Oak Hill, the main facility for juvenile offenders in the District, is slated to close within about a month, and District advocates of juvenile justice reform couldn’t be happier. Replacing this poorly secured, dilapidated, and often crowded facility with a new, albeit smaller, rehabilitation center that will trade in Oak Hill’s concrete floors and sterile cells for an atmosphere more akin to that of a YMCA. Eric Solomon, the Director of Communications for Campaign for Youth Justice, even went so far as to call it “homelike.”
The new facility is the centerpiece of a thorough overhaul of the District’s juvenile justice system. The city, which fought hard for the right to build this facility, should be applauded for taking the issue of youth justice seriously enough to proactively reform its own system.
Unfortunately, the overhaul is not complete. Not every juvenile offender will end up in the new facility, located in Maryland. In fact, any District juvenile who prosecutors decide to try as an adult has a good chance of winding up in a prison in North Dakota, a particularly troubling fact given the District’s rather arbitrary policies regarding when a youth should be tried as an adult.
Since D.C. is not a state, it has outsourced the job of housing its convicts to other states (North Dakota being one of its largest contracts) for decades. The prospect of being sent 1,500 miles away from their community and family is especially nightmarish for youth offenders—who are often first-time offenders, Solomon said—because it automatically puts the kind of rehabilitation and educational opportunities afforded to their peers in the local juvenile justice system out of their reach.
This has always been a point of shame for the District, but now that D.C. is undertaking a major make-over of the system—one which will coordinate city departments with myriad community organizations and educational foundations—it is even more critical that the city works to ensure that it can extend these benefits to as many youth offenders as possible.
Currently, the District’s provisions for trying juveniles as adults are largely arbitrary. Certain crimes automatically place a youth in the adult justice system, such as those involving a gun, regardless of the crimes’ circumstances. More troubling, only prosecutors have the power to determine who should be tried where. If a judge feels that a youth would benefit from the kinds of services the youth justice system has to offer that are geared toward children, he has no recourse by which to redirect the offender back to that system. Giving judges the right to move offenders from one track to another with consideration for the youth’s situation and the circumstances of individual crimes would go a long way toward ensuring that the city’s reform of its youth justice system is as far-reaching as it claims to be.
Let make you young again at mredden@staff.georgetownvoice.com
