County Council to decide on new juvenile detention center

About 40 Monroe County juvenile offenders are currently located in other Indiana counties for their treatment and detention needs at a taxpayer cost of about $350 a day per child. \nMonroe County Circuit Judge David Welch told the Monroe County Council on Jan. 17 that a government decision needs to be made sooner than later on whether the community needs to build a local facility to treat and detain at-risk youth.\nDespite an 80-acre purchase along South Rogers Street and a $2 million reserve in start-up funds, council members are shuffling their feet ever closer to voting on the proposal for a juvenile facility. The Monroe County Council has reflected upon this issue for more than a decade.\n"The main reason for the delay in deciding on this issue is that there are many different ways to approach various treatment and detention options: what is the best and what can we afford," said newly elected Monroe County Council Vice President Mark Stoops. "If you talk to five experts, you get three or four different ideas of what to do."\nNewly elected Monroe County Council President Sophia Travis said a council fiscal vote for or against such a facility is not as black and white as saving taxpayers' money.\n"Several of us on the council strongly advocate for prevention being worth a pound of cure, but having that philosophy also means that we don't disrupt, duplicate or impede upon the shelter and prevention programs we already have for our youth," she said. "On behalf of the county council, I can say every one of us and the county commissioners really care about youth issues."\nTravis said a public discussion of the issue is tentatively scheduled for Feb. 2, although no date is finalized. She said she plans on touring a treatment and detention facility in Bartholomew County, after touring a similar facility in Kokomo last spring, in addition to a private facility.\nFor some community members serving current at-risk Bloomington youth and local juvenile offenders, the social benefits of housing them within Monroe County outweigh any future taxpayer costs.\nBloomington resident Robin Donaldson, assistant director of the Youth Services Bureau of Monroe County, said her experience working with at-risk youth has demonstrated prevention is much cheaper than intervention in the long-term. \n"The bottom line is these kids are coming back into our community because they can't stay away for ever. We need to make sure the money we are spending on treatment and detention is effective, instead of having a kid who comes back without making any progress at all," she said. "The difficulty is that juvenile offenders come back to a home environment that has not changed. The home environment can undermine the child's rehabilitation unless the family is also treated. Most families are willing to work with you, but they might not have the time or money to drive out-of-county to meet with their kids or a counselor."\nDonaldson said effective at-risk youth treatment often involves treating the family as a unit. Secondly, she said, keeping the children in Bloomington would enable them close access to their community support network: family members, a counselor who knows the child, a teacher or coach who is a strong role model, community services like the Boys & Girls Club or Big Brothers Big Sisters and other community mentors.\nAbout 80 percent of the shelter children from Monroe County come from single-parent or step-families, 60 percent of families have an income below $30,000 and 30 percent have reported that a parent is either a drug abuser or incarcerated, Donaldson said.\nPete Giordano, director of the Community and Family Resources Department for the City of Bloomington, said the building and upkeep of a local juvenile treatment and detention facility is "the right thing to do." He said some at-risk youth might still need treatment elsewhere, but the vast majority could benefit from staying close to home.\n"Making a difference in a child's life happens at earlier stages than much further down the line. Everything being equal -- to keep juvenile offenders here or not -- I think we should keep them here," Giordano said. "It's a matter of balancing the financial cost versus the social cost and coming to the most effective solution."\nStoops said the county government is determined to solve the problem, regardless of whether a local treatment and detention facility is the only answer or one piece of a more comprehensive community outreach program.\n"We are not going to continue to just send kids out of the county. If they are not treated effectively and their families are not treated as a whole, the kids will grow up and enter the justice system as adults," he said. "If we don't invest money to treat juvenile offenders when they are young, the taxpayer cost of future treatment and incarceration is going to increase. More than 70 percent of the jail population has been there before, and with the jail overcrowding situation as is, we need to take a closer look at this issue, reduce criminal recidivism and send juvenile offenders off in a direction that is more positive"