Slow Start to Chicago Youth Diversion Plans

Over the last two decades, Chicago’s political leaders have spent tens of millions on attempts to treat children arrested by police more like children and less like a public safety menace.

It is part of a national trend away from the harsher punishments of handcuffs, jail cells, and life-altering criminal records — an often-cruel system that never lived up to its promise of reducing crime or rehabilitating kids.

Now, an Injustice Watch examination of Chicago’s efforts at youth justice reform — including dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of public records, and a decade of arrest data — reveals an inept, grindingly slow response to kids who commit crimes. It’s been a Band-Aid on a deep wound.

The investigation showed the city has hired contractors with records of failure, the Chicago Police Department didn’t buy in to key reforms, and a long-promised new program has delivered barely any help to the thousands of kids who might need it.

The latest failure is a $10 million initiative offering some kids who have been arrested one to three months of services — including help with school, legal support, or counseling. While police arrested about 3,600 kids last year, they referred only 286 to the program in its first 11 months. Of those, only 35 completed the program. That’s roughly one for every 100 kids police arrest.

City officials have also promised for years to begin offering these services to kids in lieu of arresting them instead of afterward. No such program has begun, and the city has offered no timeline to start.

The post-arrest services the city did manage to provide came from nonprofit groups, including some with tainted records. The city rehired a nonprofit that lost a previous city contract after failing to keep adequate records. Another fledgling group is getting city money, even though it failed to file its paperwork to operate as a charity in Illinois. A third group was involved last year in a controversy over the alleged misuse of confidential information about child defendants.

The contractors’ past performance was not part of the vetting process, said Lisa Hampton, who oversees the program for Chicago Department of Family and Support Services.

The police department, meanwhile, spent nearly five years flouting the federal consent decree imposed after an officer murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. The sweeping court order in part commanded the department to encourage officers to route kids away from arrest and court and toward services.

When the department finally adopted a new policy late last year, advocates blasted the new rules as giving too much discretion to a force with a long history of abusing people of color.

The city’s flailing effort illustrates how then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Mayor Brandon Johnson — who promised to address poverty instead of relying entirely on police to combat crime — have struggled to overhaul shoddy systems inherited from former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley. It’s a practical and political challenge in a city scarred by consistent serious crimes by kids, where viral videos of young people brawling and brandishing weapons downtown drive calls for curfews and tougher punishment.

The city is close to a turning point.

Funding for the effort — from federal Covid-19 relief money — is expected to end by 2026 at the latest, so city leaders now face consequential decisions about how to deal with youth crime and how to pay for it.

“Nothing involving police ever helped me in no type of way,” said Joe Montgomery, who mentors kids for Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation after spending his youth tangled in the juvenile justice system.

Montgomery, now 27, was arrested numerous times as a child for minor and serious offenses, and as a young adult, he spent about four years behind bars for armed robbery. At the same time, he moved around Chicago roughly 30 times. Montgomery said the instability led him into the streets, where he robbed people and sold drugs.

Despite his constant contact with the government as a kid, he said he was never offered a path to the thing he and his family needed most: a home.

While the city has struggled to help kids who get arrested, police do arrest drastically fewer children than they once did, as part of a slowdown in many kinds of police activity. Youth arrests decreased from about 21,000 in 2013 to 3,600 last year, police data shows, tracking a similar decrease in adult arrests. Youth arrests for most minor and major offenses have decreased, and police have nearly quit arresting kids for drug crimes.

One thing that has remained steady is the percentage of Black or Latinx kids arrested. In 2023, police made more arrests of Black and Latinx kids — 3,496 — than they did white kids across the entire past decade.

Several experts on the treatment of kids in the legal system applauded the decrease in arrests but said the city should do more to ensure kids aren’t taken into custody unless it’s truly necessary. They said the city should finally start living up to its promise to offer services to kids without arresting them and gear services more toward survival needs, such as housing.

“We are so committed to doing what doesn’t work,” said Gladys Carrión, the former commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. “They’re gonna grow up. And so either we pay for it now, or we pay for it later in homelessness and crime in the adult system.”

