Incarcerating young Kansans is more costly and inhumane than providing community services, education and mentoring to keep them out of the juvenile justice system, according to a new report by a nonprofit pushing the state to shutter its last juvenile prison.
“The prisons we have now, they’re just meant to hold our young people,” said Jazmine Rogers, a youth leader with Progeny. “They’re meant to be dehumanizing. They’re not meant to focus on how do we restore this young person, how do we prepare this young person to re-enter their community?”
Kansas has worked in recent years to reform its juvenile correctional system. In 2016, it passed a sweeping reform bill that closed a youth prison in Larned and earmarked money for programs to keep kids out of the system. But there’s more work to be done, Progeny says.
This year, Kansas cut more than $20 million from its funds earmarked for community intervention programs.
Progeny made the case that closing the KJCC and, instead, investing in prevention programs would be far less expensive. Beyond that, said Nichole Lee, campaign manager for Progeny, incarcerating young people is really harmful.
“I do think if we were able to close that facility, we could really talk about preventative measures,” Lee said.
The report comes just over a week ahead of the Kansas Legislature’s next Joint Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice Oversight.
Kansas Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican who serves as vice-chair of that committee, noted the legislature’s effort had successfully reduced the number of incarcerated children but said there was more work to do. She said money the state set aside for prevention programs hadn’t been used as effectively as legislators hoped.
“The goal has always been to reduce the incarceration level, which it has done,” Baumgardner said. “But has it helped to really resolve the issues? I don’t know that anyone is comfortable saying, ‘Yep, it’s at the mark that we want.’”
‘A very heavy experience’
According to the report, Kansas’ correctional system took in more than 11,700 young people between July 2020 and June 2021, which includes both juvenile delinquency cases and “child in need of care” cases, in which children don’t have adequate care or are abused or neglected. That’s down from more than 15,500 five years ago.
But still, incarcerating young people is ineffective, the report says. Young people who are housed in a juvenile facility have a high risk of recidivism.
Tyler Williams, an organizer with Progeny, said he was in the now-shuttered Larned youth prison and KJCC as a teen.
“As a literal child who went into the system and came out as a grown man, it was very difficult mentally, emotionally, spiritually,” Williams said. “It was a very heavy experience. I suffer from PTSD from a lot of the experiences in juvie.”
The report also notes that Black children are disproportionately incarcerated compared to their white peers.
