By RACHEL MIPRO
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Kansas officials have high hopes for a proposed program that would patch up flaws within the state’s juvenile justice system, creating more resources and oversight for at-risk youths.
House Bill 2021 would require the Department of Corrections and the Department for Children and Families to coordinate risk and needs assessments for at-risk children. The House on Thursday passed the bill 85-35, mostly along party lines.
“For right now, this is a far better solution than where they are,” said Rep. Stephen Owens, a Hesston Republican, during debate Wednesday in the House. “The funds will continue to flow. The savings will continue to exist.”
HB 2021 would implement procedures for allowing children to participate in community programs, with the DOC, DCF and judicial branch providing services and oversight.
By July 1, 2025, the DOC would create a system to provide data such as health care requirements, mental health needs, and substance abuse treatment, among other to help provide the right care for youths in the system.
While the bill creates more oversight, several lawmakers objected to a section of the bill that would implement greater detention times. The maximum cumulative detention limit would be increased from 45 days to 90 days.
Rep. Boog Highberger, a Lawrence Democrat, and Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, spoke against this provision, saying putting youths in detention for longer periods of time wasn’t a good idea.
“The longer the period of time you place a child in custody, sadly, the more bad behaviors the child learns because they’re placed in an environment with people who are already accomplished young criminals,” Carmichael said.
Many groups have urged the Legislature to take action on juvenile justice system issues for years, following the passage of Senate Bill 367, which was implemented in 2016. The bill shifted practices away from holding youths in group homes or state custody, and made it less common for youths to be detained or sent to correctional facilities. Instead, young offenders were meant to be given community programs and treatment.
“Many positives have come from SB367, but it also created issues in which more youth with criminogenic behaviors entered the foster care system,” said the Children’s Alliance of Kansas, a proponent of HB2021, in a newsletter Friday. “In the past years, we’ve seen those behaviors endanger other foster children, foster parents, and child welfare professionals.”
While youth incarceration rates have decreased since the bill’s implementation, officials have said young offenders weren’t receiving the proper treatment and had high recidivism rates. Foster care providers have shouldered juvenile delinquency cases, even without proper resources to handle them.
The state has millions set aside for juvenile crisis center funding, which is thought to be a potential solution to the lack of resources for juvenile offenders, but hasn’t used any of the funding. In 2018, Johnson County applied to create a center, but the state government dropped the project.
Owens said the reforms implemented in SB 367 were a crucial first step in fixing the system, and the new legislation would continue the work.
“No comprehensive piece of legislation ever gets it 100% right,” Owens said. “It simply doesn’t. And then it becomes our responsibility as legislators to recognize, to listen to people on the ground that are interacting with these youth every single day, and make the needed changes. And that is what this bill is a product of.”