The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has been taking its plans for reform on the road since last fall, making presentations and soliciting feedback. The DJJ’s Roadmap to System Excellence tour comes to Fort Myers Tuesday evening. The Roadmap reforms involve placing less emphasis on detention of juvenile offenders and more emphasis on community based intervention programs to keep kids out of the system.
“The vast majority of children who come into the juvenile justice system are not serious offenders, nor will they ever be serious offenders,” said Florida Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Wansley Walters. “But because we haven’t done the kind of job we needed to do, we have ended up with children who really once they finished our system didn’t have a lot of possibilities and many times ended up in the adult system.”
Walters says her department is already on the right track. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Reducing Youth Incarceration report finds the number of juveniles serving time in Florida dropped 32% between 1995 and 2010. In the past two years, the DJJ has eliminated nearly 1,000 beds from detention facilities around the state and according to Sec. Walters, the department is on track to exceed its goal of reducing the number of kids in detention by 5% this year.
“At the end of the day, what we want to be able to do is redistribute our resources so for those children that you do see on the 11 o’clock news and children that do need more intervention, we have got fewer of those children,” said Sec. Walters. “We are able to really put more resources there and do a much better job and get those children where they need to be.”
The Juvenile Justice Department’s Roadmap to System Excellence workshop is from 6:00-8:00 p.m. May 28th at the Carrie Robinson Center in Fort Myers.
