Local judges say ACLU findings are misleading

By Chet Williamson

For years, lawyers, probation officers, law enforcement officers and others in the Worcester County legal system have known that judges are tough on crime — and even tougher on juvenile offenders. In fact, according to one insider, a certain local judge was given the nickname of "Lock 'em up."

A recent report suggests there's something to Worcester County's tough reputation. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts contends there is a systematic practice of pre-trial juvenile lock-up across the state with the highest incidence being in Worcester County.

In a recent report issued by the ACLU titled Locking up Our Children: The Secured Detention of Massachusetts Youth After Arraignment and Before Adjudication, the authors say the practice is unfair, threatens public safety and wastes public money.

According to the report, Massachusetts detains up to 6,000 youth in secure facilities each year, "many of whom do not appear to be high-risk." The stats make the state numbers of youth pre-trial detainees higher than 33 other states.

Citing Worcester as "particularly affected by over-reliance on detention of youth," the report claims that youngsters here are held at a higher rate than in other counties in the state: "83% of detained kids are charged with misdemeanors or low-level felonies."

The report's principal author, Robin Dahlberg, is senior staff attorney for the ACLU Racial Justice Project based in New York City, who says, "Thousands of youth who are neither flight risks nor dangers to their communities are detained while they await trial. This only exacerbates any existing behavioral problems or educational difficulties and is a significant and wasted expense to taxpayers."

The data was largely collected from the Massachusetts Juvenile Courts, the Department of Youth Services and interviews that Dahlberg and her colleagues conducted with people in the legal system.

"We talked to the police department, officers, bar advocates, public defenders and the assistant district attorney in charge of prosecuting juveniles," she says. "We also interviewed some of the judges for their thoughts."

Though she wouldn't name names, Dahlberg did say, "Some of the Worcester judges are notorious throughout the state. We heard that there are differences of philosophy among the juvenile court judges who sit in Worcester with some taking a more punitive approach than others.

"We talked to about 120 people and when you start hearing the same stories again and again, you realize that what you are hearing is evidence of a pattern and practice."

Judge Martha P. Grace, Chief Justice of the Juvenile Court for Massachusetts says the report is disingenuous and inaccurate.

"I know most of the people that Robin [Dahlberg] spoke to, because when they get a call, they call me," she says. "Look, there are judges who are tough and judges who are less tough, but few [children] are inappropriately detained.

"The judges asked me if I would print an official response and frankly, I think it elevates the report to a level that it doesn't belong. It's not done with what I call good research methods."

The 66-page report also asserts that as a common practice across the state, judges are using detention as a rehabilitative tool to frighten youth. Dahlberg says, "We heard through our interviews that in Worcester in particular, the judiciary saw detention as a teaching device. We heard anecdotal evidence of cases where it had been used for that purpose."

Judge Carol Erskine, First Justice of the Worcester Juvenile Court, takes particular exception to the anecdotal evidence used in the report. "You cannot create statistics built around anecdotal information," she says. "And, I don't think you can relegate the lives of children to statistics on a chart. You have to be involved with these children and families in crisis to really understand this — to just take raw data from the Department of Youth Services will produce exactly what was produced — a misleading report."

Erskine also says the report "barely recognizes the fact that there are many parents who refuse to even come to court for us to release the child to them or the parents who come and say, ‘I cannot have my child at home. He is dangerous.'"

Grace, who sat for nine years in the Worcester Juvenile Courts adds, "If I can't send a child home for safety reasons, if my only option is DYS, then I don't believe a detention is inappropriate."

Dahlberg says, "We heard that from judges and prosecutors that parents wouldn't take them, but again, no one keeps any data. Other states have non-secure facilities for kids or they have short-term respite care. They don't lock them up.

"Our viewpoint is unless that child is a flight risk or danger to his community and that has been determined at an evidentiary hearing, he should not be stuck in the kiddie jail. If his parents won't take him, that's a child welfare issue."

The report concludes that the overuse of pre-trial lockup wastes taxpayer dollars, saying that in 2006, it cost roughly $16,000 to detain a youth for 16 days in a secure lock-up. By comparison, it asserts that it costs taxpayers less than $1,500 to provide six to eight weeks of supervision to ensure that youth permitted to remain at home return to court. o