Kansas fund intended to keep youth out of prison is projected to be empty by 2024

When Kansas passed a major juvenile justice reform bill in 2016, among those in strong support was then-Sen. Laura Kelly.

Her one caveat, according to a Kansas Health Institute report, was concern that the dollars set aside for programs to keep kids out of prison would be diverted to other needs. So language was inserted requiring a governor to gain legislative approval before tapping any juvenile justice funds.

The initiative showed signs of success. Population at the Kansas Juvenile Correction facility dropped by 40 percent. Subsequent annual funding and savings from reduced incarceration costs helped the program accumulate a $42 million reserve by 2021.

But five years later, now-Gov. Kelly did exactly what she opposed as a legislator. She sought permission this year to pull the entire $42 million and spend it elsewhere. Lawmakers allowed her to move $21 million out of the account.

The cut was made despite a projected $1 billion surplus in the 2021 state budget approved last week. Kelly has not yet signed the budget into law.

If anticipated expenditures and allocations remain the same, the juvenile justice fund could be out of money by the end of 2024, according to the non-partisan legislative research department.

Advocates and lawmakers say this risks elimination of existing programs while hindering the progress of new projects.

“This is going to be a bigger issue next year,” said Rep. Russ Jennings, a Lakin Republican and chair of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee. “Juvenile justice reform falls flat on its face if it doesn’t have the funding to provide the programs that are required.”

Development of projects has been slow. It takes time for a new program to meet qualifications for funding and secure approval from a poky state bureaucracy, supporters say.

In a statement last week Sam Coleman, a spokesman for Kelly, said with continued annual appropriations it’s unlikely the Department of Corrections will spend enough from the fund to deplete it.

“This administration remains committed to working with the Legislature, local governments, and stakeholders to enhance our services for justice-involved youth. At current rates of spending, we anticipate the balance on this fund may continue to grow in the short term,” Coleman said.

2016 efforts

Studies by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology show that incarcerated youth face diminished futures. They are less likely to graduate high school than their non-incarcerated peers and more likely to be jailed as adults and suffer poorer mental and physical health.

In 2016 Kansas passed reforms intended to shift the focus from incarceration to rehabilitation of youth. As part of those efforts, lawmakers set up the Evidence-based Programs Fund to support alternatives to incarceration.

The fund’s annual allocations have varied over the years. It receives any money saved by having fewer juveniles in prison alongside additional dollars provided by the governor and Legislature.

Current approved budgets allocate $14.3 million to the fund in 2021 and $12.5 in 2022. But savings from reduced correctional costs were only $54,000 in 2021 — a fraction of the millions transferred in previous years because fewer dollars were allocated for juvenile incarceration to begin with.

The fund has accumulated $42 million in five years. Facing the potential for COVID-19 related budget shortfalls, Kelly recommended the money be transferred into the state general fund this year. Kansas lawmakers on budget committees chose to retain half the account while allowing the rest to be used for other purposes.

Spending from the program has slowly increased. In 2020, the Department of Corrections spent $9.6 million and has budgeted $14.3 million in 2021 and $21.6 million in 2022.

The money has gone to a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing the youth prison population.

They range from family engagement projects to mental health programs and grants to local organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of Topeka. All are designed to help troubled juveniles stay closer to home and attend school. They can be recommended by a judge as part of probation in lieu of incarceration.

The juveniles receive case managers, mentoring, therapy and counseling for substance abuse and behavioral issues. Parents get training to better address their child’s challenges.

Lori Gonzales, Chief Program Officer at Ember Hope, said her organization depends on grants provided by the funds to administer a functional family therapy program in 52 western Kansas counties.

The therapy, she said, works with juvenile offenders and their parents to identify and resolve issues at home that could contribute to bad behavior.

“A lot of these areas are rural and frontier, so it’s really difficult to find services out in those areas to also help stabilize the youth and families,” Gonzales said. “(Our clinicians) may spend a couple hours of windshield time to get to a family in an area who may otherwise not have had services available.”

Jennings credits those programs with a dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration over the past five years.

