Marathon hearing on juvenile intervention center leaves aldermen angry, confused

A $4.8 million-a-year city program that was supposed to divert young people from the criminal justice system — but may have done the opposite — will be left in the hands of the Chicago Police Department, frustrated aldermen learned Tuesday.

At a three-and-a-half-hour hearing triggered by a scathing internal audit, Family and Support Services Commissioner Lisa Morrison Butler announced that on Dec. 31, her agency will walk away from the Juvenile Intervention Support Center, severing ties with SGA Youth and Family Services, the city’s designated case manager.

In the past, the approach has been “to tinker around the edges of it,” Morrison Butler said, but “that tinkering around the edges will no longer satisfy the standards of best practices or the needs of Chicago’s young people.”

Pointing to a request-for-proposals issued for community-based services, the commissioner said: “Rather than molding our concept of youth diversion to what has existed since the establishment of the JISC, we are looking forward to embracing new, creative and evidence-driven approaches that can be brought to the table for the long-term restructuring and limiting youth contact with law enforcement.”

That will essentially leave the center in the hands of the Chicago Police Department at a time when the death of George Floyd has some aldermen pushing to defund CPD.

Deputy Chief of Detectives Migdalia Bulnes said the department already is making changes demanded by Inspector General Joe Ferguson’s February audit.

JISC detectives are being trained to “become more trauma-informed.” The University of Chicago Crime Lab will help improve record-keeping. And a field response team has been formed to remedy the fact that few of the young people processed by police complete the anger management, substance abuse and family counseling services recommended by SGA, Bulnes said.

“We have changed the look of the JISC, given it a softer feel with hand-painted murals and new furniture. CPD wants the JISC to feel less like a police station and more like a place where children can come to change their lives,” Bulnes said of the converted police station at 3900 S. California Ave. The city hopes to replace sometime next year.

After listening to the presentations and the testimony of Cathy Burgos, who runs a Miami-Dade Juvenile Department that’s a model for the nation, Public Safety Committee Chairman Chris Taliaferro (29^th) was livid.

Taliaferro couldn’t believe Butler’s response to what the alderman called “14 years of somewhat of a failure” by the intervention center was to wash her hands and walk away.

“I was hoping to hear that you would commit to righting the ship. And what I heard was, rather than right the ship, we’re gonna abandon the ship and build a new boat. That’s not the way to go. By the time … whatever you’re gonna implement has gotten started, we’re gonna suffer even more damage to our young adults,” Taliaferro said.

“I was really hoping that this meeting would give us some type of resolve and it has not. It has actually provided me with more anguish. ... You spoke to none of the IG’s report, other than you’re sprucing up a facility. … But you didn’t talk about the failure to keep records. You didn’t talk about the destroying [of] records. … You didn’t talk about the refusal to share data with DFSS and the public. I don’t see a bright future if we can’t get it right as adults.”

Budget Committee Chairman Pat Dowell (3^rd) agreed.

“It seems like DFSS is saying that they’re gonna take their ball and go home and play a different game,” Dowell said.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Susan Lee insisted Mayor Lori Lightfoot is “looking to different funding sources to replace the dollars that DFSS will no longer be providing” next year.

“We are pretty hopeful that we will be able to back-fill dollars for those services,” she said.

Lee acknowledged the juvenile intervention center “may look radically different from what it is now” when Lightfoot is done making changes. But she said the center, created in 2006 by former Mayor Richard M. Daley, likely will survive as a “more youth-friendly, family-friendly comprehensive service center that puts the young people’s needs first and focuses on diverting them away from the justice system.”

Inspector General Joe Ferguson concluded in February the center created to keep kids away from the criminal justice system “may actually re-traumatize” young people or “increase their likelihood of re-offending.”

He said it was impossible to determine whether the goal of reducing juvenile recidivism has been accomplished because of a host of problems ranging from poor record keeping, destroyed case records and lack of collaboration between Chicago Police and the Department of Family and Support Services to inadequate training of police officers who bid for their jobs based on seniority — not on “experience or aptitude for working with youth.”