Judge pushes youth halfway house

Molly Ball

Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005 | 11:07 a.m.

About 25 of the youths in the county's juvenile detention center aren't in any trouble.

They just don't have anywhere else to go.

"These kids are awaiting being put in a group home, an independent living facility or mental health or drug-and-alcohol treatment," Juvenile Court Judge William Voy said.

"It's stupid to keep them in a secure detention center at the price we pay (to house them) -- they're not dangerous to the public and they're not a flight risk. We just have no place to put them."

What they need, Voy realized last spring, is a short-term halfway house. Voy took on the project of getting one built, and he hopes it could open by the end of the year.

The youths who stayed there would be supervised, but not on lockdown. They would be escorted to school and assigned to other activities in the community.

The cost to Clark County will be nothing, if Voy's plan works.

The land already is owned by the county. Voy and the director of the county's Juvenile Justice Services Department, Kirby Burgess, are talking with a potential donor, a nonprofit organization, to supply the construction costs, estimated at about $300,000 for the 4,000-square-foot, 16-bed house.

Voy and Burgess had originally arranged to have much of the materials and labor donated, covering the remaining costs with fees collected by the court. But the county real estate office nixed that plan last week because of a statute that says donated labor can't be used on projects that receive government funding.

No new staff would have to be hired in Voy's plan. Based on declining population numbers at the county's juvenile detention center, the juvenile justice department hopes to be able to close at least one of the center's units by the end of the year and transfer the staff.

The declining numbers are the result of the department's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, which has been working to ensure that only youths who are truly a threat are kept locked up in the period after they have been arrested but before their cases have been resolved.

Officials have praised the initiative, which over the past year has managed to turn an overcrowded facility into one with breathing room.

In December 2003, the detention center, which has a capacity of 235, had an average daily population of 243; in December 2004, the average was 191. That's especially impressive in a fast-growing area where all the other numbers seem to be going up, officials say.

"When we saw the first month's statistics, we said, 'Is this an anomaly, or are the numbers really going down?' " Assistant County Manager Catherine Cortez Masto said. But as the months went on and the numbers kept declining, "We saw that, wow, we're really making a difference."

The turnaround may have saved the county tens of millions of dollars by eliminating the need for a new facility, Voy said.

The county already has one juvenile halfway house, near Bonanza Road and 30th Street. It has only 12 beds and is always full of youths coming out of the Spring Mountain Youth Camp. Many have no families and are waiting to be placed in foster care, said Detention Manager David DeMarco.

"It was built for the kids at Spring Mountain without family resources as a place for them to stay on the weekends, or to stay short-term while they're awaiting long-term placement," DeMarco said.

But those youths often stay in the halfway house for months at a time. Voy envisions the new house being for even shorter stays of a few days to a month at maximum.

The new facility is also needed to temporarily house juvenile sex offenders, many of whom can't be returned to their homes because their victims are there, said Fritz Reese, assistant head of the juvenile justice department.

"We want to transition them into services without creating a strain on the detention center," Reese said.

Ideally, Voy said, the halfway house will actually prevent crime, by channeling juvenile delinquents into the services they need instead of punishing them like criminals and sending them down the road to a life of crime.

"Everybody sees the need for it, from the (district attorney) on down," Voy said. "It's just a no-brainer. The detention center should only be used for those kids we can't otherwise control."

The juvenile justice department also wants more funding from the county for professional services, such as substance abuse and mental health treatment. Currently the department gets only about $1 million a year for such services and is asking for an increase to $4 million, Voy said.

Voy said he believes the department deserves the increase based on the progress that has been made.

The nonprofit considering paying for the halfway house is expected to make a decision next month, Voy said, with construction hopefully beginning as soon as possible.

"We need it built, and we need it now," he said.