DYRS Budget Oversight

Testimony of Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer Penelope Spain, Esq. and Research & Advocacy Director Joshua Miller, PhD

DYRS Budget Oversight

Committee on Youth Affairs

Councilmember Zachary Parker, Chairperson

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Good afternoon, Councilmembers. My name is Penelope Spain. I am a resident of Ward 4, a mother to two children being educated in our public schools, and for the past 20 years have served as CEO of Open City Advocates, which provides legal representation and holistic advocacy to youth who have been committed to DYRS.

My message today is simple: Our youth detention facility is dangerously overcrowded, not because of a youth crime wave, but because DYRS is prioritizing the warehousing of children over true rehabilitation and effective treatment. DYRS could make specific changes that would not only reduce overcrowding but would increase public safety and the well-being of our children. Overcrowding is a choice, and we are asking you to choose differently.

The current failures we see at the Youth Services Center and New Beginnings are due to DYRS’s own failed policies and practices. Despite countless hours of advocacy and feverishly defending our clients over the past year, Open City Advocates can universally say that DYRS is not completing its assessments any faster, treatment remains minimal, and length of awaiting placement has increased.

Three minutes is woefully insufficient for me to outline the full complexity of the matter, so I’ll refer you to our written testimony which is twenty pages long.

Here’s a quick overview of how DYRS is contributing to overcrowding to the detriment of positive youth outcomes and public safety.

1. DYRS fails to perform timely and thorough needs assessments (often not completing a needs assessment at all).
2. DYRS fails to regularly or consistently convene team meetings for each young person.
3. DYRS fails to regularly or consistently develop or update individualized rehabilitation plans.
4. DYRS regularly overrides assessments that recommend a community-based placement, instead opting for carceral facilities.
5. DYRS has chosen not to implement a system of graduated sanctions, such as the one included in DYRS’s own Case Management Manual, which sadly is universally disregarded these days. Instead, DYRS chooses to respond to infractions merely with incarceration instead of engaging in restorative justice or other creative solutions.
6. Relatedly, DYRS overly relies on detention for technical violations.
7. DYRS fails to cultivate and use community-based services and placements.
8. DYRS consistently fails to conduct meaningful release and reentry planning from New Beginnings or out-of-state placements.
9. But sadly, DYRS does resort to re-booking youth for offenses inside its facilities, leading to further court involvement of our youth, and further trauma, in an effort to cover for DYRS’s own failures to keep children safe or to provide meaningful treatment.

I’m happy to answer questions.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Parker. My name is Joshua Miller, I am Open City Advocates’ Research & Advocacy Director.

I’d like to ask that you include funding for the ROAD Act in the FY25 supplemental budget and subsequent FY26 budget. The Mayor has requested an almost $12 million increase in extra funding for the rest of the year, and you have heard many reasons why that is sorely needed. But I believe we can find $207,000 to fund needs assessments, family team meetings, and reentry planning—especially since DYRS technically already funds those things through its Case Management line item.

I’d also ask you to prioritize saving the Deputy Auditor for Juvenile Facilities Oversight, the old OIJJFO position in some form. The FIS for the ROAD Act’s Deputy Auditor position included lines for a number of different facilities inspectors and analysts—basically the people needed to do on-site inspections at all the out-of-state facilities where DYRS ships children who we don’t serve in the District or their community. And we need that oversight since so many of the District’s children are shipped to for-profit institutions in faraway states that are often rife with allegations of physical and sexual abuse. If we can’t afford that level of oversight right now, I’d argue we can’t afford to be so punitive—but we at least need the basic population and incident data OIJJFO gathers and reports, as well as ongoing thematic issue reporting for things like fire safety, psychotropic medications and chemical restraints, and the upcoming behavior health report.

As we finalized this testimony for this Budget Oversight hearing at the beginning of the week, and noticed that after cresting at 126 on May 26th, the population at YSC – which has only 98 beds – had fallen to 105 on Monday, June 9th. We saw similar dips in November and February before similar hearings – perhaps another benefit of oversight.

Let me briefly highlight three examples of backsliding from the District’s Jerry M. settlement obligations that demonstrate why continued independent oversight is needed:

First, children are warehoused for months awaiting placement. The average length of a commitment is two years. We have clients who have waited up to eight months at YSC after being committed—nearly a third of their total time—without the specific treatment a judge determined they need. They are sitting in “dead time,” receiving minimal education and mental health support, while their well-being deteriorates in a chaotic and often violent environment.

Second, DYRS is failing to use proven alternatives: a spectrum of community-based placements and graduated sanctions. DYRS has only a small number of community-based placements and does not access or create a spectrum of community-based services and supports that would allow youth to live safely at home. Instead of responding to minor missteps with community-based solutions, DYRS defaults to incarceration. Research from our neighbors in Maryland shows that a graduated response system significantly reduces the likelihood of youth reincarceration. It’s a smarter, safer, and more effective approach that teaches accountability without the trauma of a locked cell. We are choosing punishment over proven rehabilitation.

Third, basic release planning is nonexistent. DYRS is supposed to start planning for a child’s return to the community months before their release. Instead, they wait until the last minute. This creates bureaucratic delays that keep youth locked up long after they’ve completed their programs. We’ve seen a two-week release process turn into a 45-day ordeal, simply because paperwork wasn’t started on time. School enrollment often does not happen until weeks after release. This is unjust and inexcusable.

Our written testimony continues to grow because the issues we’ve been tallying in oversight hearings haven’t been addressed. Locking kids up is not a public safety strategy; it is a sign of a system that has given up. We are funding a system that manufactures its own crisis, traumatizes children of color, and ignores proven, effective alternatives.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this matter.

Who We Are

Open City Advocates is a small organization with a big impact. We model an innovative solution in juvenile defense in Washington, DC, and nationwide. Founded to address the racial inequities and unjust incarceration practices in DC’s juvenile system, Open City Advocates provides youth-centered legal defense and holistic advocacy for young people after sentencing in the juvenile system.

Who We Serve

All of our clients have been committed to the care and custody of the DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) by DC’s Family Court. “Commitment” to DYRS means that a young person is a ward of the city, oftentimes until age 21, and that their placement may change several times with little or no court oversight—including placement at home or in a carceral facility.

There are extreme racial disparities in the youth delinquency system nationwide, with Black and Latino/a children being committed and incarcerated at 4.7 times the rate compared to their white peers. It is even more extreme in the District of Columbia, where 100% of all committed children are children of color, and 96% are Black, while Black youth comprise only 51% of the DC youth population.

Open City Advocates’ clients have had extensive contact with the delinquency system; most have also been in DC’s child welfare system, and all are at high risk for entering the DC Jail or being harmed or killed by street violence. The majority of our clients hail from DC’s Wards 7 and 8, where 35% of children live in poverty. Over the last two years, 46% of violent crimes committed with guns in the city occurred in these two wards. In our 20-year history, we have lost six clients to gun violence and one to a drug overdose. Open City Advocates works to help our clients envision and actualize a healthy adulthood instead of accepting death or incarceration by age 25.

1. Overcrowding leads to warehousing rather than rehabilitating children.

When the Family Court commits a youth to DYRS custody, the intention is to provide the youth with rehabilitative services and supervision for the duration of the commitment. The longer the youth spends awaiting placement at YSC, the less time they spend engaging in rehabilitation during the course of their commitment. The average length of stay at New Beginnings is approximately 9-12 months; this means that there are some youth who are simply awaiting placement for nearly the entire length of the treatment program at New Beginnings. Awaiting placement for such a long time not only exacts a large emotional and physical toll on committed youth and their families, but during this time, they are not receiving the services that both the court and DYRS itself has said that they need.

During this time, our clients who are awaiting placement or reentry are getting quite frustrated and confused. They do not know who to talk to about the delay or where they may be sent. Staff are telling them different things about what placements they might go to, how long they will have to wait, and how long they might spend at placements. They are often changing hands between different DYRS workers without much warning or coordination, which weakens trust. We often have to do a lot of digging and pushing to figure out what is going on.

The effect of these long placement times is terrible on young people. There are lockdowns, violence, and short staffing at YSC. Those three things mean that kids are locked in their cells often, which in itself causes trauma and mental health problems. They also miss out on a lot of school time because of these lockdowns and short staffing, and frequently receive packets rather than on-grade, in-person instruction. They don’t get to go to the gym much—we hear reports of less than once per week—and their movement is limited. For kids who are already experiencing the effects of trauma and have mental health needs (which is most of them), this results in them decompensating significantly.

There are minimal mental health services at YSC: some children have short check-ins and unruly group sessions approximately weekly and one psychiatrist for about one hundred children. They’re not doing evidence-based therapies. Kids aren’t getting the mental health services they need this way.

Their mental health is deteriorating in part because they’re not being told why they are still at YSC or they’re getting conflicting stories from staff. Young people are basically in a state of duress by the time their placement is decided. It wears on them. They feel that it’s “dead time” to be at YSC, because that time does not count toward any future placement’s timeline. For example, our clients have been told that their placement is New Beginnings, which they did not want to go to because of safety concerns or mental health needs, but they are still willing to go because, at that point, they’ll go anywhere to start their time and programming. And it is rare that attorneys challenge DYRS’s decision to send a child out of state, even if it’s an inappropriate placement or too far from family, because the client just wants to get out of YSC. In these cases, clients will say “just send me.”

The problems we have identified over the past few years with assessment delays, lengthy periods awaiting placement at the Youth Services Center, delaying reentry after programming ends at New Beginnings, and constantly re-detaining children for technical violations all have significant consequences for our young people.

To summarize, the awaiting placement delays at YSC are causing significant trauma and harm for youth who are committed to DYRS. Their mental health decompensates, their education is stymied, and they are unable to engage in normal adolescent experiences such as bonding with family and community. This has become an urgent issue for youth committed to DYRS.

Overcrowding itself can cause further overcrowding. By warehousing children, we create the seeds of further public safety problems down the road.

2. Lack of assessment with the YLS is causing overcrowding.

In our cases, Open City Advocates is typically appointed as defense counsel after the young person is committed to DYRS. Before commitment, DYRS is supposed to have assigned a pre-commitment worker to a young person, completed a needs assessment (the Youth Level of Service, or YLS), and have identified potential placements. That’s what DYRS’s case management handbook says should happen.

What we know is that DYRS is not completing the YLS in a timely way, nor are they consistently completing a YLS at all. They sometimes make placement decisions before completing the YLS, and sometimes override the YLS score if it recommends community-based placement, opting instead for a secure facility. It’s unsurprising that overcrowding results when DYRS ignores their own clinicians and fails to use the YLS tool with fidelity—but it’s disgraceful and actively harmful to our clients when they disregard the results.

Lately, DYRS rarely completes these tasks prior to the disposition hearing. In many cases, the young person—our client—is sitting at the Youth Services Center (YSC) for months without receiving treatment or services.

We support DYRS’s adoption of the YLS needs assessment, but we have also seen DYRS mishandle that process for children awaiting placement. The YLS involves interviewing the young person, family, and other people in the young person’s life, and looking at any evaluations or records related to the young person. It helps determine their needs and the intensity of services they are supposed to get. Sometimes we’ve seen DYRS not perform the YLS with fidelity, such as interviewing only the child and not the parents or any other family members. In some cases, DYRS has decided on a placement before even completing the YLS.

3. Lack of coordination and communication with family and attorneys is causing overcrowding.

DYRS has not been holding Team Decision Making Meetings (TDMs) regularly or in a timely fashion throughout young people’s commitments.

To truly address a child’s underlying needs and set them on a path towards success, a robust and genuine team approach is critical. Determining services without carefully factoring in the voices of the child (including the child’s attorney), as well as their family, their care providers, and the schools lead to cookie-cutter programs that are not individually-tailored. A perfunctory process conveys to children and their family a lack of concern for their well-being. And children often won’t comply with a program or treatment plan that was created without their buy-in or participation.

When young people and their family members feel they have been heard and are being treated fairly, they are more willing to engage with those trying to lift them up. This leads to better outcomes for youth and their families and a safer community for everyone. Yet we frequently see caregivers excluded from the decision-making that will impact their child, even though a parent’s rights have not been lost during commitment. For example, DYRS seem to be lacking clear protocols for when to notify families about medical, educational, or placement issues regarding their children. Even though parents retain the medical and education rights for their children when their children are committed, DYRS seems to lack a clear process about how and when important parental discussions should happen. For example, we have seen instances when parents were not consulted about medication for their child or were not notified when their child was hospitalized or moved to a new facility.

Team Decision Making Meetings (TDMs) are meant to be what their name portends—a place where a child’s full team can come together and make decisions regarding how best to meet a child’s underlying needs. These meetings should actively involve the child, their family members, school representatives, and service providers. The DC Court of Appeals has ruled that a child has a right for their post-disposition attorney, such as those working for my organization, to attend their TDMs to protect the child’s rights and to elevate the child’s expressed interests. Per DYRS policies, TDMs are to be held every 90 days and are coordinated by the child’s DYRS Care Coordinator.

Sadly, DYRS is not holding TDMs every 90 days. Instead, they seem to be happening once or twice a year and sometimes not at all. Family members are also not adequately informed about the purpose of the TDM, and they are rarely consulted about the various placement and treatment decisions about their own child.

TDMs must happen at the right times, include the right people, and avoid superficiality, or the appearance of rote indifference. TDMs should not merely be a quick conversation to inform a child or parent of what has already been decided without them or their active engagement. In terms of timing, we believe that 90 days is generally an appropriate cadence. However, we encourage DYRS, whenever possible, to link these meetings to major milestones or changes in services and placement. At the very least, they should be held immediately before and after commitment, before new placements, regularly during any sort of out-of-state or secure placement, and long before discharge and reentry so that appropriate planning can take place.

DYRS seems to be increasingly unwilling to engage non-DYRS stakeholders in the care and treatment of children. Over the past two decades, Open City Advocates has prided itself on working hand-in-hand with DYRS Care Coordinators to ensure the most effective services and best placements for our clients. While DYRS is ultimately responsible for many of the decisions regarding the treatment of a child, our attorneys are often able to speed along processes or offer alternative solutions that better meet the needs of a child or family. Sadly, such collaboration is now exceedingly rare. Our staff attorneys are frequently unable to collaborate directly with DYRS Care Coordinators as we used to; it is now typical for us to receive radio silence in answer to our emails and phone calls requesting basic information about our clients.

When we are able to connect directly with Care Coordinators, they refer our attorneys to DYRS General Counsel. Running each question or clarification through General Counsel is time consuming and often results in conflicting answers. We are grateful for DYRS General Counsel’s collaborative efforts, but they are not positioned to understand the nuances and complexities of each child’s needs: that is the purpose of DYRS care coordination staff. The agency’s staff titles (coordinators of care, representatives of youth development, managers of treatment) are not merely euphemisms for case workers and correctional officers: they’re intended to capture a distinct rehabilitative approach to juvenile justice, which must take a holistic, team approach to be effective.

4. Awaiting placement causes overcrowding.

Whether or not they do it in conformity with the YLS, DYRS assigns each child a “level” of restrictiveness: low, medium, or high. DYRS then sends the child to a placement that matches that level in terms of how restrictive the placement is. A low-level placement can be a family home or a Child and Family Services Agency foster home. A medium-level placement can be a group home, DYRS foster home, or an independent living program. These places are not locked but are secured by staff supervision. A high-level placement is a locked, secure facility, such as New Beginnings Youth Development Center, or an out-of-state psychiatric residential treatment facility or residential treatment center. And though YSC is not a placement, it is the equivalent of a “high” level of restrictiveness because it’s a locked facility.

DYRS is responsible for identifying an appropriate placement for committed children. This responsibility includes collecting the necessary information from Court Social Services to identify and secure a placement, sending applications to potential placements, developing an individualized treatment plan, and completing any interstate compact paperwork for children they’re sending to out-of-state placements.

The problems with DYRS’s handling of the awaiting placement population at YSC became significantly worse two years ago and the awaiting placement period lengthened. The YLS is not being done by the time of commitment, and staff cover multiple roles without the proper credentials or training. For example, Care Coordinators are supposed to act as social workers and case managers and are the primary person responsible for a young person’s treatment plan, placement decisions, and services. Yet we have seen both pre-commitment caseworkers and team meeting facilitators stepping in as Care Coordinators, sometimes for months. DYRS is also required to develop individualized treatment plans for children who are committed, but we have never seen them do that.

In the past, the wait time to get placed would have been a month after commitment at most. Even then, a month is a long time for a child to spend at YSC, especially considering time spent incarcerated before adjudication, and YSC does not offer consistent or in-depth services or programming.

Five to six years ago, by the time of the disposition hearing, application packets to potential placements would have already been sent out and a young person might have already been accepted into a facility. The court used to be able to handle the Article VI hearing (an interstate compact hearing necessary for out-of-state placements) at the same time as disposition, because the young person was already accepted into a facility by then.

Now, it seems like two months after commitment is the minimum wait time. Just getting a Care Coordinator assigned takes weeks or months. We have seen youth wait eight months at YSC following commitment. The average length of commitment is two years, so this means that a child could spend up to a third of the time that a judge has determined necessary for rehabilitation just sitting at YSC without an appropriate placement or individualized treatment.

The newest cause of placement delays is the April freeze on contracts—and this, too, is causing overcrowding. Youth at YSC have been in a three-month holding pattern, without the waiver that DYRS has sought from Mayor Bowser and certainly needs. None of our clients awaiting placement have been able to transition to an out-of-state placement since mid-April when contracting with out-of-state facilities was frozen. DYRS is said to have sought a waiver, but surprisingly it has not been granted.

5. Technical violations are causing overcrowding. DYRS should re-commit itself to restorative justice practices and graduated sanctions.

Two of the most direct and correctable drivers of overcrowding are DYRS’s policies for handling technical violations and youth who abscond from placements. These policies operate on a punitive reflex rather than a rehabilitative one. They use expensive, high-security detention beds to manage low-risk behaviors, creating a revolving door that traps youth, traumatizes them, and actively worsens overcrowding—all without making our community any safer. DYRS fails to use truly graduated sanctions and restorative justice practices.

When a youth violates their community placement agreement, they generally are not committing a new crime. They are, at best, breaching a supervision rule—many of which are not individually tailored to the young person’s needs in the community, and all of which are provided in a lengthy document that must be signed without a lawyer present before they can be released. These cookie-cutter documents sometimes include provisions like civil banning—a condition that requires the young person not re-enter the District of Columbia in any form or fashion!

Technical violations of a community placement agreement can include missing a curfew, failing to charge a GPS ankle monitor, missing a meeting with a case worker, or testing positive for marijuana. While these actions require a response, DYRS’s default is too often the most extreme one: re-arrest and detention at the Youth Services Center (YSC).

Positive Youth Development is a framework for working with young people that DYRS has historically endorsed. In the juvenile justice context, this model recommends that a child’s caregiving team work with the young person’s self-conception and developmentally appropriate needs to help them desist from delinquent behavior.

DYRS (and the District as a whole) can begin to move beyond its over-reliance on youth detention by implementing a robust system of graduated sanctions and restorative justice practices. This approach offers a spectrum of community-based responses that effectively teach accountability without the disruptive and often detrimental effects of removing youth from their families, schools, and communities. Research and practical application have demonstrated that a combination of incentives for positive behavior and proportionate sanctions for misconduct is a more effective strategy for promoting compliance and personal growth than a purely punitive model.

A well-designed system of “graduated responses” systematically increases the objectivity of decision-making when youth violate the conditions of their supervision. For instance, instead of immediate incarceration for a technical violation, a youth might first receive a warning, followed by increased reporting requirements, community service, or participation in a restorative justice circle. For example, a study of Maryland’s graduated response system, the Accountability and Incentives Management (AIM) system, found that youth supervised under this model were significantly less likely to have a violation of probation filed with the court or to be placed in a committed residential facility. The positive effects of the AIM system were consistent across racial groups, indicating that such structured systems can be implemented equitably.

This focus on proportionate and predictable consequences helps to mitigate the racial and ethnic disparities that plague the juvenile justice system. By establishing clear, data-driven criteria for sanctions, graduated response systems limit the subjectivity that can lead to harsher outcomes for youth of color. A commitment to a comprehensive graduated sanctions model that prioritizes community-based interventions and rewards progress can further this success, ensuring that responses to youth misconduct are not only effective but also fair and equitable for all.

6. DYRS’s abscondence return policies cause overcrowding. They should take note of CFSA’s practices.

When a youth runs away from a community-based placement like a group home—an act DYRS labels “abscondence”—the agency’s rigid return policy mandates their automatic placement in a secure detention facility, almost always back to YSC. In fact, DYRS refuses to engage with a young person who has absconded until the young person has been arrested and returned to YSC, even if the young person is asking for mediation or a team meeting. This one-size-fits-all policy is a primary contributor to overcrowding.

Consider why a youth might run away: they may feel unsafe or are being bullied in their current placement; they may have a conflict with family, staff, or peers that they don’t know how to resolve; they may desperately miss their family; the placement may not be equipped to handle their specific mental or behavioral health needs.

A policy that responds to these cries for help with automatic incarceration is a policy that has failed. Instead of de-escalating the situation and assessing the problem, it escalates the punishment, placing the youth in an even more restrictive and potentially dangerous environment. This guarantees that a bed at YSC is filled, regardless of whether that child poses any risk to the community.

Running away is often a trauma response. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a trauma-informed juvenile justice system seeks to understand and address a child’s underlying trauma. An automatic detention policy does the opposite; it re-traumatizes the child by responding to their distress with punishment, further eroding trust in the system designed to help them.

DYRS must replace its rigid, punitive return policy with an assessment-based triage system. When a youth who has absconded is returned, the first step should not be a trip to YSC. A team including the youth, their family, and their lawyer should convene to determine why they ran.

This is what we see and expect from the abuse and neglect system—and in practice many youth committed to DYRS can be understood and managed using the same tools, because delinquency is usually attributable to systemic neglect. The solution should fit the problem: a new placement, conflict mediation, or increased family counseling—not automatic and counterproductive incarceration. Once at YSC, the youth’s original problem remains unaddressed. When they are eventually sent to another placement (or back to the same one), the unresolved issues are likely to resurface, leading to another potential abscondence and another unnecessary stay in detention. This creates a cycle of failure that is blamed on the child, not the policy.

By reforming its policies regarding violations of Community Placement Agreements and abscondence, the Council can significantly and immediately reduce the population at DYRS’s secure facilities, ensuring that these costly placements are reserved only for youth who pose a clear public safety risk, not for those who simply need help.

7. Re-booking offenses that occur in the facility causes overcrowding. It disguises DYRS’s own failure to keep kids safe.

DYRS is directly responsible for recidivism whenever committed youth are involved in incidents within DYRS facilities (either for violence or contraband) and are then re-booked by MPD for new charges, which happened forty-three times in 2024. The safety issues inside of our detention facilities are driven by the mistreatment of our young people, not their misbehavior. In fact, the problem is not unruly children but undertrained and/or overworked adults.

The violence and contraband is clearly due to overcrowding and understaffing: yet too often the focus is placed on staffing levels alone and not on the real problem, which is that too many of our young people are in secure facilities where they don’t need to be.

In two recent lawsuits filed by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (WLC) on behalf of committed young people, we learned of allegations of two egregious instances of DYRS staff brutality against young people being held in DYRS facilities. Following on the heels of a month of lockdowns at YSC in 2023, Disability Rights DC (DRDC) issued a report that details the terrible violence that their client endured at the hands of DYRS staff at New Beginnings. DYRS staff also allegedly retaliated against that young person for filing a complaint. Unfortunately, based on our clients’ experiences, this was not an isolated incident.

DRDC also reports that none of the staff misconduct clearly visible in video was named in DYRS’s internal incident report. It’s not surprising that staff report incidents in a way that shows their actions in the best possible light, but it’s part of a pattern that makes it likely that no one, including DC Council or even DYRS leadership, is learning the full extent of staff abuses within DYRS facilities.

Staff are not using the safety mechanisms they’re trained and required to use, either. Our staff have observed failures in this regard, and ongoing lawsuits allege more. Failure to de-escalate (and often deliberate escalation) means that our young people are less safe.

8. The District’s inability to provide community-based services causes overcrowding.

The detention of children is fundamentally traumatizing. It fills our children with a hurt and rage that they will carry beyond those walls, often manifesting in ways that do great harm. As DC’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council has stated repeatedly, “While the juvenile justice system is intended to rehabilitate children, involvement in the system, particularly secure detention, is well-established to have lasting negative effects on youth such as increased risk of adult incarceration, decreased likelihood of high school graduation and success in the labor market, and worsening of mental health disorders.”

Research shows that incarceration greatly disrupts educational progress and can reduce the likelihood of high school graduation by 26%. And after release, it is typically our staff attorneys fighting to get our clients re-enrolled in school—not the judges, probation officers, or case workers who claimed that a child needed to be locked up in order to get an education.

The best evidence suggests that youth who spend more than six months in detention stop receiving any desistance benefits, and that even shorter periods of time can be traumatic. When we record our clients’ adverse childhood experiences, incarceration is always among them. And we see firsthand the chronic stress and ongoing PTSD that these periods of detention can cause.

There is a desperate need for more community-based placements and community-based services for committed youth. We strongly support family placements with robust wraparound services as the most effective and most therapeutic placements for youth. Community-based placements, such as foster care and independent living programs, can also play a much larger role in closing the gap between “hardware secure” facilities that are ultimately prisons no matter how much we euphemize them. These community-based placements can serve an important function by allowing youth the opportunity to transition into the community from a secure setting, while also providing close support and programming options. They also serve as critical alternatives to incarceration.

As it stands, however, there are limited group home beds for committed boys and none at all for girls. DYRS is also not using most of its available foster home placements, and has limited, if any, placements in independent living programs. This means that a young person waits at a secure facility until a spot opens up even if they have been deemed clinically ready to be discharged or that a medium-level placement is most appropriate for them. This is not only unfair to the individual young person, it goes against DYRS’s rehabilitative mission to place youth in the least restrictive setting that is appropriate for their individual case. To put it plainly, in these instances, young people are being held in secure facilities not because they have been deemed a public safety risk; in fact, they have been deemed ready to return to the community, but because DYRS does not have a community-based placement for them, they remain securely detained. This is a fundamental injustice that violates the spirit of the juvenile justice system.

9. Lack of services for girls is causing overcrowding.

In part due to the lack of community-based options, DYRS relies heavily on out-of-state facilities to place committed girls; and when those places choose not to accept a particular youth, they remain at YSC indefinitely despite the fact that YSC is “not a treatment facility,” to quote DYRS Director Abed. If more community-based options were available, DYRS could choose to place girls there rather than letting them languish at YSC. But they currently do not have that option.

We believe that community-based placements are always more beneficial and therapeutic for young people compared to secure facilities, and we would also like to ensure that they operate as intended. The benefit of these placements is that youth can receive regular access to services, including mental health support, that they can continue to access even beyond their commitment to DYRS. This continuum of care allows them the opportunity to learn how to integrate services into their everyday schedules, which may also include school, work, and family time.

However, in order to keep youth engaged and invested in their own success, robust programming and services need to be made available. In our experience, local group homes for committed youth typically do not provide the level of programming that would be consistent with DYRS’s mission. While youth in a group home can be taken to DYRS facilities, such as the Achievement Centers, for programming, it is our understanding that there are little to no activities that are being programmed by the group homes themselves. This means that during summers, school breaks, weekends, and evenings, youth in group homes are left with very little to do if they are not being brought to a DYRS facility. This creates a vacuum that leads to boredom and frustration, and is often a contributing factor leading to abscondences.

10. Lack of release planning causes overcrowding.

As it currently stands, discharge planning does not occur until just before the youth is scheduled to discharge from a facility; there is also a lack of transparency regarding the discharge process and timeline. This often results in delayed discharges from out-of-home facilities, even when a young person has successfully completed their treatment program, and leads to a gap in services upon discharge. We have noticed that this is especially an issue when it comes to school enrollment, with some clients not getting properly enrolled in community schools for up to several weeks or months after they have returned. While we understand that some delays are unforeseeable, we believe that it is imperative for the agency to engage in robust discharge planning well in advance of a youth’s anticipated return to the community. Indeed, the ROAD Act would, if funded, require that DYRS begin reentry planning within 60 days of a child’s arrival in an out-of-home placement. This is the way to ensure that crucial services, including access to education, are maintained as a youth transitions from one placement to the next.

If a child’s commitment requires them to complete a program at New Beginnings, they can expect to move through seven levels of programming. DYRS usually reports this as six levels of positive youth development, in part because it does not have specific programming for the final level, but DYRS has added a significant extra step because of its own failure to begin discharge planning in a timely fashion. Historically, discharge from New Beginnings was supposed to happen within a week or two of reaching this sixth level, but we have observed that as the delays mount, kids become frustrated. DYRS thus added a seventh step: petitioning for release, known as “home petition.” This has grown from a two-week process into an extra forty-four days, at least: DYRS now requires that a child remain at Level 6 for thirty days, successfully petition for the next level which is called “home petition,” and then DYRS will start the process of scheduling a discharge meeting after two weeks of maintaining good behavior. (And at that meeting they are likely to learn of obstacles to discharge that may require additional days and weeks of incarceration.) In practice, this means that a process that should be as short as six months in the best case scenario now requires at least nine to twelve months, and almost always longer than a year.

Much of this extra time is generated by the bureaucratic delays caused by waiting so long to begin discharge planning. School enrollment, identifying foster homes or ensuring adequate space and safety in the family home, lining up community-based providers for referrals, and completing all the paperwork takes time. Moreover, as children spend longer and longer feeling that they have completed all the expectations set for them without the promised reward of freedom, it gets harder for some of them to maintain positive behavior, which can lead to further delays that are then blamed on them: indeed, they see this temporizing as a violation of the implicit contract the program promises.

DYRS no longer follows a discernible discharge planning timeline, suggesting that a child might stall or regress until the very last minute. However, a young person who has completed level 4 is likely to complete the rest of the program on schedule, is two or three months away from completing the program, and is ready to begin concrete planning for a return to the community. The cost of making last-minute decisions with uncertain timelines is that neither schools nor community placements can keep spots open indefinitely.

Conclusion

This testimony paints a clear picture of a system in crisis, but this is a crisis of DYRS’s own making. The dangerous overcrowding at YSC is not due to a crime wave; it is due to a wave of profound inefficiency and neglect. We see clients waiting eight months for a placement that should have been arranged before commitment. We see youth re-arrested for running away from a placement where they felt unsafe. We see release planning that should take weeks stretch into months due to bureaucratic delays. This isn’t just unjust; it’s illogical and fiscally irresponsible.

Overcrowding is the direct result of a system that has chosen to warehouse children, predominantly Black children from Wards 7 and 8, rather than rehabilitate them. We are funding a bureaucratic machine that manufactures its own crisis, ignores its own case management manual, and inflicts profound trauma on the very youth it is mandated to serve. Funding the ROAD Act and independent oversight is the bare minimum. We are asking you to make a different choice today: to choose timely assessments over ‘dead time,’ community-based solutions over costly incarceration, and our children’s futures over this broken, unjust status quo. We cannot afford to lose another generation to this systemic neglect.