Out of destruction can come rebirth.
Like the phoenix, a mystical bird of Greek mythology that rises from the ashes of its predecessor, we are experiencing today a rebirth of a once promising trend in juvenile justice I refer to as deconstruction, which goes well beyond what we commonly call deinstitutionalization.
Deinstitutionalization is the process of identifying which youth shouldn't be incarcerated, and assumes that prisons for youth are a necessity, though maybe fewer are needed. Deconstruction is the process of shuttering all youth prisons as we know them today. It assumes that most kids don’t require secure confinement and that the few who do should be housed in smaller secure residential housing inside the communities where their families are located.
We are most familiar with the term deinstitutionalization because it is one of the four core protections of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), called the Deinstitutionalization of Status Offenders (commonly referred to as the DSO protection). Its intended purpose is to eliminate incarceration of youth whose conduct would not be criminal if they were adults, such as unruly and truant behavior.
[For more of this story, written by Steven Teske, go to http://jjie.org/2017/07/10/tea...ad-situations-worse/]
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