JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Joint Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect met Tuesday to discuss the final version of the Missouri Juvenile Standards as written and presented by members of the Juvenile Officer’s Association.
The standards will create a statewide system of rules and guidelines instead of allowing individual court circuits to set their own parameters on child care services and juvenile justice proceedings. Committee chair Rep. Bill Lant, R-McDonald County, noted that circuit-by-circuit standards can be inconsistent.
“There are 45 different circuits, in some circuits a child is removed if they have scratches or bruises or minor signs of being disciplined or abused, and in others, a child can be running blood and not be removed,” he said. “We don’t need those extremes, we need some type of standardization.”
Lant also said that added pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice after the events in Ferguson last year made that standardization all the more important in terms of juvenile justice.
“On the criminal side of things, if we have children that are going into the justice system we need to treat them the same way all across the state,” Lant said. “We certainly don’t want the problem the Department of Justice has accused us of, of having a different set of standards for St. Louis and Ferguson than we do in Newton County or McDonald County.
“We want to do it the same way everywhere and treat children fairly.”
Lant also said the standards would help mitigate an inherent conflict of interest present in the Missouri court system since circuit court judges hire the chief juvenile officers in their circuit
“The people who are presenting the case to the judge work for the judge,” he said. “If you have a judge that has a very strong personality, it’s going to be done his way or her way, no matter what. That’s not always bad, but in some situations it can be viewed as a conflict of interest.”
The hearing mainly served as an initial presentation of those standards. Later this week, the recommendations will be submitted to the standards committee, followed by a finalization of the rules. Then, the family court committee, a committee within the Missouri Supreme Court,will decide how or if to implement the recommendations.
The standards presented by Beverly Newman, the chief juvenile officer of the 17th Circuit, included examining alternatives to detention, documentation standards, shackling of juveniles in juvenile court, interventions in schools, transferring jurisdiction, among many others.
But it stretches far beyond that. Newman said this new set of recommendations involved a massive amount of work aimed solely at enhancing “how we operate with integrity and competence and be responsive and collaborative and all of those things to make sure the work we’re doing is worthy of the opportunity we have to serve children, youth, families, and communities in our state.”
“We have recommendations that relate to every operation processed throughout the juvenile office,” Newman said. “Whether it be through supervision services, through child abuse and neglect cases, we have standards that impact across the system.
“This is representative of a genuine effort by the juvenile officers to really raise the bar on practice throughout the juvenile justice system, to find issues and address concerns and to just improve what we’re doing.”
Lant said Newman and company had “done a yeoman’s job of including everything that needed to be addressed.”
“I was extremely pleased with the overall work,” he said. “These people with the Juvenile Officer’s Association have worked extremely hard the past 18 months… I think overall what we’ve done today is make it better for the kids one way or another.”