In 2016 the Kansas Juvenile Correctional Facility housed 245 juveniles. By 2020 the number had gradually declined to 147

In its 2020 annual report, the Kansas Department of Corrections said the population has dropped because “youth who do not need the deep-end supervision and programming are being kept in the community.”

“I’m afraid (loss in funding) will just turn things in the opposite direction,” Jennings said. “We’ll have more kids in the system, deeper in the system. Keeping them out of juvenile correctional facilities safely and serving them in the community is much better than locking them up.”

Nichole Lee, Campaign Manager at Progeny, a youth-led organization that advocates for juvenile justice reform, said young people who are released from the system need time to adjust to a society they don’t recognize. Once she had to teach a 22-year-old how to use a cell phone.

Jazmine Rogers, an 18-year-old youth advocate for the organization, summed up the impact of incarceration in one word: “traumatizing.”

“Young people have no way to try to grow or try to better themselves in a facility like that,” she said.

Community-based programs, such as those supported by the state effort, help treat the juveniles near home where they will see less disruption and more meaningful improvement.

“Continuing to invest in that, in an ideal world, would be essentially eliminating the need to lock kids up,” said Mike Fonkert, campaign director, at Kansas Appleseed.

“Kids that end up deep in the system aren’t bad kids, they’re kids that have done bad things … They’re almost all of them reacting to some form of childhood trauma.”

Future projects

Fonkert said he doesn’t believe that the Department of Corrections will actually spend the dollars next year it anticipates and dilute the fund by 2024.

However, he said, removal of half the reserves creates a frustrating barrier for new projects.

The Juvenile Justice Oversight Committee, which recommends expenditures, has considered starting projects to build juvenile crisis intervention centers, expand family preservation services and substance abuse counseling among other things.

But no final decisions or expenditures have been made.

Access to the full $42 million fund, Fonkert said, would have “softened the blow” to the state budget if the Department of Corrections decided to go forward.

“Otherwise every single one of these things is going to be a budget fight,” Fonkert said.

Existing programs have been effective, Fonkert said, but they don’t yet reach every corner of Kansas.

“(KDOC has) done a good job in a lot of ways but if we stop where we’re at you would find plenty of people around the state who would claim the money didn’t come,” he said.

None of the projects have been started yet. Sen. Pat Pettey, a Kansas City Democrat and member of the Juvenile Justice Oversight Committee, said she was okay with the decision to cut the existing reserve funds in half. Slow work to spend the funds, she said, makes it difficult to justify preserving it.

“It does say to us, the Juvenile Justice Oversight Committee, that we have a responsibility to provide a clearer picture to the legislature,” Pettey said. “We need to look at how we are presenting our information to the Legislature and giving them a clear picture of how these funds are being used and why they’re important.”

But Fonkert chalks the issue up to bureaucratic processes.

“The thing that sticks out as slowing this down is a lack of commitment among the Legislature and agency officials to make it a priority to get this money to communities,” he said.

Additionally, the requirement that programs be evidence-based has blocked some community programs from expanding with state funding. For a program to be considered evidence-based requires time and money, not just results.

“There’s amazing non-profits in Sedgwick county that are working with youth that have had run-ins with law enforcement,” Lee, with Progeny, said. “Organizations like that that are doing the work with young people to provide those alternatives don’t have the resources or the funding.”

“We’re talking about under-served and under-educated communities who may not speak the lingo that it takes to have evidence-based programming.” might move this up.

If long term funding for the account is put at risk as expenditures increase, the Legislature and Governor can fix it. The $21 million removed from the account could be replaced in the 2021 fiscal year budget when lawmakers return to Topeka next year.

But Rogers with Progeny said the move to cut funding has already damaged the ability of an already vulnerable set of youth to trust leaders in government to look out for them.

“It’s a fund that’s not being spent so it seems like an easy target,” Rogers said. “But it’s still money that was set aside solely to help young people and instead the governor raided it the first chance that she got and she wasn’t the only one that did it.”

“Now that it’s gone we have no way of knowing if it’s going to be replaced.”