New initiative would shut down youth prisons nationwide, including Eldora training school

WATERLOO - A new nationwide initiative aimed at closing down juvenile prisons is setting its sights first on the 80 oldest and largest facilities in the country, including the State Training School for Boys in Eldora.

The Youth First campaign launched Thursday, noting the recent calls for change that include efforts by governors to close facilities, a renewed focus on juvenile justice reform at the federal level and a Supreme Court decision to guarantee parole hearings for youth offenders.

Their reason for establishing the campaign is simple.

'These prisons for our kids aren't working,” Da'Quon Beaver, a former incarcerated youth and activist seeking to close youth facilities in Virginia, said during a conference call announcing the initiative. 'My experience at these prisons, which they are prisons, it doesn't matter what other softer names they're given, because anything that you could imagine that would happen in an adult facility is taking place in these juvenile prisons.”

The campaign launched as it released polling results showing support for juvenile justice reforms, with 77 percent supporting a shift from incarceration to prevention and rehabilitation.

There is even higher support for specific reforms, such as treatment facilities that involve a youth's family and providing financial incentives for states and cities to invest in alternatives to youth incarceration. The poll also found majority support for requiring states to reduce racial and ethnic disparities, increase funding for public defenders and directing funds to community-based programs after shuttering youth prisons.

'What we see here is very clear majority support for a wide range of proposals to reform the way the youth justice system operates, both specifically and kind of in principle,” said Michael Bocian, a pollster with GBA Strategies that conducted the youth justice reform poll.

Amy McCoy, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, rejected the notion that the Eldora facility is a youth prison. She noted that it provides treatment and educational services within a structured setting to assist youth who are judged to be delinquent.

The State Training School is accredited through the American Correctional Association; however, McCoy said its focus is on both supervision and rehabilitation, including education as a 'critical component of the services provided to the seriously delinquent youth” at the facility.

Jill Ward, a data researcher for the youth prison mapping tool, explained how it came to locate the 80 targeted facilities in 39 states.

She said they looked at facilities that held 100 or more youths, is 100 years or older, or both. The State Training School has a capacity for 130 males 12 to 18 years of age and was founded in 1873.

'We started here because … many of these facilities are relics of a bygone era, dating back to the 1800s, or were built to warehouse large numbers of children and do not represent the most effective approach to help youth or benefit public safety,” Ward said.

Ward said the data collectors also looked at facilities that met at least two of four criteria that signified it as similar to an adult prison. Those included physical characteristics, like gates and fences; practices, like use of isolation or restraint; documented cases of abuse; and limited family contact.

Ward said the data mapping tool will ultimately be expanded to include other facilities throughout the country that incarcerate youth.

The data mapping tool also includes data on racial disparities in the youth prison system. In Iowa, for instance, the incarcerated youth are 59 percent white, 24 percent black and 10 percent Latino; the makeup of the overall Iowa youth population, meanwhile, is 82 percent white, 6 percent black and 10 percent Latino.

'We know that youth of color are much more likely to be incarcerated, despite the fact that youth of color commit roughly the same level of juvenile crime as white youth,” Ward said.

For more information about youth incarceration or to use the mapping tool, visit http://www.youthfirstinitiative.org/.