If America’s juvenile justice system were a school district, it would be deemed “in need of improvement,” the federal euphemism for “failing.”

According to the National Youth Justice Alliance, a juvenile offender has almost a 75-percent chance of going back into the justice system sooner or later. With results like these, “Corrections” is a bald-faced lie.

So it is with great pleasure that I see a major bright spot among the otherwise dreary ideas for dealing with Rhode Island’s budget deficit. The proposal to “cap the Training School’s population at 148 inmates” is a promising development for kids and communities. Naturally, the budget officers are motivated by money. Rhode Island’s juvenile inmate population usually runs to well over 200, at an annual cost of $100,000 each.

But wait, this cap sounds scary. Will the little car thief who happens to be the 149th inmate be set free, or will authorities make room for him by letting the two-time burglar go a couple of months early? I don’t want 50 hooligans set free.

We worry for good reason. When a kid goes to the Training School, absolutely nothing is done to improve the conditions in the community that cultivated his antisocial behavior in the first place. Indeed, prison sequesters the offender with a whole lot of other deviants who teach each other the tricks of their unfortunate trades and, in effect, make each other worse. (For the research behind this assertion, see a 2006 study online at http://www.srcd.org/documents/publications/SPR/spr20-1.pdf.) Once released, the young criminal returns to the home that couldn’t cope with him in the first place. Now he makes the community worse.

So the existing juvenile justice system ignores the kids, acts as though they should become model citizens and punishes them when they don’t. But all that “system” does is grow prisons, fear, neighborhood distress, despair and parents who just give up.

Far better to spend resources on the kid, the families and the community, fixing some of the problems that led to criminal behavior in the first place. Community-based programs that send clinicians and help into the homes will cost much less than prison and do far more long-lasting good.

Be clear, however, violent offenders, who make up 5 to 10 percent of the Training School inmates, will stay at the prison.

Already Rhode Island can divert some offenders from the Training School to agencies such as Ocean Tides and Newport’s Child & Family Services. But to further reduce the prison population, the state needs more capacity to handle antisocial kids.

So a new partnership, called Preserving Families, has been formed to work with the state Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF). Partners include Psychological Centers, which is the state’s only provider of multisystemic therapy, an intense, community-based intervention specifically developed for juvenile offenders. Psychological Centers is working with Tides Family Services, an agency with a long-respected track record serving wayward youth.

Mark Dumas, a principal at Psychological Centers, can’t describe where one agency leaves off and the other picks up. “Between us we do whatever we believe will decrease the likelihood that the child will reoffend.”

Preserving Families has begun to bring back to Rhode Island kids who have been in out-of-state placements, some of which cost us $250,000 per child. Learning to manage these tough kids here, in their own communities — which Dumas calls their “natural ecology” — is the only way to improve chances that they will be able to live productively outside of institutional care. Only by caring for families and communities will we ever reduce the conditions that lead to crime and chronically antisocial behavior. Preserving Families costs roughly $30,000 a year per teen, a comparative bargain, but also a better solution.

One huge problem with our current system is that it’s far too convenient to put the kid into a residential placement — a group home or the Training School — and not bother with assessing and working with the families.

So when a kid is placed with the Preserving Families network, a clinical team goes to the home to make an initial evaluation. (Of course, this help would be even more effective if such teams investigated lesser problems far earlier in a kid’s life, but that’s for another day.) If the parents are themselves too overwhelmed to handle an adjudicated child, or at least not right away, the team looks for relatives, friends of the family, and in some cases, foster care. Most kids live with their parents, but even when they don’t, the network continues to work with the parents.

Dumas sketches various scenarios for what comes next. “If the parents have issues that are getting in the way, like substance abuse, depression or unemployment, we deal with that. Most don’t have parenting skills, so we teach them the skills and stay with them as they practice. If a kid has a psychiatric need, our psychiatrist is integrated into the team. If there’s drug-dealing on the corner and moving away is not an option, then we have to work to keep Johnny off that corner.

“Many of our families say they’ve been there, done that. They want us to focus on Johnny, who’s the problem, not us. In those instances, we work 100 percent on getting the family to do things differently than they have done before. It’s the clinician’s responsibility to engage the family. In the end, we need the family to take over the work.”

Dumas concedes, “That doesn’t suggest we are always successful.” Which is what the Training School is still there for. A last, not a first resort.

So the bland-sounding proposal to “cap the Training School at 148” is actually a truly important shift away from trying to punish kids into compliance. It didn’t work. The prisons, both youth and adult, are burgeoning. Instead, let’s use precious tax dollars — and a lot fewer of them! — to work on healing the conditions that lead to crime. Consider juvenile crime a red flag signaling a need for help. Then use the juvenile justice money to get parents, neighbors, schools and shop owners the skills they need to help kids make pro-social choices.

If it took a budget crisis to get us here, so be it.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.