Mo. Tries New Approach on Teen Offenders

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MONTGOMERY CITY — At age 9, Korey Davis came home from school with gang writing on his arm. At 10, he jacked his first car. At 13, he and some buddies got guns, used them to relieve a man of his Jeep, and later, while trying to outrun a police helicopter, smacked their hot wheels into a fire hydrant.

For his exploits, the tough-talking teen pulled not only a 15-year sentence (the police subsequently connected him to three previous car thefts) but got "certified" as an adult offender and shipped off to the St. Louis City workhouse to inspire a change of heart.

It didn't have the desired effect.

"I wasn't wanting to listen to nobody. If you wasn't my momma, or anybody in my family, I wasn't gonna listen to you, period," says Korey, now 19. "I was very rebellious."

At that stage, most states would have written Korey off and begun shuttling him from one adult prison to the next, where he likely would have sat in sterile cells, joined a gang, and spent his days and nights plotting his next crime.

But this is Missouri, a place where teen offenders are viewed not just as inmates but as works in progress — where troubled kids are rehabilitated in small, homelike settings that stress group therapy and personal development over isolation and punishment.

With prisons around the country filled to bursting, and with states desperate for ways to bring down recidivism rates that rise to 70 and 80 percent, some policymakers are taking a fresh look at treatment-oriented approaches like Missouri's as a way out of America's juvenile justice crisis.

Here, large, prison-style "gladiator schools" have been abandoned in favor of 42 community-based centers spread around the state so that now, even parents of inner-city offenders can easily visit their children and participate in family therapy.

The ratio of staff to kids is low: one-to-five. Wards, referred to as "clients," are grouped in teams of 10, not unlike a scout troop. Barring outbursts, they're rarely separated: They go to classes together, play basketball together, eat together, and bunk in communal "cottages." Evenings, they attend therapy and counseling sessions as a group.

Missouri doesn't set timetables for release; children stay until they demonstrate a fundamental shift in character — a policy that detainees say gives kids an added incentive to take the program seriously.

Those who are let out don't go unwatched: College students or other volunteers who live in the released youths' community track these youths for three years, helping with job placement, therapy referrals, school issues and drug or alcohol treatment.

The results?

_About 8.6 percent of teens who complete Missouri's program are incarcerated in adult prisons within three years of release, according to 2006 figures. (In New York, 75 percent are re-arrested as adults, 42 percent for a violent felony. California's rates are similar.)

_Last year, 7.3 percent of teen offenders released from Missouri's youth facilities were recommitted to juvenile centers for new offenses. Texas, which spends about 20 percent more to keep a child in juvenile corrections, has a recidivism rate that tops 50 percent.

_No Missouri teens have committed suicide while in custody since 1983, when the state began overhauling its system. From 1995 to 1999 alone, at least 110 young people killed themselves in juvenile facilities nationwide, according to figures from the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives.

Does this "law-and-order" state know something others don't?

Hardly, says Mark Steward, who, as director of the state's Division of Youth Services from 1987 to 2005, oversaw the development of what many experts regard as the best juvenile rehabilitation system in America.

"This isn't rocket science," Steward says. "It's about giving young people structure, and love and attention, and not allowing them to hurt themselves or other people. Pretty basic stuff, really. It's just that a lot of these kids haven't gotten the basic stuff."

Take Korey Davis. He didn't meet his dad until he was 5. He and his siblings were raised largely by aunts and uncles. If the judge handling his case had left him in county detention centers until he reached adult age — 17, in Missouri — then had him serve the rest of his sentence in prison, few eyebrows would have been raised.

But a chance to save a life would have been missed. "In jail, I wouldn't never have changed what I always done," Davis says. "There was no treatment at all." He contemplates this for a second, and adds with a near-whisper: "Right now, I'd probably be dead."

In Missouri, judges can keep serious felons in the juvenile system until they are 21. That's what happened with Davis. At 15, he was sent to the Montgomery City Project, where robbers, rapists and the like get one last shot.

At first, he didn't want it.

But a year into his stay, two things knocked him back on his heels: the news that his younger brother had been shot and wounded in a gang fight, and an invitation from a counselor to sit down, after class, to read a book out loud with her.

To a boy accustomed to hiding his illiteracy, the offer felt awkward. But because this woman had given him a chance, he responded, and "when I actually learned how to read, it made everything in the world easier for me."

