Problems have dogged Maine’s juvenile justice system for years, but solving them has never seemed impossible to Jill Ward.
Ward directs the Center for Youth Policy and Law at the University of Maine Law School and serves as senior policy advisor to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the U.S. Department of Justice. In various roles, she has helped shape national conversations around juvenile justice reform by encouraging states to adopt practices that are more effective at addressing delinquency than traditional correctional facilities.
Her interest in juvenile justice grew after visiting a youth detention center in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s where conditions seemed inhumane and unlikely to change the behavior that got kids in trouble. She has since visited several states, including Missouri and New York, to study how they developed secure facilities that look different from large, prison-like settings. In Maine, she has focused on ways to keep youth in their communities without jeopardizing public safety.
In 2019, Ward co-chaired a state task force charged with improving Maine’s juvenile justice system. The group commissioned an extensive assessment of the system that identified many problems that still exist today and also recommended solutions.
The Bangor Daily News sat down with Ward in a recent interview to discuss how Maine could make progress toward solutions. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Callie Ferguson, BDN: What was going on in 2019 that felt like a pivotal moment for improving Maine’s juvenile justice system?
Jill Ward: We had the tragedy of a young trans boy committing suicide in [Long Creek], and we had research coming out of the National Institute of Justice that was really questioning the use of the adult corrections model [for minors]. One of the things [an audit of Long Creek] found was that there were kids who were incarcerated who had complex and varied mental health issues, and a carceral setting is not the best place to treat those characteristics.
I think it’s important that everyone understands that the point of the juvenile justice system is rehabilitation. It has this notion that young people are amenable to change, and we should give them that opportunity to do so, and not lean into the more punitive structure of the adult criminal justice system that is more about punishment.
We [also] had a dwindling population [at Long Creek] and an investment [from state corrections officials] to further reduce the population and to build out responses that did not involve detention and incarceration. We kind of had this moment in time where everybody was paying attention and was interested in those solutions, and we were spending millions of dollars on an institution that was incarcerating a handful of young people. Could we spend that money better?
BDN: Five years later, Maine suffers from a shortage of programs to serve as alternatives to Long Creek and that keep youth out of the juvenile system entirely, and it’s unclear how state leaders intend to fix it. Where can Maine start?
Ward: I think there needs to be a really clear recognition that we’re not just talking about the juvenile justice system. We’re talking about the child protection system, the children’s behavioral health system, the education system. There needs to be a real intentional focus on how those systems interact.
COVID really interrupted the work because the assessment was published a month before the world shut down. But we needed to continue that cross-sectional work with some kind of oversight body advisory council that really could take the recommendations [from the task force assessment] and establish a comprehensive plan to move towards meeting them.
The state has met some. But there hasn’t been the intentional setting of a vision and executing that vision.
BDN: Did the task force come up with a specific vision in mind?
Ward: The task force did not because we stopped meeting once the report was issued. But the last recommendation of the report is to remove all young people from Long Creek. [This type of setting] has the highest recidivism rates; it has the highest incidence of trauma; it’s really challenging to transition a young person from that facility back into their community.
So the opportunity was, and remains, to look at how we take the investment in that approach and reallocate it into communities to build stronger, more comprehensive responses to kids.
I’m not saying we’re never going to need any kind of secure capacity. I’m saying we have not even done our due diligence with what those community based alternatives could look like.
[Say you’re a cop], and here’s a young person who just broke into the local convenience store. I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t take them home because their parents don’t want them, or nobody’s home. I can’t hold them in jail for a long amount of time because that’s not appropriate.
Well, what if there was a drop-off center? Or what if they had a mentor that was on call 24/7?
What I am suggesting is that there are approaches [to juvenile crime] that have better outcomes that we could be more intentional about weaving together in a plan for how we respond to kids’ needs. Because once their need is met, you get the public safety that you want. That’s where we needed to focus our energy coming out of the task force.
BDN: This question comes up all the time when I talk to police and parents: “What do we do with a kid who is out of control? If not Long Creek, what are examples of secure confinement that are more effective at improving public safety, and under what circumstances should they be used?
