Douglas County Department of Youth Services and Juvenile Detention Center at 330 N. Industrial Lane

A top Kansas lawmaker is now acknowledging that a sweeping program to get more kids out of juvenile detention centers and into foster homes is behind schedule.

Rep. Russ Jennings, R-Lakin, said a number of technical and outlier issues has caused the first implementation deadline of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act to be missed. Jennings, who oversees the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, acknowledged further implementation delays are possible as state officials realize some key systems still aren’t in place.

In addition, the Kansas Department for Children and Families is bracing for the act to move forward. That’s because the department is already near record-high numbers, its partners are gasping for money and volunteers, and the JJRA is expected to increase the number of troubled youth who will be transferred into its custody.

Rep. Russ Jennings, R-Lakin

“There is no doubt in my mind that would likely occur,” Jennings said of a spike in DCF numbers. “You take a kid who is not at high risk for reoffending, but is more of a victim of their circumstance at home — it is not a great idea to take a low-risk kid and throw them into the mix with a bunch of thugs and train them to be a better criminal.”

Instead, Jennings said “you should have them with the agency that specializes in family dysfunction.”

Missing systems

The Kansas Department of Corrections and the Office of Judicial Administration are in charge of putting the bill into action while the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee, chaired by Jennings, oversees the process.

Enacted in 2016, the bill was laid out in stages, with deadlines peppered from Jan. 1 to this July and beyond, Jennings said. The entire bill is supposed to be in effect by 2019.

In late December, Randy Bowman, director of community-based services for the KDOC, said the organization asked for an extra month or two to “fully vet through policy issues” before it and the OJA make formal recommendations to state agencies.

More specifically, Bowman said there are two main problem areas.

The first is a type of diversion system called the Immediate Intervention Program, he said.

The program allows certain children, often without a criminal record and who have committed low-level crimes, to avoid formal charges being filed against them, Bowman said.

However, at the moment, there is no centralized database where prosecutors can look up a child’s criminal history, Jennings said. This makes it difficult to know who might qualify for a diversion program and who would not.

“It’s one thing to give kids a chance on relatively minor offenses on one or two occasions,” Jennings said. But prosecutors are at a disadvantage if they can’t accurately look up criminal histories, which also gives way to concerns about “repetitive participation” in the program, he said.

The second problem is developing a Detention Risk Assessment Instrument, Bowman said.

The assessment will use “breakpoints for low-, medium- and high-risk youth,” Jennings said. The scores will determine whether a child will be incarcerated or not.

Though the assessment’s concept is simple, Jennings said it’s more of a science to apply. In fact, the KDOC and OJA reached out to the University of Cincinnati’s juvenile justice professionals for additional help, “trying to be sure they get it right.”

Alongside the two main problem areas, Jennings said the KDOC and OJA are working to ensure they’ve prepared for any “oddball things that come up from time to time.”

Noting that the bill likely had a more aggressive timeline “than what was doable,” Jennings said lawmakers will use the current session to discuss and likely tweak the measure.

In his December memo, Bowman asked for deadlines of Jan. 31 and Feb. 28 to publish standards for the immediate intervention process and to finalize the risk assessment, respectively.

Crowded DCF

Another issue brought to the forefront is that the JJRA will likely take children in custody of the KDOC and place them into the hands of the DCF, which just recently hit record numbers.

Even before the juvenile reform act is fully in place, the KDOC and DCF are moving in opposite directions.

As of Friday, Todd Fertig, KDOC communications director, said there were 1,487 children in the department’s custody. That number has decreased by as much as 40 percent in the past 10 years, Bowman said.

The DCF, however, hit an all-time high of 6,911 children in custody in October, followed by 6,846 in November, according to their most recent data. Those numbers have been trending upward steadily for the past five years.

In March 2016, Kathy Armstrong, DCF’s assistant director for legal services, testified that custody referrals resulting from the JJRA could become “potentially duplicative and cumbersome” to the department.

Despite the current trends, Jennings said he’s confident the JJRA will place children where chances for rehabilitation are highest and will avoid more costs in the long term.

Jennings acknowledged state department concerns regarding funding and staff shortages and said the Legislature will continue to discuss those issues. In addition, he said similar concerns may also be directed to Gov. Sam Brownback, who “was a very big supporter” of the JJRA.

Attempts to contact Brownback’s office for this article were unsuccessful, and DCF representatives declined to discuss the JJRA in detail.

Douglas County details

Though some organizations may be anxious about the JJRA, Pam Weigand, director of Douglas County Youth Services, is not.

Douglas County Department of Youth Services and Juvenile Detention Center at 330 N. Industrial Lane

This is because Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Wyandotte and Douglas counties have participated in the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative since about 2010, Weigand said.

“We’ve already been diverting kids from detention for years,” she said. “We’ve had a risk assessment instrument at our intake for years.”

In the process, the number of Douglas County children in KDOC custody has decreased from 40 to 12 between 2010 and 2016, Weigand said. So, instead of massive, sweeping changes, she expects to see just a few technical changes around the facility.

“I feel like Douglas County is well positioned to comply with the reforms,” she said. “We were already doing a lot of that work; it’s just a matter of how it’s going to be prescribed.”