Chicago spent about 30 times more on police overtime in 2023 alone than it has allotted to its new program to steer kids away from jail.

While on the campaign trail last year, Johnson promised more transparency in his administration and said violations of open records laws “threaten democracy and erode trust.”

Yet his administration broke those laws for months during Injustice Watch’s reporting.

The city repeatedly refused to give up records detailing its new program until Injustice Watch threatened a lawsuit and did not hand over nonprofit groups’ applications until the organization sued the city. Meanwhile, Johnson’s staff told nonprofits working with the city to rebuff Injustice Watch inquiries. Johnson, Lightfoot, and Police Superintendent Larry Snelling all declined interview requests. Police department officials also refused to directly answer written questions.

One of Johnson’s spokespeople attributed the secrecy to the sensitive nature of information about kids in the program.

But Deputy Mayor of Community Safety Garien Gatewood acknowledged changes in the city’s approach “take a little bit longer than we would like” and haven’t helped enough kids, a view shared by some on the Chicago City Council. Gatewood said the Johnson administration is working on expanding the program — though he gave few details — as part of a “sea change in how we view young people.”

“My general philosophy is we want to have as few people involved with the criminal justice system as humanly possible,” Gatewood said.

A program that serves few

After the city’s previous youth justice program melted down, the Lightfoot administration spent years designing a new one that started operating shortly after Johnson took office in May 2023. It was supposed to include “diversion” — a path away from the courts after arrest — and “deflection” — the practice of offering services and avoiding arrests altogether.

The push is fueled by research showing jails, prisons, and criminal records often do more harm than help. Studies have shown they hurt schooling and job prospects and likely harm mental and physical health. Recidivism is common.

“We’re really working towards reducing the overrepresentation of youth of color in the justice system and to promote a safe well-being and prosperity of all youth in the city of Chicago,” Hampton, director of prevention and intervention for the Youth Services Division of the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, told nonprofit groups in 2022.

The city’s stated goal remains far apart from reality.

The program is designed to provide an early exit from the system for some kids. Rather than routing children toward the courts or lockup, officers can let them walk free while referring them to nonprofits offering voluntary services for 30, 60, or 90 days if parents want them. The groups offer kids in-house services, and they can try to arrange other help through nonprofits or government agencies.

The data provided by the city is vague and incomplete, but it’s clear from public records almost all kids police referred to the program in its first months were arrested on relatively minor charges, such as trespassing, retail theft, or misdemeanor battery.

As of April, 286 kids were referred by police to the program. The parents of 154 kids declined help. Another 38 started and left the program without completing it. Decisions by parents of another 42 were pending, and 17 kids were enrolled in the program but had not yet completed it.

City officials expected to offer at least some services to 800 kids by the end of this year, according to contract records. As of the end of April, 90 kids — including those who quit the program early — had received services of some kind, meaning the city was on pace to serve less than one-fifth the kids it planned to help.

The 35 who completed the program did so by meeting a few benchmarks. They were required to achieve two “youth-derived goals” that could include going to school and attending family counseling and to complete another task, such as participating in a peace circle or making an apology. The nonprofits also set them up with two connections to services that could include housing support and mental health treatment.

Though city officials previously described the program as including services for kids without arresting them, that hasn’t started. Every kid in the program was arrested but not referred to court.

Hampton told Injustice Watch family services officials had trained some detectives on the program. Asked for records on rules or guidelines for using the program, the 12,000-member police department said it had none.

Multiple City Council members told Injustice Watch they were concerned about how few kids the program has helped. Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st Ward) took an early interest in the program and had high hopes for it in his Northwest Side ward, but he was disappointed in how few kids police had referred in his area.

“That’s an F to me, unfortunately,” he said.

Hampton said the city is working on adding services without arrest but said she couldn’t specify when it would happen. She noted the high rate of parents declining when asked about the low participation.

“It’s not a mandated program, and so it’s the parents’ decision. So I can’t comment on whether the number is good or bad,” she said.

City gives millions to contractor with troubled past

The nonprofits include some with spotty records or limited experience.