Ward: When something is secure, it means the young person can’t run away. It means it is staffed appropriately to meet the needs of whatever is causing the crisis of the young person. It is not on the scale of what Long Creek is and with the sort of correctional features that Long Creek has, as far as individual cells where kids are often isolated.
I think the answer to that question is: It can look however Maine designs it, but the design of it should be informed by what is appropriate from an adolescent-development standpoint, and a clinical standpoint, to stabilize that young person and start to meet their needs. A lot of these young people are ending up in emergency rooms because there’s this feeling they really shouldn’t be in a place like Long Creek.
You saw a commitment from the Legislature’s standpoint and from the Department of Corrections to develop these smaller, more therapeutic facilities, but it needs to be a more inclusive and intensive process than just looking at sites where this could be done.
BDN: The state has struggled to open smaller secure alternatives to Long Creek. Corrections officials have had trouble staffing programs they have tried to bring online. Is there anything Maine can do to make this process more successful?
Ward: I’m going to come back to having an intention that that’s actually what you want to do — that you want to transition away from a youth prison model.
Then you need to engage people impacted by this policy change, and that is more than the Department of Corrections. That’s the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s the Department of Education. That’s community providers and nonprofits; that’s law enforcement; that’s the judicial branch.
That is the model that New Hampshire used to come to some of their reforms [around diverting youth into community services and replacing their youth prison with a smaller facility]. They had a stakeholder group that was really in the weeds, talking about, “What do we want it to look like? How do we get there? What are the compromises that need to be made? And then what’s it going to cost?” I think that’s the kind of process that would really inform what we do in Maine.
BDN: Rockland has been in the news a lot for a surge in juvenile crime. And yet, last summer, you tapped a law student to do a case study about how the region was coming together to find ways to prevent the problem, primarily by providing youth with greater levels of supervision and support.
Ward: The state should take its lead from those communities that are really trying to identify that for themselves, and come in with actual support that fills the gaps that they’ve identified.
BDN: Is that what the Place Matters project at the University of Southern Maine has been trying to do?
Ward: It has several components, but the couple that are most relevant to this conversation is the notion of asset mapping: to identify what assets are in the community and then marrying that with where the gaps are. That information drives both your actions and where your dollars go.
For instance, if you realize that your biggest problem is petty crime, what strategies work with that? Who are the individuals that young people listen to and respond to? What are the proven strategies, and do we have enough of those in Rockland, for example, or, you know, in a Windham? Or a Presque Isle? If the answer is no, then you work with the community to figure out how you bring those there, maybe with state resources, or maybe there’s some kind of braiding of state and local resources.
BDN: The shortage of services in communities has gone on so long that it can feel very daunting to fix. Do you see signs of hope?
Ward: There are signs of hope. The state has taken some action to improve the system. There was legislation passed that reduced the mandatory minimums for young people committed to Long Creek and that established some limits around kids who can be detained and incarcerated. There have been some investments in restorative justice programs. There have been other investments that young people benefit from around behavioral health.
BDN: Is there anything you believe the public misunderstands about juvenile justice that you’d like to talk about?
Ward: I think there’s still a heavy feeling that the answer to youth crime is to remove them from the community. There’s an othering that happens when kids cause harm. What the research shows us is that 75 percent of the kids who are involved in the system have a mental health issue; nearly two thirds of them were abused or neglected, or had some kind of contact with the child protection system. Mostly they are kids who live in poverty. None of that should surprise people, but I think it still does. Some of what creates [delinquent behavior] is their environment. If we don’t address those things, we’re not going to get the outcomes that we want.
There’s just a feeling that the threat of punishment is going to solve the problem, and it doesn’t. Research is very clear on this. Kids’ brains don’t work that way. That’s not how they think, to the extent that they even think about what they’re doing when they’re doing it. We interrupt [normal brain development] when we pull them out of their community and lock them up.
If we’re not dealing with the realities of what’s happening in these young people’s lives, we’re not going to get the outcomes we want, even with the kids that are harder to talk about because they have caused harm.
