend, and by November of 2017, it had several policy change strategies outlined.
The Reimagining Juvenile Justice program is the latest in that effort, and Benton said she and one other staffer will attend a three-day, intensive training on the program’s evidence-based curriculum. They’ll then train other county employees for six months.
The training, Benton said, will allow the county to develop the ability to support, divert, and redirect youth to appropriate and fair justice options, including options that require a high degree of cross-department collaboration and coordination.
She said implementing those options will help move the local juvenile justice system to a more effective approach that addresses the multifaceted needs of youth and families, rewards kids for good behavior, helps them mature and improve family relations, and minimizes or avoids system involvement entirely.
“I’m very excited,” Benton said. “It has so much potential to make a positive impact.”
This article appears in May 2-9, 2019.
