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TROUBLED KIDS POLICY

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California supports intensive interventions for troubled youth and their families because they have been proven to cut crime. Each year, there are over 200,000 arrests of juveniles in California. While many young people learn their lesson, too many offend again and again. Intensive family interventions are proven to prevent juveniles from re-offending. For example, through the Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) program, juvenile offenders are closely supervised by carefully-chosen and trained foster parents, while their parents receive complementary training. MTFC has been proven to successfully cut the average number of arrests for seriously delinquent juveniles in half. Programs like MTFC pay off in saved lives, reduced incarceration costs and other fiscal savings. For example, studies of intensive family interventions show these approaches can save as much as $13 for every $1 invested.

Enacted in 2000, the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA) provides a dedicated funding stream for local juvenile justice programs designed to curb juvenile crime, including intensive family interventions, after-school programs for at-risk teens, gang and truancy prevention, job training and diversion programs. JJCPA currently supports 168 programs in 56 participating counties, and serves over 105,000 at-risk and delinquent youth annually. According to the State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, comparison youth were 33 percent more likely to be arrested than youth in JJCPA-funded programs. JJCPA funding is linked to the Citizens' Option for Public Safety (COPS) program, which funds local law enforcement agencies for front-line public safety services.

In addition, the Juvenile Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction (MIOCR) grant program, established last year, funds a variety of evidence-based programs, including intensive family interventions, for juvenile offenders with mental health needs.

However, the need for proven interventions for juvenile offenders far outpaces the supply of available funding. For example, demand for juvenile MIOCR grants was over 60 percent more than available funding could support, forcing the state to turn away over $14 million in grant applications. And, in light of repeated budget cuts, JJCPA funding is still short of its original $121 million funding level from 2000-2001, without even taking into account the increased cost of living since then. As a result, many counties have been forced to cut the number of JJCPA programs available and/or reduce the amount of services provided in ongoing programs.

Moreover, only a few counties are implementing proven intensive family interventions. For example, just three counties currently offer MTFC for juvenile offenders, and even with a fourth county expected to start MTFC with MIOCR funding this year, still MTFC programs will serve fewer than 30 juvenile offenders statewide each year.

In the interest of getting troubled youth on the right track, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California endorses the following:

• Protect existing funding for the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act, and increase funding from $119 million to $150 million to restore program funding to its initial funding level, taking into account cost-of-living increases since the program was established in 2000. Maintain JJCPA's link to the COPS program.
• Protect Juvenile Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction funding, and increase funding from $22.5 million to $37 million to accommodate unmet demand from the first round of grant applications.

For more information, please review our comprehensive 2007 State Legislative Agenda.