NCJ Number
181369
Date Published
1998
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This analysis of the San Francisco juvenile justice system focuses on the legacy of California's juvenile justice policies and offers a plan for implementing a modern comprehensive system that promotes quality and accountability.
Abstract
The juvenile justice system of San Francisco has received criticism for the past 137 years. However, the system has successfully resisted reform and continues to rely on a 135-bed juvenile detention center that detains most youths for short time periods and then cycles them back into the community without meaningful or productive intervention. This approach does little to change the life situations and destructive patterns of troubled youths and promotes institutional neglect, mediocrity, and brutality. Pressure for a new approach accelerated in the 1960's and 1970's. The system faces crucial decisions regarding its future. Reinventing the system requires abandonment of the stifling, centralized, institutional approach of the past century and the establishment of a new organizational structure and direction to maximize accountability, flexibility, innovation, service integration, and individualization. A contract-based system that provides a continuum of services can achieve these qualities. The juvenile justice system also needs to improve its willingness and capacity to deal with the small number of serious and high-risk offenders through the use of wraparound services based on identified individual needs. The initial reforms of the system will require seed money due to the difficulty of shifting currently committed revenues toward new programs. These major structural changes are long overdue. Case examples