We must be guided by evidence, not breathless headlines.
With a new lawsuit alleging unconstitutional conditions in state youth facilities, calls to try more children as adults and more than $1 billion sitting unused in a state fund to launch programs to help rehabilitate young people to which New York City has been denied access, youth justice is at an inflection point in the state and city. At such times, it’s crucial that policymakers not only improve public safety, but treat young people humanely. When the City and State confronted a similar watershed moment 15 years ago, the changes we enacted — reducing youth incarceration and funding a raft of rehabilitative programs — reduced youth crime and improved decency in ways that reverberate to this day.
An inflection point
I know an inflection point when I see one. Around 2010, it was a watershed time for youth justice in New York. I was the City’s Probation Commissioner then, and my colleagues and I had to wrestle with decisions not unlike those confronting the city and state today.
In 2009, like today, the state’s Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) had been sued — back then by the U.S. Department of Justice and Legal Aid — after the 2007 in-custody death of a 15-year-old boy from the Bronx; he’d been killed in a harsh takedown by staff in the notorious Tryon Residential Center outside Albany. That happened within a year of a scathing ACLU/Human Rights Watch report on the girls’ portion of Tryon. The same month that OCFS was sued, a gubernatorial task force found, “New York’s juvenile justice system is failing in its mission to nurture and care for young people in state custody … [damaging] the future prospects of these young people, wast[ing] millions of taxpayer dollars, and violat[ing] the fundamental principles of positive youth development.” DOJ’s investigation revealed that “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs … [leading] to an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures.” OCFS Commissioner Gladys Carrión called her facilities “toxic” and proceeded to close dozens of them and increase funding for community alternatives.
The facilities weren’t just dangerous; they were patently failing at their core mission of rehabilitating young people. One 2010 state report revealed an 89% recidivism rate for boys released from OCFS facilities.
The coup de grâce for city leaders was the extraordinary, and growing, cost of youth confinement, which city and county leaders shared equally with the State. The cost per child per year to purchase brutality and a 71% recidivism rate was around $260,000.
Fortunately, those crises spurred policy ingenuity. In December 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg toured an OCFS facility with Reverend Al Sharpton and announced a bold proposal. “The current system is not helping kids, it isn’t helping taxpayers and it isn’t helping public safety,” he said. “[W]e need to stop sending kids miles away from their families and communities. And, instead, authorize the city to fully operate its own juvenile system here in the five boroughs.”
With that, a policy known as Close to Home was born. The Mayor tasked his staff to work with the governor’s office to draft a bill transferring young people and resources from state to city custody, and had us initiate an intensive planning process to design a system that would remove hundreds of young people from harmful, distant state facilities into a City-run system.
The Dispositional Reform Steering Committee, co-chaired by Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner Ron Richter and me, included representation from the City Council and the Mayor’s Office, along with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police, education specialists, mental health professionals and advocates. With consultation from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Vera Institute of Justice and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we conducted a deep dive into the City’s youth justice data and looked at best practices nationally, even conducting site visits with our state counterparts.
On the state side, OCFS provided hands-on oversight to ensure program fidelity and quality. OCFS staff supported local providers through training, coaching and technical assistance, helping them adopt best practices in youth-centered, community-based care. The Mayor’s Office also regularly convened stakeholders to problem-solve implementation issues alongside OCFS’ watchdog role.
In the end, when the Close to Home Act (C2H) passed in 2012, the State and City amassed huge savings from no longer sending kids to state custody, plus $31 million annually that the State transferred to the City, generated by savings from having fewer city kids in OCFS facilities. The City used those savings to provide intensive wraparound services near the communities where young people live. The Probation Department also adopted a new risk assessment instrument and state-of-the-art structured decision-making model that judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys had input into.
The Administration for Children’s Services designed and procured 300 residential beds from 11 different nonprofit organizations in 37 small, homelike facilities in or near the five boroughs. Because we provided judges with expanded options in lieu of commitment, the city was able to reduce by two-thirds the number of youth placed out of home, so most of those beds were never filled.
All of that is what policy reform should look like when it’s well thought out. There’s coordination between agencies and between the City and State, not haphazard, headline-chasing “wins” that ultimately yield no lasting victories.
The outcomes of Close to Home were strong. Within a few years, the city’s juvenile courts placed no young people in state custody, a remarkable achievement for the nation’s largest city. By 2016, as outcome data started to roll in, 91% of C2H youth had passed their academic classes; 82% had transitioned from C2H to a parent, other family member or guardian; and 91% were enrolled in community-based programs. The decline in the city’s juvenile arrest rates accelerated from -24% in the four years preceding C2H’s passage to -52% in the four years after its enactment. And of youth released from C2H placements, only 8% had their aftercare revoked for violations of the terms of their release, including rearrests.
Flash forward
Today, although young people make up only 11% of the violent crime arrests in New York City — down slightly from 12% in 2018 before policymakers raised the age of the state’s juvenile courts so more young people were retained in the juvenile system — some have called for trying more children as adults. Further, the Administration for Children's Services is spending $340 million to expand the city’s juvenile detention capacity by 48 beds.
