How Ohio lawmakers are looking into juvenile justice concerns
Jesse Bethea, NBC4, August 25, 2026.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — A new legislative study committee will examine serious concerns among lawmakers and child welfare experts about how the juvenile justice system treats youth who have been adjudicated delinquent.
The Study Committee to Evaluate the Placement of Delinquent Children in Residential Facilities held its first hearing Monday morning, co-chaired by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering).
With little time left in the 136th General Assembly, White said her committee will “hit the ground running” and continue its work until the end of this year, ultimately producing a report and recommendations for the governor, legislature and the public.
The idea for a study committee came out of legislation White and Rep. Phil Plummer (R-Dayton) worked on two years ago, trying to establish stronger accountability for the hundreds of juvenile group homes operating in Ohio.
White said during that process they learned, “many times youth who had been adjudicated delinquent by the juvenile court system were being placed in the care of children’s services agencies instead of being placed in detention centers.”
“The children’s services agencies are struggling to find proper places to care for these kids,” White said. “These children are being mixed in with kids in the foster care system in some of these group homes who’ve been traumatized and had violations against themselves.”
Committee member Rep. Erika White (D-Springfield Twp.) said while she shares concerns about mixing adjudicated delinquents with youth who have been removed from dangerous or abusive homes, she also wants the committee to examine whether group home settings are even helpful to adjudicated youth.
“They’re children; we have to remember that. Yes, they’re accountable for the crime they committed, but how do we help them become adults who are part of our community and our society?” Erika White said. “What does it look like to truly help a child to go from being a juvenile delinquent or in the juvenile justice system to being an adult?”
Incentives For Diversion
Judges in Ohio have broad sentencing discretion, and juvenile judges are incentivized to divert adjudicated youth away from detention facilities operated by the Department of Youth Services (DYS). Since the 1990s, Ohio’s RECLAIM program has granted money for local, community-based juvenile corrections programs, with amounts determined by the number of children diverted out of the justice system.
The more children a judge diverts from DYS detention, the more funds are available for their community. RECLAIM says its program has reduced overcrowding in the state’s youth institutions and allowed DYS to focus treatment and rehabilitation efforts on more serious, repeat youth offenders.
It’s also resulted in youth who are diverted away from the juvenile justice system ending up in the child protective services system instead, as Angela Sausser, executive director of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO), explained to lawmakers Monday.
On any given day in 2025, according to Sausser, three percent of the youth entering children services custody did so due to delinquency or unruliness, eight percent entered due to mental health or substance abuse disorders, and eight percent entered as “dependent,” a term sometimes used by juvenile courts to refer to youth adjudicated for serious offenses. In 2021, more than nine percent of all youth who entered children services custody were diverted from juvenile justice. More than a quarter of those were accused or convicted of a felony offense.
“The purpose of the children services system is to protect children from abuse and neglect by their parents or caregivers,” Sausser said. “Increasingly, however, Ohio’s child protective services are expected to serve children whose needs and reasons for coming into PCSA custody fall primarily within other systems, including behavioral health (mental health and substance use), developmental disabilities, and juvenile justice, particularly when those systems lack sufficient treatment services, placement options, or funding.”
Besides funding incentives, there are practical reasons why juvenile judges prefer to divert youth away from detention. As Paul Pfeifer, former state Supreme Court justice and executive director of the Ohio Judicial Conference, testified in 2024, juvenile judges are often unaware of specialized residential facilities that can accept and properly treat delinquent children.
Nor is separating children with criminal histories from other children in foster care necessarily the best choice. Kate Rossman, policy manager for the Ohio Children’s Alliance, told lawmakers in 2024 that such an approach actually “contradicts therapeutic best practices.”
There is also the fact that, as Pfeifer pointed out, “many children involved with the juvenile court system have dual status as both an adjudicated delinquent and a foster child.”
Erika White echoed that point, saying there are plenty of examples of youth in the juvenile justice system who have also experienced the sort of mistreatment or abuse that would require attention from child protective services. In other cases, said Erika White, adults influence children to commit crimes, knowing the consequences will be lighter.
“We have to realize these are children where the adults or the village that’s around that child has failed,” she said.
Finally, the alternative — institutionalizing more adjudicated children — is also undesirable. Sausser told the committee that PCSAO strongly supports reforms that reduce the reliance on placing kids in restrictive institutional settings.
“However, the responsibility and cost of serving these children have shifted to the children services system, which must comply with court orders and cannot decline service or placement of a child,” Sausser said.
“There Is Money To Be Had”
Making the placement of adjudicated youth an additional responsibility of child protective services adds strain to a system already at the breaking point.
The number of Ohio children in foster care has declined in recent years, but the cost of placing those children in appropriate settings has gone up. The Ohio Department of Children and Youth (DCY) has struggled to establish standard rates for foster placements, in part because providers have not voluntarily shared useful data with the state.
Child welfare professionals like Tammy Moore Morton, director of Scioto County Job and Family Services, have seen firsthand how and why foster placement costs can deplete a county’s resources. She described how one child in her agency’s custody ended up in at least a dozen different placements around the state because they exhibited “extreme behaviors.”
“The facilities can decide to increase our daily rate to any amount they want without necessarily increasing the level of care,” Morton said. “They know this child is hard to place, so they take advantage of the situation and charge the county unreasonably or threaten discharge or return the child to the lobby of the agency.”
Numbers published by PCSAO bear this out; in 2021, about six percent of youth who came into care had to spend at least one night sleeping at their county children services agency because there were no available providers willing to accept that child’s level of care.
Testimony on the first day of hearings circled at times around the implication that many group home providers see foster care first and foremost as a business, which DCY director Kara Wente tied to the dramatic increase in placement costs.
“If the placement’s between $236 and $400 per day, there is money to be had there,” Wente said. “And I would hope that they want to serve the mission of actually helping kids.”
A uniquely high concentration of group homes has appeared in the Dayton area in recent years, especially in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods. Montgomery County Juvenile Judge Helen Wallace said that also appears to be part of the business model.
“We have heard that business developers are buying up cheap real estate and staffing them with young, inexperienced staff who have not gone through extensive training that might be available to higher-level group homes for the high per diem, per child rates,” Wallace said.
Treating foster group homes as a business model also means, according to Wente, “they actually have to take kids from out of town to meet the numbers and make it lucrative.”
Counties all over the state end up sending kids to Dayton, far from their families and friends and making reunification even harder. When group homes are concentrated in impoverished areas and supervised by untrained and inattentive staff members, delinquent youth are also at increased risk of reoffending, sometimes against other kids in the home.
In 2024, Dayton Police Chief Eric Henderson told lawmakers his officers had seen a notable increase in calls for service involving youth group homes.
He described one case in which a child had absconded from a group home and was hesitant to return, eventually telling officers he had been touched inappropriately by another youth resident. In another incident, a 14-year-old was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries after other kids in the same group home beat him up for stealing a video game console.
According to Henderson, no adults or group home employees were aware of the assault.
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