In the summer, Rhode Island’s General Assembly decided to save money by shifting the 17-year-olds from the Training School, at $98,000 per offender per year, to the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), at $39,000. Apparently, in their minds, the state’s acute budget crisis justified this barbarian idea. (Incredibly, they somehow failed to realize that the ACI puts juveniles in a high-security facility, at $104,000 per year.)

While the Assembly debated the decision, Paul Block, Ph.D., and Mark Dumas, Ph.D., the principals at Psychological Centers, a Rhode Island mental health service, sent a letter to the House Finance Committee outlining a far better solution than the ACI. Their program, Multisystemic Therapy (MST), guarantees a much lower rate of recidivism than the Training School’s, at a cost of $15,000 to $36,000 per year. Florida and Washington state have already saved buckets of money with this program.

Even if you don’t care about turning around the lives of troubled ruffians, surely as a taxpayer, you care about the costs to incarcerate them. High recidivism drives up future costs of prison and social services.

The psychologists’ letter included this quote from a report called “Youth Violence” (2000), by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office: “Residential programs, interventions that take place in psychiatric or correctional institutions ... show little promise of reducing subsequent crime and violence in delinquent youths. While some residential programs appear to have positive effects on youths as long as they remain in the institutional setting, research demonstrates consistently that these effects diminish once young people leave.”

In other words, juvenile correction facilities do not turn kids’ lives around.

And no one holds these facilities accountable for their notoriously poor performance. We just pour good money after bad.

Mind you, everyone agrees that chronically violent kids need to be locked away. Rhode Island laws already remand kids to the adult system for certain heinous crimes, including murder, and allow judges to waive threatening kids into the adult system. But there’s only a handful of such sociopaths; here we’re talking about garden variety delinquents.

Last winter, a small group studied the effectiveness of the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), which runs the Rhode Island Training School. In its April report, authors Thomas Hogg, Stephen McAllister and Lee Grossi — Grossi is now the interim head of the office that oversees DCYF — noted that the new Training School building just now being completed will have fewer beds, require more staff, and be even more expensive than the old one ($98,000).

They write, “The addition of 21 new employees [65 new staff were originally requested], at a time when services are being radically diminished, to staff new facilities to house children and youth that may not need traditional incarceration ... at an annual cost approaching $140,000 per child, makes no sense at all.”

Ya think?

Still, the General Assembly ignored the proposal from Psychological Centers. It also ignored the other two agencies that have a long-standing history of taking adjudicated kids, also with far better recidivism rates than the Training School.

Child and Family Services of Newport County runs community-based programs statewide, among which is “The Network.” Very troubled kids usually enter the Network in an intensive residential facility. These kids cannot be maintained in their homes and probably never will go back. Some were sentenced to the Network instead of the Training School. As behavior improves, the children “step down” to less intensive services along a “continuum of care,” until they learn to live independently, safely and cooperatively in their own communities. The most expensive kids in this program, the ones in secure residential care, cost us $70,000 per year — still a bargain compared with the Training School. Peter DiBarri, the program’s director, reports that in the seven years of operation, only a handful of kids have done anything so egregious that they land back in the Training School.

The Network can take another 100 kids.

Also standing ready is Tides Family Services. Brother Michael Reis is famous locally for his commitment to wayward, truant and adjudicated youth. Tides runs Ocean Tides, a residential facility in Narragansett that was the first in the state to take adjudicated kids. As children graduate from the residential facility out into the community, Tides’ outreach-and-tracking program sends community workers into their homes to work with them, their families and the schools.

So Rhode Island already has excellent options for turning around the lives of wayward and deviant youth. DCYF needs to turn to them instead of the Training School.

Hopefully, Rhode Island’s budget crisis will be the cattle prod that goads us into dismantling our ineffective youth prison. There are kinder and far more promising practices we could use instead.

Which will, to boot, save tons of money.

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, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.