Three years later, Davis is a group leader — and no softy with his peers, either. "We don't let each other get by with slick stuff, just doing the bare minimum," he says. He reads voraciously (recently, "The Bond," about three fatherless teens in Newark, N.J.). He's been accepted by a community technical college, plans to study carpentry. And, he's proud to say, his kid brother has taken to heart this advice:

"Put the guns down."

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Many states are trying to bring down high rates of repeat offending by juveniles.

Wisconsin now treats some repeat offenders with mental health counselors in hospitals, instead of corrections officers in jails.

Illinois offers them drug treatment, job placement — or an expedited return to custody.

And Washington state targets kids at risk of becoming its most serious offenders with early, intensive anger-management, drug and family therapy.

Research guided these approaches. One 2006 study, for example, found that anger-management, foster-care treatment and family group therapy cut recidivism drastically among teens, resulting in taxpayer savings up to $78,000 per child. Programs that tried to scare kids into living a clean life were money losers, according to the study, conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

Missouri employs similar carrot-and-stick techniques. But it takes rehabilitation one step further by normalizing the environments of children in custody, says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif.

"It's a pretty simple concept: The more normal the environment, the more likely these young people will be able to return home and not be sucked into a criminal subculture," he says.

Montgomery City, built for Missouri's worst juvenile offenders, could be mistaken for a college campus.

In a literature class, students analyze plot lines in "Julius Caesar" and "A Farewell to Arms." In a computer lab, they write resumes and peck out cover letters to employers. In a central courtyard, they celebrate "Victim Empathy Week" by huddling in a circle with lit candles, praying silently for those harmed by their crimes.

The cottages where they sleep resemble college dorms, with one notable difference: These are all immaculate.

Ten teens are assigned to a cottage. Each gets a bed with quilt, pillow, nightstand, and an understood "space." In this space are often collected the precious remnants of a truncated childhood: dream catchers, stuffed animals, Dr. Seuss books.

"When you walk into these facilities and see 17- and 18-year-olds with dolls on their pillows, that's when it hits you: 'Hey, these really are just kids,'" says Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.

Some things you won't see in this detention center: razor wire, barred windows, uniformed guards, billyclubs, or kids in orange jumpsuits with broken noses.

"We're all about creating a safe environment for our kids," Larry Strecker, Missouri's northeastern regional administrator, explains.

Here, boys wear — well, what boys wear: jeans, knee-length Bermudas, an occasional earring, T-shirts. Staff members dress almost as casually.

To the teens, many of whom have done long stretches in adult jails awaiting adjudication, the sight and feel of Montgomery City come as a shock.

It was for Josh Stroder, who at 15 was arrested by a SWAT team in 2004 at his home in Dexter, Mo., and charged with 12 crimes, including terrorism. He confessed to improvising a bomb, which took off the front door of an appellate judge's home. No one was hurt by the blast. Police also found a car bomb in his basement.

The youth was detained in a juvenile center for a year, then sat in the Dexter City jail for 5 months before being sent to Montgomery City.

In a 6-by-9 cell, says Stroder, now 18, "there's really nothing to challenge you, nothing to stimulate you. It becomes easy to succumb to apathy, bitterness, or whatever is boiling in your brain."

He contrasts that with Montgomery City: "Here, you are faced with the possibility of reconciliation with so many people, and forgiveness. I was expecting a treatment program, but not so intense — not the way it is here. I expected maybe to crack the surface of the ice, but not go in so deep."

Treatment comes in "group builders" — sessions in which detainees open up to one another about traumas, crimes and family conflicts that have scarred them. Kids can also call a "circle," in which team members stand and face each other to air grievances, fears, anguish.

Two staff specialists, college graduates in counseling, psychology or social work, sit in on the circles, but the kids generally run them. "Adults lived in a different generation — they can only tell us so much," says Korey Davis.

Teams that interact more are rewarded — day furloughs to visit family, fishing trips, bicycle excursions, an afternoon volunteering at a food bank or a soup kitchen. Those who pull against the program — generally, new arrivals — quickly find themselves pressured by their peers to shape up.

"We know that when we do positive things as a group, we earn things," says Chan Meas, 17. Three years ago, he ran with a gang in Columbia, Mo., smoked dope, broke into people's homes. "Now, I look for positive people that care about others."