SGA Youth & Family Services won a 2023 city contract to provide youth services on the far South Side despite playing a central role in the city’s disastrous past youth justice effort, the Juvenile Intervention and Support Center.

In 2020, then-Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson criticized the city’s $5 million-per-year initiative as a “primarily punitive” lockup for kids. JISC was started in 2006 under Daley and housed in a building where the late Cmdr. Jon Burge and his men were previously accused of torturing suspects.

“Because JISC is not designed according to best practices for youth diversion programs, it subjects youth to a negative experience that does not encourage their success,” Ferguson wrote in his report.

SGA offered services at the center, and Ferguson found the group’s records were so “inconsistent and frequently inaccurate” investigators couldn’t determine whether JISC was fulfilling its goal to reduce recidivism.

Asked about the city rehiring SGA, Ferguson, now president of the research organization the Civic Federation, told Injustice Watch, “It raises a lot of questions.”

SGA, a frequent city contractor with roots stretching back more than a century, is better funded than most groups in the program, with more than $18 million in total revenue during the last fiscal year.

The city awarded SGA a contract worth up to $500,000 for its work on the new youth program, city records show. Martha Guerrero, SGA’s CEO, did not respond to requests for comment.

The group used its application for the city program to highlight its long experience and programming “designed to empower youth and eliminate or lessen the effects of violence in their community.”

Other nonprofits in the program are much newer to serving kids, Injustice Watch found.

Maurice “Pha’Tal” Perkins — who spent years in and out of the justice system — founded the Englewood-based organization Think Outside Da Block in 2016 and ran it on a slim budget for years. Then last year, the group won four city social services contracts potentially worth nearly $1.7 million, including one worth up to $500,000 for the youth program. His sister runs the program out of a house owned by their mother on the city’s South Side, records show.

Records also show the group failed to register as a charitable organization with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office last year and hadn’t filed the papers in June, even after the threat of legal action.

“Our office is considering all available options to bring this organization into compliance,” said Jamey Dunn-Thomason, Raoul’s spokeswoman.

Perkins and his sister, Charice McCullum, declined to comment. The group’s application pointed to “extensive experience working with youth in the target population for this program” through youth groups and community initiatives.

Another group in the program helped run a now-shuttered police department youth program and got tangled in a controversy in the juvenile courts.

As the city worked for years starting in 2020 to set up a new initiative to give arrested kids services, CPD continued running a program that involved staff from Lawndale Christian Legal Center coordinating legal and social services for arrested kids. Data provided by the city on the program is incomplete and contains errors, making it impossible for Injustice Watch to assess the group’s performance. CPD ended the initiative when the new one started in 2023.

The city paid the group nearly $1.8 million for the old program between 2020 and 2023, records show. In 2023, the city awarded Lawndale Christian another contract worth up to $500,000 for the current youth program.

Last year, the nonprofit drew attention from the county inspector general’s office for its role in the alleged misuse of the sensitive information of children accused of crimes. The watchdog said the Cook County public defender’s office, under former leader Amy Campanelli, may have broken the law by releasing the information of children charged with crimes to the organization, which was trying to enroll kids in a study of the value of its services.

The watchdog said the nonprofit’s executive director, Cliff Nellis, had “expressed fear of losing funding if the legal center did not receive enough referrals.” Nellis sent one email to Campanelli saying, “I’m concerned … that funding for it will stop if we don’t get our numbers up to 40 per month.”

In earlier reports, Campanelli and Nellis told Injustice Watch they ordered their staffs to seek consent for the kids.

When Campanelli later lost her job as chief public defender, the nonprofit hired her, though she left the organization after the inspector general’s report came out. Campanelli and Nellis were investigated by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which took no action.

Nellis declined to comment for this report.

Asked about the groups, Hampton said DFSS did not weigh past performance when awarding the contracts, and she said she was confident her agency would quickly spot problems.

Even if the groups function well, they’re limited to what services they provide themselves or find in a gap-ridden social safety net. People who work with kids with behavioral problems cited housing as a frequent need in a city where getting a public housing voucher can take decades.

Academics who study youth justice voiced concern the program might not reliably provide kids with survival needs and said unhelpful services might actually hurt them.

