Almost three years ago now, what seemed like Maine’s best chance to lead the country in juvenile justice transformation slipped away under a governor’s veto. Today, we have a new opportunity to inch toward goals of better care for children and safe communities.

The 2021 bill – L.D. 1668, Resolve, To Develop a Plan to Close the Long Creek Youth Development Center and Redirect Funding to Community Integration Services for Adjudicated Youth – would have caused a plan to be developed for closing the state’s controversial youth prison, and shifted resources to community-based delinquency prevention and treatment. The bill was informed by experts: young people experienced with exposure to the state’s youth prison themselves.

Having passed the Legislature with strong bipartisan support, Maine Youth Justice’s disappointment with the governor’s veto was deep. Gov. Mills did not believe Maine was ready. Now supporters like myself are back with perhaps a better idea.

L.D. 1779, An Act to Prevent Youth Involvement in the Juvenile Justice System by Establishing a Strength-based, Discretionary Juvenile Needs Assessment Program, is not only based in the science of child development and juvenile justice outcomes research, but it also capitalizes on the experience of neighboring New Hampshire, where a similar bill was passed in 2021.

If it passes out of the appropriations committee and Mills signs it, we will be one step closer to meaningful prevention and treatment of delinquent behavior. That means healthy children and safe communities.

L.D. 1779 will help ensure that each child who is facing arrest or court involvement will be provided with the most appropriate services at the appropriate time. It would allow law enforcement to refer a child for a comprehensive needs and strengths assessment. Needs will be assessed to identify conditions causing a child to commit a delinquent act. Strengths will be assessed to determine child and family capacity to overcome underlying conditions, thereby providing guidance for the most appropriate intervention to prevent delinquent behavior from happening again.

When she vetoed the 2021 bill, Mills wrote, “If Long Creek did not exist for those who failed to take the conditions of their release seriously, there would be little incentive to do so (to take the conditions seriously).”

That statement reflects a traditional approach to delinquency that holds the threat of punishment incentivizes good behavior. Maine Youth Justice can tell you that it does not. Even the Department of Corrections, which runs the Long Creek prison, reports 61% of young prisoners have been there two or three times before. It is time to stop thinking this kind of failure reflects bad kids and start understanding these are programs that are not meeting kids’ needs. In fact, removing a child from their home, or even imposing punitive measures in the community under rules of probation, amount to adverse childhood experiences.

A groundbreaking 1990s CDC-Kaiser study revealed that adverse experiences in childhood increase risks for lifelong chronic conditions, including poor school performance, unstable employment, depression, obesity and heart disease. Juvenile justice involvement increases those risks even more.

In fact, the most predictive factor for juvenile justice involvement is juvenile justice involvement.

Maine Youth Justice gets that not everyone cares about children. But we are certain everyone wants to be safe in their community. There is now plenty of evidence demonstrating punishing children for bad behavior instead of figuring out the reason for the behavior and intervening to eliminate it is not productive.

Investing public funds in expensive programs like Long Creek prison and residential centers without knowing precisely what children need is wasteful, harmful to children and increases risk to the community. We believe L.D. 1779 represents a smarter, better step forward. The comprehensive needs and strengths assessment children in trouble may opt for will not only inform the state about what that individual child needs, but the compilation of assessments over time also will tell what services to invest in to benefit all children and communities.

In New Hampshire, more than 70% of assessments in the first year revealed children needed basic community-based services. One-third required intensive wraparound care to address child needs within family dysfunction. One-third required Medicaid-covered outpatient services like counseling. And one-third needed safe after-school activities like access to YMCA, or mentors and tutors. In order for Maine to lead in juvenile justice, we need to start by understanding the roots of the problems and investing in programs that work.

L.D. 1779 will get us started. We urge the appropriations committee to pass the bill on to Mills and we respectfully ask the governor to give Maine children and communities the best path forward.

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