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Bloomberg Seeks Control of Juvenile Justice System

By DNAinfo Staff on December 21, 2010 5:37pm  | Updated on December 22, 2010 6:14am

By Jill Colvin

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

CITY HALL — First it was schools. Now Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants control of the state's troubled juvenile justice system.

Citing "decades of dysfunction and waste" by the state, the mayor called on Albany lawmakers Tuesday to cede control of juvenile justice services to local authorities, arguing that they can do a better job for less.

"The current system is not helping our kids. It isn’t helping taxpayers and isn't helping public safety," Bloomberg said. "We need to make 2011 the year that we finally end juvenile detention as we know it."

The state's youth prisons, which held 569 young people from the city last year, have long been the subject of scorn from both local and federal authorities.

A whopping 81 percent of young men in the system are rearrested within three years of their release — a number the mayor called "unacceptable" and "phenomenally costly."

The mayor also argued that the average community-based juvenile program in the city, which provides home-based counseling and other social services, costs only about $17,000 per child per year — significantly cheaper than the nearly $300,000 the state spends to house a child for a year in a limited-security facility.

The city filed a lawsuit last month accusing the state of over-charging for the facilities, many of which stand half-empty.

In addition to saving cash, the mayor said the plan will help young people by keeping them close to their families, communities and schools.

"These upstate facilities are relics of an era when experts believed that sending poor, urban kids to remote, rural regions would be the best thing for them," he said, noting that none of the upstate juvenile facilities have accredited education programs.

Rev. Al Sharpton said the move would also help cash-strapped families with kids in the system.

"It is very challenging for many people in our community to afford to go on five or six-hour one-way rides, sometimes necessitating overnight hotel stays, just to visit some of their youngsters," he said.

Earlier Tuesday, both Sharpton and the mayor toured the Finger Lakes Residential Juvenile Justice Center near Ithaca, New York, which Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs described as a cinder-block facility covered with barbed-wired in the middle of a snow-covered field.

Brooklyn resident Andrew Shanks, 22, who was arrested for robbery, said he was grateful he wasn't forced to serve his time at a facility like Finger Lakes upstate. Instead, he enrolled in a program run by the East Village's Esperanza, which provides home-based counseling and other services.

"If I was upstate, I never would have finished school," said Shanks, who is now planning to go to college or join the Air Force. 

"If you’re a juvenile, you deserve a second chance because you’re still a child," he said.

In the past, the city’s efforts to close state facilities have been met with resistance from lawmakers trying to protect jobs upstate.

But John Feinblatt, the mayor’s chief advisor for policy and strategic planning, said that the city needs a better approach, arguing that the current system "does more to perpetuate crime than prevent crime."

The U.S. Department of Justice is currently monitoring a handful of state facilities following allegations that they violated inmates' constitutional rights by using excessive force and inappropriate restraints, the mayor noted.

Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo's spokesman Josh Vlasto declined to comment on Bloomberg’s plan, but Cuomo has called for major reforms to the juvenile justice system himself.

In the "New NY Agenda" Cuomo released during the campaign, he said he favored a plan that would reduce incarceration, improve conditions in state facilities, close facilities that aren’t being used and reign in spending.

A spokesman for Gov. David Paterson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.