Juvenile Justice Pandemic Lessons

The Juvenile Jurisdiction Advisory Committee (JJAC) met on May 15th. The meeting began with a presentation from William Lassiter, Deputy Secretary for Juvenile Justice. While the goal of the presentation was to provide data on trends since implementation of raise the age and the resulting resource needs, the presentation included information and data about juvenile justice system trends during this unprecedented pandemic. The data left me wondering—can changes in juvenile justice system utilization during the pandemic teach us lessons for the functioning of the system outside of a pandemic? Juvenile Detention Utilization Among the many updates posted on the website of the Department of Public Safety (DPS) related to COVID-19 is a statement that one of the operational changes instituted to protect the health and safety of staff, juveniles, and their families has been “[d]ecreasing the number of youth in detention through the utilization of electronic monitoring.” The JJAC presentation noted that the detention population was reduced by 27% (from 202 to 148) as a result of this effort. The reduction moved the level of detention utilization back to the level that existed before the increase in the age of juvenile jurisdiction. Data from March 28th through April 30th shows that the detention population during this time period was virtually identical to the detention population during that time period in 2019—prior to raise the age. This trend is interesting for at least two reasons. First, G.S. 7B-1906(d) requires that at hearings for continued custody “[t]he State shall bear the burden at [...]