A few weeks ago, Loose Lips wrote that the D.C. Council’s bill to reform D.C.’s screwed-up youth justice agency was limited in its ambitions, but it was better than nothing. After a series of changes prompted by Mayor Muriel Bowserthe bill doesn’t even clear that low bar anymore.
Lawmakers openly admitted Tuesday that the overhaul of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services they’ve been working on for the past six months has become pretty much toothless. The bill still ensures independent oversight of the agency, which manages kids accused and convicted of crimes, and creates new avenues for kids to be released from confinement at the city’s youth jail. But Chair Phil Mendelson ultimately chose to strike one of its most consequential provisions under threats of a veto from Bowser.
That section of the bill, which was originally introduced by Attorney General Brian Schwalbwould’ve required the agency to provide rehabilitative services to kids within 30 days of them being convicted of (or pleading guilty to) a crime. These services often involve moving youth out of the jail and into residential treatment facilities, such as the New Beginnings center that the city operates in Maryland. Yet DYRS leaders spent the past few months claiming that this would be an impossible standard to hold the agency to. Even though Director Sam Abed has repeatedly identified the 30-day timeline as the agency’s goal, but Bowser made it clear that it was a central part of her opposition to the bill.
“Enacting this bill will neither increase public safety nor will it improve outcomes for juveniles engaged in dangerous criminal activities,” Bowser wrote in a letter to the Council Tuesday. “Instead, it perpetuates a revolving door at the courthouse where juveniles can commit crimes and know there’s no real accountability for their actions.”
The Council was set to pass the legislation two weeks ago, but held off in order to work out some of these issues with the mayor—ultimately, Mendo judged it wiser to ditch the 30-day deadline entirely, arguing that issues with the availability of treatment beds were beyond the agency’s control and could make timeframe unworkable. The legislation still passed unanimously Tuesday, but it didn’t exactly generate the usual self-congralutory rhetoric from its supporters.
“We’ve too often given in to fearmongering in an effort to win the mayor’s support,” said Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parkerwho took on oversight of DYRS after Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White’s bribery scandal precipitated a committee shakeup. “We should take seriously the likelihood that time in DYRS custody is putting some youth on a worse trajectory than placement in the community. … Something is better than nothing, but I want to express caution for us giving away everything, especially when it comes to the wellbeing of our youth.”
LL had to laugh that this was the part of the bill to be excised, since it was only a few days ago that a federal judge considered ordering the agency to comply with that 30-day standard. Attorneys for a pair of teens held at the youth jail (known as the Youth Services Center or YSC) argued that their clients have been waiting for months for placement in residential treatment programs: One spent more than four months stuck in YSC; the other kid was there for nearly seven months. All the while, they haven’t had access to the mental health services that they’ve been promised, left to languish in an overcrowded and understaffed facility. The judge overseeing the lawsuit decided to hold off on issuing a ruling while he waited to see if the Council would impose a 30-day limit—it seems he has his answer.
DYRS finally transferred the kids at the heart of that case into treatment facilities, their lawyers announced Tuesday, but many others still face the same challenges. Advocates for kids convicted of crimes have previously testified that their clients regularly wait up to eight months to be transferred out of YSC. Abed told the Council this fall that it takes the agency an average of 62 days to manage this process. Plainly, this is a serious problem for DYRS, with direct bearing on why the YSC remains so persistently crowded, and now the Council’s key reform legislation does virtually nothing about it.
“When children are held in the District’s jail-like detention center, they can experience irreparable mental, emotional, and physical harm,” said Aditi Shahan attorney with the ACLU’s D.C. chapter, which is representing the teens suing the city. “While we are glad DYRS finally transferred our clients to their placements following last week’s court hearing, we need systemwide relief so that all children committed to DYRS promptly receive the rehabilitation to which they are entitled by law.”
The agency has often claimed that it’s doing all it can to get kids moved into treatment more quickly, and councilmembers begrudgingly accepted its excuses. Mendelson, in particular, said he was persuaded by DYRS’s arguments that it’s constrained by space limits in these treatment facilities, most of which are privately managed and located outside of D.C. The agency has had to place kids as far away as Georgia as a result.
“You cannot make Utah or Oregon take a young person,” said At-Large Councilmember Anita Bondsperhaps slightly overstating the scope of the city’s current problems. “That’s the dilemma we’re up against, because we do not have the services here in the District of Columbia.”
Mendelson argued that the bill contains other provisions aimed at addressing these issues. It allows attorneys for kids to petition a judge for release if their clients are being held at YSC without treatment for months, for example. DYRS would then have to show “good cause” to justify the delay. But he subsequently admitted Tuesday that this section of the bill had undoubtedly still been “weakened” because “we could not figure out how to require timely placements.” (The chair also expressed no small amount of frustration with Bowser, saying “I don’t think the mayor understands the bill,” and that he found it difficult to negotiate with the administration over their resistance to any “deadline” placed on DYRS whatsoever.)
“The goal of this legislation was to improve the operations at DYRS, to ensure young people could be placed quicker, to ensure we actually put young people on the path toward rehabilitation and ensure they receive services,” Parker said. “All of that has been compromised and gutted.”
Several councilmembers also noted that Bowser has not exactly been moving swiftly to facilitate the construction of new treatment facilities in the city, even though that would address this issue.
When lawmakers sought to add a provision to the legislation requiring the mayor to explore the feasibility of opening a new psychiatric hospital in the city, the administration told the Council that it would need until 2027 to even draft such a plan. At-Large Councilmember Christina Hendersonthe health committee chair, said such a move would amount to “lighting money on fire.”
“We’ve been talking about this ad nauseam for over two years,” Henderson said, pointing to recent oversight hearings identifying the need for more psychiatric beds for youth amid problems at the District’s existing psychiatric hospital. “Why do they need an additional two years to do a feasibility study that will likely be a page and a half?”
This points to Parker’s chief concern with Bowser’s resistance on the issue: “I think she genuinely sees no issue with DYRS, and when I met with her, she said there is no crisis at DYRS.” Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Herronor does not seem to view the existing situation as one demanding urgency, even as kids struggle while being held in these conditions.
“There are some who believe that the agency should be more geared toward rehabilitation and ensuring that the young people don’t come back or exit the agency damaged, or worse, broken, after being admitted,” Parker said. “And then there are others that view the function of DYRS as purely a system for detention, and I think where we are not as aligned. … Based on the mayor’s rhetoric and what she’s pushed for, it’s safe to say that her focus has been on detention, and less so on rehabilitation.”
This is not a new complaint about Bowser, but it still colors every effort by the Council to address juvenile justice in the city. Parker looks likely to maintain oversight of DYRS when Mendelson proposes updated committee assignments in the next few days, which gives advocates hope that they’ll have a lawmaker who is receptive to their concerns in a position to act. But LL finds it hard to have too much hope for the future when this year’s effort fell so short.
