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State funding rises as juvenile crime declines
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County Juvenile Court has seen its annual allocation of state RECLAIM funding triple since 2009 as its felony adjudications and commitments to state juvenile correctional facilities have declined, the court reports.
RECLAIM Ohio funding to the court went from about $750,000 in 2009 to a record $2.3 million this year, said Magistrate Anthony D’Apolito, juvenile court administrator.
The court’s felony adjudications – the juvenile equivalent of felony convictions for adults – went from 169 in 2009 to 92 last year.
The court’s commitments to Ohio Department of Youth Services correctional facilities – the juvenile equivalent of state prison for adults – went from 29 in 2009 to seven each in 2014 and 2015.
“Our funding has been going up for RECLAIM; and juvenile crime in the area has been going down,” as shown by declining felony adjudications and DYS commitments, D’Apolito said.
RECLAIM stands for Reasoned and Equitable Community and Local Alternatives to the Incarceration of Minors.
The state funding formula rewards counties with increased funding under the RECLAIM program as they reduce their felony adjudications and DYS commitments.
The court’s strategy for juvenile-crime reduction is earlier intervention with unruly youths before they progress to a felony adjudication or DYS commitment, D’Apolito explained.
“We understand the problem, and now we have the programs paid through RECLAIM to help them – seven boys programs, four girls programs, mediation, counseling and diversion,” he added.
“RECLAIM gives the court the flexibility to personally address the needs and strengths of each and every family and student that appears before the court,” said Judge Theresa Dellick of juvenile court.
“Now, with RECLAIM, we’re able to be more individualized, using best evidence and best practices,” the judge said.
“If you went to a doctor, you wouldn’t want the doctor to treat your stomach ache the same way as he would be treating someone who had stomach cancer,” the judge said by way of analogy.
When the court received $70,000 in RECLAIM money in 2001 in her first year on the bench, Judge Dellick used it to establish a drug, alcohol and mental-health treatment court, her first specialized docket.
“From there, we just kept increasing and providing more and more structured programs to address the individual needs of each student and family,” she said.
“Now, we’re working directly with the schools in trying to keep the students from even going from schools into the juvenile court system,” she added.
RECLAIM returns tax dollars to the local community to help provide a safer community, the judge noted.
“We are providing programming to them [troubled youths] that decreases the likelihood of criminality. The less criminality, the less stress on the adult [criminal justice] system” as juveniles enter adulthood, the judge explained.
“The families and the juveniles benefit by the increase in funding to the county to provide programming for the youth to keep them out of DYS and out of prisons,” said Jennifer Pangio, the court’s accounting director.
“It’s better to try to prevent [delinquency]. We can try to prevent them from committing crimes. We do counseling. We run many different programs to try to show them what they’re doing wrong and keep them from committing more crimes,” Pangio said of troubled youths served by the court.
“The dollars are awarded to the counties to implement programming to keep the kids off the streets and teach them there’s victim impact” when they commit crimes, she added.
RECLAIM benefits young people because “it keeps them in the county. There’s money in there, too, to treat the families and try to find the root cause” of the child’s misbehavior, Pangio said.
“There’s a lot of innovative ideas that we have here that we bring to fruition through the grants,” said Linda McNally, the court’s grants coordinator.
“We are applying for as many [grants] as possible to help with our budget,” McNally said.
The court’s success in applying for grants has enabled it to contain its demand on the county’s general fund until recently, when employee health care and retirement contribution costs escalated, D’Apolito said.
The court’s use of general-fund money ranged between $5.3 million and $5.7 million a year between 2010 and 2014, until that figure rose last year to $6.2 million, with this year’s general-fund budget for the court being $6.4 million, Pangio said.
Total grant funding to the court jumped from $1.4 million in 2013 to $2.3 million in 2014, with McNally having joined the court in February 2014.
One innovative RECLAIM-funded grant program, McNally said, is a $250,000-a-year, five-year, four-county regional effort in partnership with Homes for Kids in Niles, in which counselors visit the homes of troubled youths to work with them in their family environment.
“This actually allows the services to go to them, rather than them having to come here or to go to some facility” for counseling, D’Apolito said.
This program, which is one of the few regional projects DYS is funding statewide, consists of Mahoning County as the lead county and includes Trumbull, Geauga and Ashtabula counties.
The use of DYS correctional facilities should be reserved for the most-dangerous offenders, D’Apolito said.
As the state has financially rewarded counties for reducing DYS commitments, the number of youths housed in DYS correctional facilities has declined from its peak of just slightly more than 3,000 in 1992 to about 475 today.
DYS correctional facilities are Indian River in Massillon, Cuyahoga Hills in Highland Hills and the Circleville JCF.
D’Apolito is the Democratic candidate challenging Republican Judge Shirley J. Christian of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court in the Nov. 8 election.