As city and state leaders are poised to undertake expensive and harmful (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that trying juveniles as adults increases their recidivism rates by 34%) solutions to perceived youth crime increases, they should look to a time of similar tumult for guidance. Here are a few takeaways from C2H’s success story.
Get the right people on the bus
The advocates and City Council could have scuttled C2H legislation. Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys could have refused to place kids in the new programs. The Department of Education’s new school could have failed, or mental health services been inadequate. State and city negotiators could have cared more about turf than kids or public safety. Any of these would have meant more crime, worse outcomes, higher placement rates and an “F” grade for C2H.
In "Good to Great," management guru James Collins recommends getting the right people on the bus as a key ingredient to elevating business and government functioning. By bringing diverse stakeholders together and keeping lines of communications open between city and state officials, we not only gained important insights into how this radical new system should function but also garnered significant buy-in from those stakeholders.
As his predecessor did with C2H, Mayor Zohran Mamdani should empanel divergent partners into a no-nonsense working group charged with the duty of examining real data (not media-generated hyperbole), costs and realistic options, to chart a course for the future of youth justice in the city that has consensus and can be implemented expeditiously.
Follow the data and best practices (and don’t forget to innovate)
There’s a need to focus on the small group of the city’s young people committing a disproportionate share of very violent crimes. While it’s true that there was a doubling of very serious violent juvenile crime arrests from 2018 to 2024, it’s also important to remember that (1) the overall proportion of youth arrests for violent crimes dropped slightly during this time and (2) the serious violent crime increase amounts to 334 arrests out of 1.7 million young people under age 18 in the city.
Nationally, and here in the city, there’s growing progress and innovation focusing on high-risk, hard-to-reach young people. When I was Secretary of Juvenile Services in Maryland, building on research showing that gun violence is concentrated by person and place, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott launched a police-based effort to focus resources on people at the highest risk of gun violence in the most violent area in the city, West Baltimore. The University of Pennsylvania’s independent research found that there was a significant decline in gun violence in that neighborhood without displacement to the rest of the city (New York City, in collaboration with John Jay College and neighborhood credible messengers, has recently launched a similarly focused community-based effort in Staten Island).
Working with grassroots credible messengers in the four jurisdictions that accounted for 80% of youth homicides in Maryland, my department mirrored that focused, resource-rich approach to youth under our supervision at highest risk of gun violence, launching The Thrive Academy. In its first two years, no participating youth were homicide victims and four out of five had no subsequent gun arrests. UPenn will also independently evaluate Thrive.
In March, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform will issue a report outlining several other programs that combine cognitive behavioral therapy, relentless outreach and robust support services from Chicago, to Oakland, to Boston, to New York, with impressive results with “HR2” — high risk, hard to reach — youth. As a sign of how salient this population has become nationally, the report is being released on a keynote panel of the National Conference of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which is devoting a track of five additional workshops focused specifically on HR2 youth.
New York City has a strong network of organizations with deep roots in communities that work with young people who have had contact with police, including community violence intervention, mentoring and parent support services — services that work for youth and community safety. Unfortunately, this work has been chronically underfunded in New York City. Following the evidence means not only focusing on, but investing in and scaling up projects like these.
Follow the money
Costs to institutionalize young people are extraordinarily high and yield remarkably disappointing outcomes. The annual cost to house a youth for a year in OCFS facilities has grown to nearly $1 million. While some young people need to be in custody, confinement should be deployed parsimoniously, only after other options are exhausted.
As collaborative as the City-State work was on C2H, that relationship deteriorated badly when Bill de Blasio was mayor and Andrew Cuomo, governor. Governor Cuomo allowed C2H funding to sunset five years after it started even though the State was saving buckets of money by no longer having New York City youth in its custody. That exclusion has persisted for more than a decade, weakening one of the state’s most effective youth justice models.
Worse, when state lawmakers raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction from 16 to 18 in 2018, one of the last states in the nation to do so, none of the $250 million allocated annually to help localities absorb additional youth into their youth justice systems was allocated to New York City. This exclusion has denied the city, home to the largest share of the state’s court-involved young people, the resources necessary to sustain community-based responses and meet the law’s goals. The expectation that the City can deliver reform without access to the same funding as every other county is both unrealistic and unjust.
The real crisis in youth justice is not these laws; it is the State’s persistent failure to fund and implement them equitably.
State lawmakers need to redress this childish tiff between the governor’s office and the state’s largest city by fairly reallocating much of the largely unspent $1.6 billion that has accrued in that fund since Raise the Age was enacted in 2018. Additionally, passing the proposed Youth Justice Innovation Fund, which would allow nonprofits to apply directly for a portion of those unspent funds, would help jump start innovation and provide much-needed services to young people.
In 2010, when the state and city were at a youth justice inflection point, we didn’t panic. We governed, acting carefully, decisively and collaboratively to improve youth outcomes, public safety and decency. By contrast, bromides like adding expensive locked beds or prosecuting more kids as adults provide only temporary relief, while the ulcer continues to fester below the surface. Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani have started on a positive youth justice note, with Hochul withdrawing her support for trying more juveniles as adults. They should now build upon that to make real improvements in safety and youth wellness.