Juvenile Justice Reform: A Golden Opportunity to Invest in Kansas Families

Executive Summary

Kansas’s juvenile justice system is at a crossroads. As a response to youth offenses, the state has increasingly relied on taking children out of their homes and communities and placing them in prisons and nonsecure placements. Currently the state has the 6th highest youth detainment rate in the country. But those strategies aren’t working to keep our communities safe: 42 percent of Kansas youth sent to a secure juvenile prison were incarcerated again within three years of release, and 54 percent of Kansas youth sent to out-of-home, non-secure juvenile justice facilities were not successfully discharged.

Kansas must decide either to continue to spend tens of millions of dollars on failed incarceration strategies, or to change course and invest in family and community alternatives instead. While incarceration of youth often increases the likelihood of future crime, family-based juvenile justice programs produce better outcomes. Along with being safer than confinement, family-based approaches are better at holding young people accountable for their behavior in their communities, and the public supports redirecting money away from facilities to support these programs. Youth crime in Kansas has fallen over 50 percent in the last decade, but the state’s incarceration of youth is still much higher than the national average. A large number of the youth Kansas incarcerates or sends to other out-of-home placements are not a threat to public safety: 80 percent of youth sent into the custody of the Kansas Department of Corrections are low- or moderate-risk; 35 percent of youth discharged from Kansas juvenile prisons last year were convicted of misdemeanors only. Kansas legislators have a golden opportunity this year to reduce youth confinement and invest in family-based approaches to juvenile justice that are safer and more effective.