Chicago's alternative to locking up youth

Instead, Cook County accepted a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to create alternatives. It developed a complex screening process, which looks at factors like the violence of the crime committed and prior arrests to determine if a kid really needs to be locked up. Many kids in detention were there simply because they'd missed their court dates, so the court started sending reminders - which improved court attendance by 50 percent.

And the county developed a range of alternatives to detention, including home-confinement, in which a child is allowed to leave home only for school; a monitoring system by electronic bracelet; and the reporting-center program.

"This was about taking the kids off the street during the high-crime time [of 4 to 9 p.m.] and actually giving them something," says Ms. Reichs. The centers, run by community agencies under contract with the court system, provide transportation, a meal, and programming - from current-events discussions and bowling to pet therapy and victim-impact panels.

Not everyone, of course, sees such alternatives as a good thing. In an age when the prevailing mood seems to be toward zero tolerance, alternatives to detention strike some as a softball experiment that doesn't teach young offenders a sufficient lesson. Worse, they worry it puts the community at risk by allowing criminals to remain on the street until their trial.

"The devil is in the details," says Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, a victims' advocacy association in Houston. "Public safety is No. 1 for all decisionmaking in criminal justice. If there's the slightest inclination by the prosecutor or judge that the youth is a risk to public safety, they must go in a detention center."

Those communities emphasizing alternatives over lockup - in addition to Chicago, Ms. Gannon cites Portland, Ore., Santa Cruz, Calif., and areas in North Dakota, Idaho, and New Mexico - say they take precautions to make sure any kid who poses a real threat is still locked up.

And they point to the results. Community safety was a prime worry for many of the reform detractors in Cook County, says Reichs, but even though the detention center now averages just above 400 kids, crime hasn't gone up, and arrests for violent crimes dropped 54 percent from 1993 to 1999.

The long-term impact of the center on boys like D. (the county runs one reporting center for girls) remains a question mark. No one in Cook County has yet studied what becomes of them down the road, or even how their repeat arrest rate later compares with those offenders who were locked up. And 21 days - the length of time most teens spend at such centers - seems a short span to make any real changes.

But the reforms have succeeded in making juvenile advocates and those in the court system feel they're working with each other, not against each other. "It used to be adversarial to be in treatment and working with probation," says Margo Bristow, the program manger at Youth Outreach Services. "But now, they're looking at - let's help these kids grow, and be what they can be. That's the biggest change I've seen with juvenile justice in this state."

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