Montgomery City is no fairyland. It's a "Level 4" facility, meaning high security. It has isolation rooms, and every door locks automatically. Video cameras in walls and ceilings film everything, everywhere, 24-7. Kids need passes to go from one room to the next.

Kids are trained to restrain peers who threaten the team's safety. Only staff may authorize a restraint, but once they do, team members grab arms and legs and pin their peer to the floor until the child stops resisting.

This practice has its critics, such as Loughran, a former commissioner of the Massachusetts state Department of Youth Services, who called it "very, very dangerous."

"The juveniles have learned violence all their lives, and we're going to use them to control other residents? It's a confusion of roles," he says.

But Tim Decker, Missouri's youth services director, says there's never been a serious injury during a restraint, and rates of injury are markedly lower here than in states that rely on billyclubs and mace.

Besides, he says, the restraint policy reinforces the notion that "everyone in the facility takes responsibility for keeping it safe."

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A half hour west of Montgomery City, in the university town of Fulton, there is a house that looks just right for a summer camp. It's brick, with a maple tree out front, a wide lawn and a wrought-iron sign that reads, "Welcome Friends."

Inside are comfy sofas, bookcases holding trophies, vases full of flowers, and 11 girls, ranging in age from 12 to 17, who've been convicted of truancy, assault, drug crimes, theft and forgery — bright kids carrying darkness around inside.

This is the Rosa Parks Center, a detention home on the campus of William Woods University. Here, the girls get counseling, schooling, a feeling of togetherness.

"I had a lot of problems being angry," says Brooklyn Schaller, 15, who was arrested on drug charges and for violating a parental curfew. "I would be aggressive. I didn't care about anyone else, or anything else." But after just a year, even she has noticed a change.

"Last weekend I went home for a furlough, and me and Mom got into an argument, and so I left her alone. I let her have her space, and she came back and I listened to everything she had to say and she listened to me. And that was the most amazing thing, to sit down and talk and have someone listen to you."

What's been the difference?

Good role models help: The girls get to mingle with college students in the campus dining hall and attend campus plays and other cultural events. At the start of the school year they describe their experiences to incoming students during orientation week.

But the biggest plus, Schaller says, is that "you have people to talk to here, you have people who truly do care."

Rosa Parks Center opened in 2001, part of Missouri's response to the notion — resurrected about a decade ago — that it might be worthwhile to punish teen offenders by locking them up in adult prisons or in remote, sprawling juvenile prisons.

In the early '90s, a series of high-profile crimes had prompted dire predictions of teen "superpredators." Legislators across the country backed "scare-kids-straight" approaches.

But Missouri was on a different path by then, and stayed with it.

It had tried the traditional approach: From 1887 to 1983, young offenders from truants to attempted murderers were confined either at the Boonville Training School for Boys, or the Chillicothe Training School for Girls.

Boonville warehoused 650 boys, most of them minorities, in grim, two-story brick structures. There was rape and other brutality by guards, and a solitary confinement room atop the facility's administration building known as "The Hole," until judges demanded its closure.

"You had rural, white staff with inner-city kids of color, thrown in together with kids from all across the state who were disconnected from their families and neighborhoods," recalls Steward, the former director of youth services. "It wasn't a terribly successful formula."

Which is why conservatives such as John Ashcroft, the former Missouri senator and U.S. attorney general, and state Supreme Court Justice Stephen Limbaugh, a cousin of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, joined with liberals such as the late Gov. Mel Carnahan to stick by systemwide reforms initiated in the late 1970s.

"What is remarkable about Missouri's system is that is has been sustained by conservative and liberal governments," says Krisberg, of the national crime and delinquency council. "They've seen that this is not a left-right issue. In many ways, its a commonsense issue."

A common-cents issue, too — since it costs states between $100 and $300 a day to keep a juvenile in so-called "punitive" correctional facilities, according to a 2005 report by the Youth Transition Funders Group, a philanthropy network.

Missouri's per capita cost of its juvenile rehabilitation program is $130 a day.

"The fact is that most kids from punitive states get out, get re-arrested, and get thrown back into correctional facilities," Krisberg says. "What amazes me is that taxpayers in these punitive states put up with such rates of failure."

Miriam Rollin, vice president at Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., with a membership of 3,500 police officials, prosecutors and crime victims, agrees:

"Twenty years ago, people threw up their hands and said, 'We don't know what works.' But now, we actually do know ... We're just not doing it — or not doing enough of it."

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