Youth who have simultaneous involvement with the child welfare
system and the juvenile justice system comprise an increasing
percentage of juvenile court dockets across the state and
nationally. These crossover kids, so labeled due to their
"crossover" from involvement with the Department of Children and
Families (DCF) to the Department of Youth Services (DYS), or vice
versa, pose unique challenges to the current juvenile court model.
At the very intersection of the child welfare and juvenile justice
systems, these youth face increased systemic service barriers,
school exclusion, and prolonged detention or out-of-home placement
during their childhood and greater rates of academic failure,
unemployment, homelessness, and recidivism into adulthood. Improved
identification, cross-system collaboration, and meaningful
interventions may allow these youth to extricate themselves from
the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, reaping benefits
for these youth long into the future as they transition to
successful adults.
The number of crossover kids in Massachusetts is staggering. A
study of youth committed to DYS between 2000 and 2012 found that 72
percent had involvement with DCF either prior to or during their
involvement with DYS, accounting for nearly 7,500 kids statewide.
These crossover youth become involved in the juvenile justice
system at an earlier age and are more frequently arrested or
charged than their peers. Likewise, national studies have shown
that crossover youth struggle with more persistent family or
service needs, longer lengths of out-of-home placements, and more
placements overall than kids with child welfare cases alone.
Further, minority youth make up a disproportionate percentage of
crossover kids, further exacerbating the racial and ethnic
disparities which already plague the juvenile justice and child
welfare systems.
Crossover youth who cannot extricate themselves swiftly from the
juvenile justice and child welfare systems face bleak outcomes:
lower graduation rates, higher unemployment rates, higher
homelessness rates, increased recidivism, and poorer health
overall. Earlier identification of crossover kids and intersystem
collaboration during the youth's involvement in the juvenile court
has the potential to reduce the likelihood of pre-trial detention,
limit the duration of secure detention, prevent instances or limit
the duration of school exclusion, identify appropriate placements,
and implement timely services which may avoid further juvenile
justice system involvement.
Important initiatives are currently being implemented statewide
to better understand and assist this vulnerable population. The
Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) is a national
initiative advancing systems-reform in order to reduce the harmful
and unnecessary detention of juveniles. Their reform work,
particularly in Massachusetts, emphasizes data collection and
analysis in order to guide fairer decision making, identifying
areas of concern, and diagnosing systemic patterns across courts
and counties.
County-wide initiatives are also trying to address the unique
complexities of working with crossover youth. Hampden County, for
example, has attempted to address the current lack of accurate
identification of crossover youth by implementing a data sharing
memorandum of understanding and implementing a multi-disciplinary
team meeting opportunity. These components seek to bring together
the youth, family, probation officer, DCF social worker, defense
attorney, community collaterals, and the prosecutor to make
individualized suggestions in order to prevent the youth from
moving deeper into the juvenile justice system. In August 2013, the
Springfield session of the Hampden Juvenile Court also began a
dedicated docket to crossover cases with judges trained on the
specific needs of dually involved youth. While Hampden County is at
the forefront of this type of crossover youth program, dual status
youth initiatives are in varying stages of design and
implementation in Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex Counties.
Improving outcomes for crossover kids in our own practices is
also critical. Client-directed representation is not only the
hallmark of the Massachusetts juvenile and child welfare defense
practice, it empowers the young person to be an active decision
maker in his/her own life. In maintaining fidelity to this model,
it is our responsibility to identify the crossover kids in our
practice early on, educate them about the perils of being dually
involved, and involve them in every stage of their case. We must
hold each systemic partner, not just the child, accountable for a
plan to extricate the youth from the juvenile justice system and
successfully transition the youth back to his/her school and larger
community. This includes frequent collaboration between CAFL and
delinquency attorneys (with your client's consent) to limit
instances of or duration of school exclusion, identification of
community resources not yet utilized, advocacy for the right
placement for the child at all times (from DYS to DCF), and
creation of probation terms that are specific to the individual
youth. This also entails being vigilant that this unique population
does not become exposed to unconstitutional bootstrapping of civil
status offenses to delinquency cases, which can lead to prolonged
pre-trial detention for normative adolescent behaviors. Finally, we
must continue to advocate in court and in our communities for more
data, more services, more accountability from adults, and more
opportunities for this unique population to disentangle themselves
from crossover status.