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CENTER ON JUVENILE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE PRESS ROOM |
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| www.cjcj.org |
| Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 1622 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 | Tel: (415) 621-5661 | Fax: (415) 621-5466 |
On one side, kids are graduating from San Francisco's public high schools ready for college at the highest rate in California. On the other side, kids are being locked up in juvenile hall at the highest rate in California.
These are the puzzling findings of a new report that ranks California's 15 largest counties in terms of youth health and safety. San Francisco was on top in two categories -- graduation and incarceration.
"It's a tale of two cities," says Deborah Vargas of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco.
"If you look at the longitudinal trend, that's the way it's been in San Francisco for a very long time," she says. "And the gap seems only to be getting greater."
It is good news that, despite its problems with finances and facilities, San Francisco public schools are preparing students for college. Nearly 60 percent of its graduates meet the University of California and California State University requirements for admission. (By comparison, 35 percent of Los Angeles graduates meet the requirements.)
But the schools are not reaching all students. Of the African American kids who graduated from San Francisco public schools in 2000, just 29 percent met college requirements; for Latinos, it was 31 percent.
"I've been doing these reports for a decade," said Amy Dominguez-Arms, vice president of Children Now, "and San Francisco tends to be a story of disparity in terms of educational outcome."
And in terms of judicial outcome as well. The racial split for detention is the mirror image of the high school graduation rate.
San Francisco locks up more kids per capita than any other large county in California -- and about 55 percent are African American, though they comprise just 12 percent of the total youth population in the city.
If incarcerating kids made our streets safer, or set kids on a more productive path in life, the approach would make sense. But there is no correlation between juvenile crime rates and detention. There surely is no correlation between rehabilitation and detention.
Still, San Francisco keeps throwing kids behind bars in alarming numbers.
"It defies all logic," says Dan Macallair of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
Which is why the Annie. E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore is working with San Francisco, as well as 10 other jurisdictions across the nation, to implement reform. For about a year now, it has been spearheading meetings among all the stakeholders in San Francisco's juvenile justice community to find alternatives to detention.
San Francisco officials seem eager to change the system, though attempts in recent years have failed.
"Using detention is a matter of policy not public safety," says Bart Lubow, the director of the Casey Foundation's program for high-risk youth.
"What we're observing when a county has higher incarceration rates than other places is a difference in the behavior of the adults (making decisions about detention), not the behavior of the kids."
The only thing that works, Lubow says, are programs that involve the family, not just the child. They are complicated, time-consuming, labor-intensive.
They demand that we ask difficult questions about culture and values and traditions, about why one set of kids continues to succeed and another set continues to fail.
San Francisco, the most liberal of cities, is split along social, Economic and racial lines as surely as a town in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
Closing the gap won't be easy, because first we have to acknowledge it's there.
E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.
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