County sees impact of youth release.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

The closure of four juvenile state prisons and the release of 234 of Oregon's most prolific young criminals in March hasn't produced the kind of crime wave that might follow a jail break of that magnitude.

In 3 1/2 months since their release, only 13 have returned to prison accused of new crimes that ranged from a robbery to eight property crimes, along with four minor assaults.

In Lane County, three of 28 teen-agers released then face new criminal charges. One faces a potential mandatory Measure 11 prison term for second-degree robbery. Another is in custody on charges of fraud and forgery. The third, Imanuel Menelik Williams, turned 18 and is charged in adult court with carrying a concealed weapon.

Those return rates are higher than for juvenile parolees in general, but not unduly alarming, juvenile officials said.

The numbers seem to belie earlier predictions that the release of teen-age offenders would spur an immediate crime spree, but the statistics tell only part of the story, according to those who deal with teen-age offenders.

"It's a hard thing for people to understand. It's not as though we're having looters driving down Centennial Boulevard holding people up," Lane County Juvenile Court Judge Kip Leonard said. "It only gets our attention when it's something tragic or dramatic."

To be sure, the county has more crime victims than it would have had if the prisons had stayed open, Leonard said. Before budget cutting, Oregon had 1,150 state prison beds for juvenile criminals. Today, there are 816.

But the prison closures must be considered along with other factors, such as a 25 percent cut in state funding for community-based reform programs, that will create long-term costs to society, Leonard said.

For example, the Lane County juveniles in state custody before the prison closures had more than 15 prior convictions on average, according to county Department of Youth Services data. One in four had committed a crime while on parole for another crime.

When the prisons closed, high-risk offenders came home and in many cases - although they remained out of jail - they were assigned to spots in local reform programs. That meant they bumped other potentially high-risk offenders out of treatment. "As we lose the ability to lock up those kids, and at the same time are losing community-based programs, what we will most likely see is an increase in the rate of juvenile crime," Leonard said.

State lawmakers, facing a drop of almost $3 billion in state revenue, trimmed more than $18 million from programs dealing with juvenile crime in the final months of the budget cycle that ended July 1.

"The long-term cost to these short-term savings are real. It's very difficult to convey that in a three-month snapshot (of juvenile crime rates)," said Steven Harder, juvenile parole supervisor for Lane County.

"Putting kids on the street when they're not ready is very costly in the long run. They come back into the system. They get into the adult system," Harder said.

Overall, Lane County has 540 young offenders on parole or probation.

In fact, Lane County's juvenile crime rate is continuing a steady decline that reflects how well its reform efforts are working for offenders who are at the highest risk for repeat crime, Leonard said.

Local statistics show 13 percent of offenders commit 80 percent of juvenile crime, he said. Success with even a small number of high-risk offenders can substantially affect crime rates in the short run while giving youths a shot at successful lives in the long run, Leonard said.

"We can make productive people out of young people a lot of people would look at as throw-aways," the judge said. "We have proved that."

For example, he said social workers regularly tell him that the estimated lifetime cost to society for one drug-affected newborn is about $1 million. More than 50 such children are born annually in Lane County, Leonard said.

The high-risk juvenile offenders are easily identified by people trained to look for the common characteristics, "the risk factors," the judge said.

Those include:

The child's mother or father has been arrested.

State child protective service workers have intervened in the child's family.

The child has a learning problem in school.

The child's first criminal conviction happened before age 14.

The family has experienced one or more serious disruptions, such as death, divorce or serious illness.

If children have three or more of the risk factors, they're at high risk of being a repeat offender, Leonard said.

"There is no reason to think that by locking them up, it's going to change those risk factors. If you can't deal with the family issues, you're just dealing with the symptoms," he said.