Financial incentive to try juveniles as adults

Financial incentives
Columbus Dispatch, Sunday, September 17, 2006

With state juvenile detention centers overflowing with petty criminals, Ohio started offering counties financial incentives in 1995 to incarcerate fewer teens and expand local rehabilitation programs. It worked. The number of criminals in state juvenile facilities has plummeted.

But, inadvertently, the program also financially rewards counties for trying juveniles as adults. A "perverse incentive" is how Scott Anderson, of the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, describes it.

How it works
Johnny Doe, 16, is charged with burglary in Franklin County.

In juvenile court: If Doe is sentenced to a year in a state juvenile detention center, the county picks up 75 percent of the $70,000 cost.

In adult court: If Doe is sentenced to state prison for a year, the county pays nothing.

Impact
In a 1999 statewide survey of juvenile judges, 17 percent acknowledged that money had influenced their decision on whether to try a juvenile as an adult.

No wonder. Franklin County’s state incentives have dropped from $1.8 million to $841,000 in the past three years as it sent more teens to juvenile detention. The incentives for Clark County, which transferred felonies to adult court more than twice as often, grew to $1.2 million, surpassing Franklin.

Comments
• "I doubt if a judge has ever made a decision because of money. But it has to figure into it." — Clark County assistant public defender Noel Kaech

• "It has zero influence, in my mind." — Franklin County Domestic Relations Judge Dana Suzanne Preisse

• "It could be happening in isolated cases. But there’s no trend." — Edward Latessa, head of University of Cincinnati’s criminal justice division