“You would be better off playing video games in your house than participating in things that might just be reminding you that you’re one of the bad kids,” said Stephanie Kollmann, policy director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

One 19-year-old from Chicago with a juvenile record wondered why it should take an arrest to get services.

He told Injustice Watch he started acting out as a teenager while grieving the shooting death of a close friend. The man, who Injustice Watch is not naming because of the potential harm of exposing his youth record, said he got arrested on an armed robbery charge when he was 16, then again for vehicular hijacking, and he spent time in the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and youth prison.

He said he hated the experience, which made him feel like a zoo animal or someone’s pet, but he was glad he had it because it taught him, “I just can’t be in jail.”

He said it’s helpful for kids to have an advocate to help meet their needs.

“They only give you that for some reason after you get out of jail,” he said.

Years of failure

The Lightfoot administration inherited a youth justice program on the verge of collapse under Emanuel. Lightfoot promised “a new youth diversion and deflection model that is trauma-informed, services oriented, and limits the role of law enforcement,” per a 2021 slideshow made to brief members of City Council.

Those ambitions dwindled because the mayor stopped pressing for the changes, according to three high-level Lightfoot staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. And the police department — famous for its reluctance toward reform — resisted starting a program to avoid arrests altogether, sources said.

Even tracking who was running the show in an administration plagued by employee turnover calls for a spreadsheet. Lightfoot had four acting or permanent deputy mayors for public safety in four years, four permanent or temporary police superintendents, and two family services commissioners.

“In order to be successful, you needed extraordinary leadership, aligned, focused, building an infrastructure. And that didn’t exist,” said a former top Lightfoot aide who continues to work in government and asked not to be named.

Ferguson, the former inspector general, said, “What we’re talking about is sound and competent public administration, which isn’t our finest tradition.”

Lightfoot called for fixing youth justice before taking office, when Emanuel picked her to lead his Police Accountability Task Force during the crisis sparked by officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times in 2014.

The task force’s 2016 report said, “Arrest and detention should be reserved for the most violent youth offenders. Otherwise, diversion to community-based resources should be the first priority when working with youth.”

Lightfoot won office in 2019, and momentum to overhaul the city’s approach to youths increased in 2020, when Ferguson issued his damning report on the prior program and DFSS announced it would pull out of the initiative.

The new effort to route kids away from the system was one of 26 initiatives Lightfoot marketed as anti-violence measures made possible by $1.9 billion in Covid-19 relief. Lightfoot moved glacially, and the youth justice program launched in 2023, the year after it was promised.

Another cornerstone of Lightfoot’s plan was CPD changing its rules about dealing with kids to comply with the consent decree, a 2019 federal court order city officials promised would improve the police department. The police have mostly failed to comply with the order since it was signed, and their handling of youth justice is no exception.

The department was nearly five years behind schedule when it finally changed the policy in December. The department’s new policy says it is “encouraging officers to exercise discretion by using alternatives to arrest and alternatives to referral to court” and tells them to consider alternatives to arrest “when applicable and available.”

Advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, want a stricter policy. They wrote to the city’s lawyers they were “deeply concerned that the current policy will not keep youth out of the criminal legal system.” They want police to be told “arrest is a last resort option.”

The rules give discretion to a force with a long history of hurting Black and brown people, noted Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago Law School professor and a lawyer for the advocacy groups.

“There should be certain things that are just black and white: ‘Don’t arrest kids for this, no matter what.’ Absolute prohibitions,” he said.

Youth arrests down, but disparities persist

Kids are less likely to be arrested in Chicago these days, just like adults, records show. There are a number of possible explanations, including drug decriminalization, fewer reported crimes, the pandemic, and increased scrutiny of the police nationwide.

Youth arrests for nearly all types of offenses dropped precipitously from 2013 to 2023, with the exception of a few high-profile categories. Weapons-related offenses have remained relatively steady while arrests for vehicle theft and carjacking have increased.

