The state budget for the next two years now being considered by the House of Representatives proposes much-needed changes to the Sununu Youth Services Center, the facility for New Hampshire’s children adjudicated as delinquent.
The policy behind this proposal and the amendments to the juvenile justice statutes were developed by our colleagues on the House Children and Family Law Committee. We as members of the House Finance Committee then put our efforts into making the numbers work. These proposed changes will benefit both the 2018-2019 budget and our troubled youth.
Legislators, study committees, and advocates for children have tried for several years to solve the dilemma of the Sununu Center. The facility is too large and expensive for New Hampshire’s needs. Declining youth crime levels have led to an ever-shrinking number of juveniles who should be in a secure facility, and we have learned that places like the Sununu Center often lead to poor outcomes as compared to services based in the community.
The state’s directive for the mental health system is that community treatment is cheaper, more effective and more sustainable than a centralized institution. Why not the same for the juvenile system? Children placed in correctional settings experience weakened connections to family, teachers and peers – the pro-social connections that discourage misbehavior. The stigma associated with being in a facility like the Sununu Center is an additional emotional and developmental burden for kids who already have a strike or two against them.
Previous attempts to solve these problems have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. Some opponents of a new approach have been reluctant to reduce the use of a facility that is relatively so new, built in 2006. Others have questioned that there is adequate capacity to serve children in the community. Still others have been wary of repurposing a facility in the heart of a desirable Manchester neighborhood.
The plan takes a comprehensive approach. First, the center will be reduced in size and reserved for children who cannot safely be served at home or in other residential settings. This means that juvenile offenders will be less likely to become alienated from their communities and turn to more serious criminal behaviors when they return home. Research shows that juvenile offenders are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of a correctional facility like the Sununu Center.
Second, the savings realized from downsizing the center will be invested in community services. Rates paid by the state to residential service providers have not kept pace in recent years with the costs of effective treatment. Some have gone out of business, others have lost the ability to serve children with complex needs and many have turned to serving children from outside New Hampshire to make ends meet. The changes in our proposed budget will make resources available to halt and reverse this trend. Providers of services to court-involved children will be better able to address their needs, and children’s problem behaviors will be less likely to progress to the point where they must be confined at the Sununu Center.
The plan we are proposing is consistent with other states that have successfully moved away from large correctional institutions for delinquent children to smaller, more cost-effective community interventions. Our neighboring state of Maine has seen similar decreases in its juvenile detention facilities’ populations.
Just last week the Portland Press Herald editorialized that Maine should close its youth corrections facility and transition to more community-based programs, with a much smaller facility “to house the rare teenager who legitimately needs incarceration.”
The Sununu Center has beds for 144 but its population over the last year has averaged around 60. We believe that reducing the number of children to 36 over the next two years is a very realistic goal. When there was a proposal in 2016 to repurpose the center as a psychiatric residential treatment facility, the state’s fiscal note envisioned an average daily census of only 15 committed and detained youth at the Sununu Center, and psychiatric services available for another 65.
The shrinking population of juveniles who should be in a secure facility also means that the number of state employees working at the Sununu Center is out of proportion with the number of children. More than 140 employees now work at the center to care for, feed, counsel and educate 60 or fewer kids. The workforce problems we have in the health care field and the problems the state has had in finding staff for other institutions would seem to provide a logical transfer of staff and skills. If we can dovetail these needs with a reduction in the size of the Sununu Center, we will have a win-win.
The proposed budget offers reasonable, cost effective and forward-thinking amendments to juvenile justice statutes and to the operation of the Sununu Youth Services Center that are long overdue.
2017 needs to be the year when New Hampshire will correct both a system and a mindset that are costly to the state and damaging to our youth.
(Rep. Neal Kurk of Weare is chairman of the House Finance Committee. Rep. Mary Jane Wallner is the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee.)