From mysanantonio.com
Leticia Van de Putte – Special to the Express-NewsLast month, Los Angeles City Council member Tony Cárdenas and I convened an intimate gathering of prominent Latino elected officials from throughout the country for the inaugural meeting of The Changing Face of America: A Latino Conversation on Juvenile Justice and Youth Intervention.
This historic forum was held in Los Angeles and was designed to provide lawmakers with a better understanding of youth delinquency by having candid conversations with juvenile justice policy experts, local law enforcement, private-sector advocates, and street-level intervention practitioners on effective legislative solutions to help significantly reduce youth violence in each of our respective communities.
According to a recent report released by the Campaign for Youth Justice, nearly 18,000 Latino youth are incarcerated on any given day in the United States. In Texas, minority youth are 39 percent more likely to be arrested than Anglo youth. Furthermore, the Texas Youth Commission has reported that in the last five years, nearly 5,000 Latino youth, mostly between the ages of 12 and 17, have been admitted into juvenile detention facilities, representing the largest ethnic population in our juvenile system.
Heavily investing in the incarceration of our youth in Texas has come with a hefty price tag for taxpayers. The Texas Youth Commission (TYC.) reported that in 2008, it cost nearly $300 per day per youth who was locked up in a juvenile detention center, with an even greater combined cost for those youth in contract facilities, halfway houses, and on parole supervision. As such, the Texas Youth Commission’s 2009 Operating Budget cost taxpayers approximately $223 million to house the 2,259 youth currently detained in their facilities. According to the authors of the California Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Bill, it only costs $1,200-$1,300 a year to keep one youth in a crime-intervention or prevention program.
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