When Minnesota did justice for juveniles

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The Star Tribune's excellent series "Juvenile Injustice" has enumerated multiple tragedies of Minnesota's current disorganized hodge-podge of county-specific plans, providers and promises when it comes to young offenders. Some additional history might serve as a guide to a better future.

The state's current circumstances are all the more tragic when we recognize that in the recent past Minnesota had an integrated, flexible, statewide system for identifying, adjudicating, evaluating and treating juvenile offenders that was internationally recognized and lauded by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

The Minnesota Youth Conservation Commission was created by the Legislature in 1947. The measure establishing the YCC provided: "The purpose of this Act is to protect society more effectively by providing a program looking toward the prevention of delinquency and crime by educating the youth of the state against crime and by substituting for retributive punishment methods of training and treatment directed toward the correction and rehabilitation of young persons found delinquent or guilty of crime."

In short order, the orientation of juvenile facilities changed from incarceration and punishment to evaluation and rehabilitation. Corporal punishment ("caning") was eliminated. The emphasis was put on positive peer-group pressure and individual advancement educationally and socially.

At its most developed, the YCC ran forestry camps providing constructive physical activity along with group and individual programming. More-troubled youths were housed in more-secure facilities, but all were initially seen at the receiving center at Lino Lakes and evaluated to identify their educational, mental health, social and familial challenges.

This approach to juvenile delinquency was radically different from that of most other states, so it was watched carefully over the first few years — but very soon emulated. Other states sent representatives to learn about the Minnesota approach. Juvenile justice ministers from Japan, the Kingdom of Jordan and others visited. The YCC was featured at a White House conference.

Back in Minnesota, recidivism dropped, a result noted by courts throughout the state. The Minnesota Supreme Court, ruling in Loyd v. Youth Conservation Commission, praised the program:

"… [T]he purpose of the Youth Conservation Act is to rehabilitate juveniles adjudicated delinquent by a flexible system of supervision. The system allows the delinquent the maximum degree of individual liberty consistent with public safety and with the progress of reformation of his attitudes toward society. The act is based upon the principle that rehabilitation may better be attained by individual supervision and attention than by confinement to a penal institution.

"But a correctional system based on flexible, individual supervision sometimes requires prompt action by the controlling authority, unencumbered by procedural formalities as far as possible, to meet changing circumstances in the rehabilitation of the individual subject. If we are to encourage early parole of youthful offenders, as the Youth Conservation Act is aimed to achieve, we should not at the same time create procedural obstacles to the revocation of parole thereunder, for the officials can hardly be expected to grant early parole if they must also provide the individual with all due process rights every time he is suspected of violating the conditions of parole … .

"The Minnesota youth correctional system is grounded in the philosophy of parens patriae, namely, that the state has the inherent power to take such steps as are necessary for the protection and welfare of the child … . This philosophy, admittedly under attack in some quarters, has operated well as applied to our system of rehabilitation. We regard the Youth Conservation Commission as a progressive and highly satisfactory correctional entity and nothing … compels us to encumber or restrict it."

Through the 1950s and 1960s the YCC continued to rehabilitate Minnesota's youthful offenders. Yet the successes of the program were effectively hidden from public view. Juveniles making progress in school and not stealing cars or vandalizing properties are not the subject of public discourse. Nor do they create stories for journalists. What's not happening is just not newsworthy.

In the mid-1970s, as a way to fund the Minnesota Miracle, Gov. Wendell Anderson promoted sweeping changes to make state government "more efficient." The YCC was reorganized as a division within the Department of Corrections. Funding for the diverse and subtle needs of troubled youths was subordinated as the department concentrated its attention and expenditures on the well-publicized antisocial actions of adult offenders.

Charging counties with the responsibility to evaluate, manage, rehabilitate and follow up on the progress of juvenile offenders saved the state budget some funding. But the costs to communities, families and individual youngsters have been felt across the state, as chronicled in the Star Tribune's series.

The newspaper has outlined the results of decentralized juvenile delinquency programming. The few counties with funding for a comprehensive approach are successful. Most counties have outsourced the effort to private entities that may or may not actually enroll or track individuals. Counties can't learn from each other how individual youths are responding to commitments after previous offenses. These multiple compounding tragedies could be ameliorated by returning to a fully funded, integrated, flexible, and comprehensive statewide system.

Doesn't the current budget surplus oblige the state to do this now for the good of us all?

Thomas W. Day, of Duluth, is a retired physician. His father, Whittier Day, was chairman of the Youth Conservation Commission from 1947 until it was subordinated into the Department of Corrections.