CHEYENNE — Gov. Dave Freuden- thal’s new adviser on juvenile justice, recently retired District Judge Gary Hartman, says Wyoming needs to do more to keep youths out of jail while lining up appropriate programs and treatment for troubled kids.
Hartman says it will be up to local communities to develop those new approaches and programs. Wyoming communities already are getting help from the state through a pilot program involving the state departments of family services, health and education.
Under that approach, boards made up of local prosecutors, judges and others evaluate all youths who get in any trouble more serious than a simple traffic violation. Hartman says the boards then recommend the best ways to handle those youths — an approach that can be as simple as mentoring or as severe as detention.
The Legislature helped to start the pilot program — involving Park, Sheridan and Sweetwater counties and the town of Rock River — with a $2 million appropriation last year.
“It’s most effective when the communities put together a continuum of care — all the way from diversion on one hand to talking about secure detention on the other end,” Hartman said in an interview Friday. “Wyoming incarcerates way too many juveniles. We need to find a way to do better delivery of services in Wyoming. That’s what my goal is, to help communities establish these programs.”
Wyoming has the nation’s second- highest rate of locking up juveniles, and nearly three-quarters of those youths go to jail for nonviolent offenses, according to this year’s Kids Count report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Juveniles evaluated by the boards might get a simple, hour-long “pre- screening” and be recommended for mentoring or something similar. Other juveniles who seem to have more complicated issues might go through a more sophisticated screening by the board — one that’s looking for substance abuse, mental health and family problems.
Hartman said it’s common for a youth to have mental-health and substance-abuse problems simultaneously.
“We need to identify those kids because those kids don’t belong in detention,” he said.