It is hard to track whether police focus more on serious crimes now, because CPD’s data is vast and messy. But arrests for several categories of minor offenses have dropped significantly. In 2023, there were 285 arrests for misdemeanor assault or battery, 134 for vandalism, and 183 for disorderly conduct, all fractions of the totals a decade ago.

High-school-aged kids are consistently the most likely to get arrested, with 15- to 17-year-olds making up nearly four out of every five arrests last year. Still, CPD made 271 arrests of kids aged 13 and younger last year. Unlike many states, Illinois lacks a minimum age of arrest.

It’s tough to precisely track trends in punishment or services because the programming has changed often. State law restricts the release of information on kids in the court system, and the police offer only vague data that makes it tough to assess outcomes for kids in the justice system.

But it’s clear most kids still go to court or juvenile jail. Police data shows two-thirds of kids arrested last year were either held at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center — long decried by advocates as inhumane and ineffective — or referred to court rather than diverted from the system. That proportion has largely held steady for years.

Some experts say police take a softer approach to white kids, but data showing who doesn’t get arrested, naturally, is scant.

The racial breakdown of arrests is grimly familiar; 79% of arrests since 2013 were of Black youths, despite Black kids making up 30% the city’s youth population. White kids, who make up about 20% of the city’s youth population, accounted for less than 3% of arrests.

The damning 2017 Department of Justice report on the Chicago police said, “One officer told us that the law is unquestionably enforced differently in some neighborhoods: When ‘kids’ on the North Side of Chicago get caught with marijuana, they get a citation; kids on the South Side get arrested. This officer’s commander confirmed this approach when he told us that his policing philosophy in areas with violence is to make arrests because that was how he ‘was brought up.’”

Teacher Mike Smith told Injustice Watch he observed the disparate treatment firsthand. Smith, a Black educator who currently works for the Chicago Teachers Union, said when he taught in largely Black and brown schools, kids got arrested for fighting. He contrasted that with his experience attending largely white suburban schools as a child, where school staff handled fights without police.

“People understood that they weren’t criminals,” he said. “People just accepted them as kids, and these are the things that kids do.”

Possible fixes

Chicago’s failures need fixes from technical to profound, experts and city leaders said.

Some City Council members in the past advocated an approach like the one in Miami-Dade County, Florida. There, police deliver kids arrested throughout the county — roughly the same population as Chicago — to the Juvenile Assessment Center. Staff then screen kids and coordinate services.

Some experts criticized the Florida initiative for giving kids arrest records along with services, but proponents see it as a competently managed version of Chicago’s past efforts.

Former Chicago City Council member Michele Smith, a former federal prosecutor who led hearings on youth justice highlighting the Miami program, said the county should step in and help run something similar.

Academics and several City Council members said the city should finally formalize a program to give quality services to kids without arresting them.

“I think it’s real critical to have a deflection process versus a diversion process where you end up in the system,” said Ald. Michael Rodriguez (22nd Ward), who used to lead the Little Village social services nonprofit Enlace Chicago.

Some researchers say Chicago’s problems with youth justice have roots in state law, which allows police to arrest kids of any age. Though details vary widely, at least 26 states have some minimum age requirement to prosecute a child. The Civitas ChildLaw Center at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 2021 called for a law barring arrest for kids younger than age 14.

Beyond the technical fixes, experts and stakeholders interviewed agreed: Meaningful reforms must include more resources for the survival needs of families.

Ald. Matt Martin (47th Ward), vice chair of the City Council subcommittee that oversaw the spending of federal Covid-19 relief money, said the city should review its social services spending and pull back on what’s not working while pouring more into things that might, including housing.

“Rather than spreading our money so thinly all across the board, I wonder if we should give some thought to taking a bigger swing on some issues,” he said.

As the federal money runs out, the city will be forced to make choices about what to fund and how to treat kids who can go one way or the other.

“We can choose to look at normal adolescent behavior as criminal, or we can choose not to. We can choose to look at trauma responses as criminal, or not,” said Lisa Jacobs, associate director of the Legislation and Policy Clinic at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

“We can choose to respond in other ways that actually give families what they need to be safe and be together. And we do that more in some neighborhoods than others.”

Missy Scavongelli and David Jackson contributed to this report.