Gov. Shapiro can fix juvenile justice in Pa. by taking lessons from the 1970s

Some 46 years ago, in August 1977, Pennsylvania Gov. Milton J. Shapp signed into law Act 41 — a measure that turned Pennsylvania into a leader in juvenile justice during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The law made it illegal for juveniles — those under age 18 — to be detained in adult jails and prisons. It also required a noteworthy change to the handling of cases involving youth charged with so-called status offenses — actions that are not illegal but still prohibited because of a young person’s status as a minor.

Those who committed status offenses, such as running away from home or habitual disobedience of a parent or guardian, were to be excluded from the juvenile justice system and treated instead in the child welfare system.

Act 41, along with Act 148 of 1976, which provided a financial incentive for counties to treat youth mainly in community-based programs, were early examples of decarceration reforms that have since become an accepted component of juvenile justice best practices.

At the national level, juvenile incarceration rates declined a remarkable 70% between 1995 and 2019; even more remarkably, between 1997 and 2017, the number of youth held in large correctional facilities declined 87%.

Rather than being at the cutting edge of today’s juvenile justice reform movement, Pennsylvania is now known for its mistreatment of youth in largely unregulated courtrooms and abusive conditions of confinement.

Fifteen years ago, there was the infamous “Kids for Cash” scandal, in which two Luzerne County judges in the 2000s, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, were found to have frequently sentenced young people committing minor offenses to incarceration at private residential treatment facilities, from which they received millions of dollars in kickbacks — while also denying youth their right to an attorney.

In 2019, reporting by The Inquirer helped unearth violent and abusive conditions of confinement in the Glen Mills Schools, located outside of Philadelphia. Moreover, a 2021 report by the bipartisan Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force showed that nearly 40% of youth in residential treatment facilities in 2018 were first-time offenders.

To be sure, Pennsylvania has also made recent progress in addressing the needs of system-involved youth. Like the rest of the country, the state has experienced substantial declines in youth incarceration over the last 15 years. Pennsylvania has also excelled at implementing research-supported best practices in juvenile probation through its Juvenile Justice System Enhancement Strategy.

Still, a lack of centralized authority and planning and a very loose regulatory structure all but guarantee that the mistreatment of youth in correctional facilities will continue. Considerable research suggests that first-time and minor-offending youth could be much better served in the community.

Juvenile justice in Pennsylvania is now at an important crossroads, and the story of how the state passed and implemented major juvenile justice reform legislation (Acts 41 and 148) in the late 1970s contains important lessons for the present moment.

At that time, more than 1,000 youth per year were being detained in adult jails while awaiting their court hearings because of a paucity of separate juvenile detention facilities. Moreover, 400 youth were imprisoned at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill (near Harrisburg), where they intermingled daily with adult inmates. In a political climate in which the connected and influential county juvenile court judges opposed substantial efforts at change, it seemed likely that youth would continue to be mistreated for years.

That is, until Shapp, a Democrat from Montgomery County, sprung into action in his second term and made reforming the state’s juvenile justice system a priority.

In January 1975, Shapp appointed Jerome Miller as his special assistant for juvenile justice. Miller, who only a few years earlier had famously closed down Massachusetts’ youth correctional institutions, immediately launched an aggressive media offensive against state and county juvenile justice officials for allowing young people to be incarcerated in Camp Hill Prison.

After a 15-year-old Camp Hill youth who had been sentenced there for a status offense died by suicide, Miller contacted the investigative journalists with 60 Minutes to document the dangerous conditions faced by youth incarcerated alongside adults. Miller also pressured the state attorney general to rule that further commitments to Camp Hill Prison were illegal. Within a year, despite considerable opposition, Camp Hill was emptied of juveniles and new community alternative programs were set up.

Shapp’s actions pushed Pennsylvania further down the path of legal and policy reform.

Shapp’s forceful actions had cascading effects that pushed Pennsylvania further down the path of legal and policy reform.

While Miller was closing down Camp Hill, legislators such as State Rep. Joseph Rhodes Jr. (D., Allegheny) and leaders of advocacy organizations such as Philadelphia’s Barbara Fruchter began to craft Acts 41 and 148 as a way to imprint decarceration principles into state law. Shapp and his aides tirelessly supported their efforts. In late July 1975, he declared Aug. 5 to be Juvenile Justice Day, announcing that the language of the reform legislation constituted “the goals toward which we dedicate this day and for which we will work with Legislature and the people of this state.”

After that, Shapp helped bring together a broad coalition to oversee concrete implementation of the laws’ provisions. By the end of the 1970s, Pennsylvania had succeeded in prohibiting some of the most harmful responses to delinquency that used to happen commonly. Gov. Shapp’s willingness to take bold action to shake up the status quo dramatically improved Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system.

The Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force’s 2021 report has provided a blueprint for change that, similar to Act 41 of 1977, delineates new legal guardrails to protect youth from unnecessary and potentially harmful incarceration. Many of the task force’s proposed changes, such as a requirement that first-time offenders be diverted from the court system and offered community-based programming (unless they committed a very serious offense or had prior offenses), are contained in House Bill 1381 and Senate Bills 751 and 752.

Gov. Josh Shapiro should do what Gov. Shapp did almost 50 years ago and prioritize the passage of this landmark juvenile justice reform legislation, while also coordinating a robust implementation process. Implementing these legislative reform measures will require a significant investment in community-based diversion programs and alternatives to incarceration. A serious dialogue should also begin over how to enforce the law’s provisions through greater oversight of Pennsylvania’s juvenile courts and residential facilities.

The Pennsylvania juvenile justice reforms of the 1970s demonstrate that major improvements in the treatment of system-involved young people can happen quickly — but a strong commitment to reform by the governor is vital.

Michael Schlossman is a lead research analyst at the Institute for Innovation and Implementation at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Social Work. He previously worked as a research analyst at the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission.