Bill Barton impacts juvenile justice system
Jan. 15, 2008 – Bill Barton has the usual titles: B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.
Now, he’s got a new one – “Champion for Children.”
Marion Juvenile Court Judge Marilyn Moores bestowed the title on Barton, a professor at the Indiana University School of Social Work, for his contributions to reforms at the Marion County Juvenile Center in Indianapolis.
Barton, who specializes in juvenile justice issues, was a key player in devising a new assessment tool to determine which juveniles need to be locked up pending a court hearing.
“We regard the contributions of Dr. Barton this past year as the foundational underpinning to reforms underway,” Moores wrote in a letter to IU School of Social Work Dean Michael Patchner.
“His leadership manifested in a gentle, firm manner as he steered multiple and competing perspectives toward a vision far more fair and just …..than we then could have imagined on our own,” Moores wrote.
“The work of Dr. Barton contributed significantly to the fact that after many years of significant overcrowding in our detention facility, we have reduced our detention population by 30 percent since the adoption of the RAI (Risk Assessment Instrument) in May, 2007.”
Barton, while on sabbatical, volunteered to help the center undertake reforms. But his participation hardly came about by accident.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Barton was working at the Center for The Study of Youth Policy at the University of Michigan. The center became involved in an initiative to assist the juvenile center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. through a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The Florida facility was facing a federal lawsuit involving overcrowding and other issues, Barton recalled. The work that he and other team members did there became the prototype of the Casey Foundation’s national efforts at juvenile detention reform.
When Moores became judge of the juvenile court, she and others began looking at changes needed at the Indianapolis juvenile center and contacted the Casey Foundation and received assistance from retired Florida Circuit Court Judge Frank Orlando, who directed the juvenile center reforms in Florida and knew of Barton’s work.
One of Orlando’s first questions for Marion County officials was whether Barton was involved.
Like Fort Lauderdale, the Indianapolis juvenile center was facing serious problems. A number of staff had been arrested on various charges and an audit of the conditions at the center by Michigan State University detailed “horrible conditions,” Barton said.
Barton became co-chair of a committee whose job was to create a screening instrument to objectively determine who needed to be securely held and who didn’t.
“Detention is simply to protect public safety and to protect the integrity of the court process for a very limited time – from the point of arrest to a court appearance,” Barton said.
But that’s not the way it always worked out on a day-to-day basis, Barton said. Sometimes kids were left in detention because their parents didn’t want to pick them up, or a kid looks funny to the screener or somebody decided a youngster needed to be taught a lesson, he explained.
Barton’s committee devised a framework to determine which juveniles needed to be held and then using the prototype went back and examined past cases to determine how things might have been handled differently.
“It was huge,” Barton said. “That started raising some eyebrows.”
What the committee members found was that many of the juveniles that had been held had never done anything very serious, but kept coming back into the system. Every time they came back the system ratchets up its response even if it was for a minor offense, he explained.
In 2006, the juvenile center held as many as 150 to 160 kids on any given day, with an average daily population of 141. By December of 2007, the average daily population dropped to 86.
How juveniles are handled can play a major role in the future lives, Barton said. Juveniles who are locked up for pre-trial detention are more likely to be placed somewhere other than home after adjudication and were more likely to get in trouble in the future.
In coming up with a new approach, Barton and others visited Portland, Ore., where officials have a different outlook on juveniles, he said.
Here, if juvenile returns after receiving counseling and treatment, people think the kid failed. But in Portland, people blame the plan, not the kid, he explained. That’s not to say the juvenile doesn’t have some responsibility, but they look at it as “we haven’t figured out the best way to handle the situation,” Barton said.
The new assessment tool is allowing a more objective way to limit the use of detention except for those who are deemed likely to commit another offense pending their court hearing or fail to appear for the court hearing.
Because of the new assessment tool, the juvenile center’s population has dropped, which has allowed it get by with fewer beds and close two units, Moores notes in her letter.
Barton continues to work with the juvenile center officials as they look to devise an approach that moves beyond vacillating between the twin pillars of either treatment or punishment that have governed juvenile courts since the beginning of the 20th century.
Bill Barton, champion for kids
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