Even as fewer teens are being prosecuted, the state is not providing enough intervention, rehabilitation and other help.
Despite multiple recommendations to overhaul the juvenile justice system, Maine has not come up with a comprehensive plan to fix the crisis. Photo by Ashley L. Conti for The New York Times
Despite Maine’s efforts to establish smaller, secure alternatives to Long Creek, none are currently in operation. Officials have not fixed the severe shortage of community-based intervention programs intended to catch delinquency early. Many in the juvenile justice system are not getting the help, required by state law, to change their behavior.
Chief Timothy Carroll of the Rockland Police Department, which has struggled with an uptick in crimes involving teenagers. Credit: Ashley L. Conti for The New York Times. In desperation, the police and parents — some of whom say they are afraid of their own children — have increasingly turned to emergency rooms for help. Many of those adolescents do not suffer from classic psychiatric disorders but have chronic, aggressive behavioral issues, transforming hospitals into “new forms of detention,” said Dr. Lindsey Tweed, former president of the Maine Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry., even weeks, receiving no treatment while awaiting placements elsewhere.
Governor Mills, who declined an interview request, defended her record. The governor believes in diverting low-risk teenagers into rehabilitative services to make “youth incarceration as unnecessary as possible,” said a spokesman, Ben Goodman, in a statement. The administration has begun to “implement systemic reforms” by investing more in a range of youth programs, the statement said.
“If these kids had a real champion among agency heads or elected leaders,” added Ms. Rosenthal, who advised Maine officials for several years through the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, “real solutions could be implemented.” Homicides are even rarer. Since 2010, four teenagers have been tried for manslaughter, three prosecuted as adults. Eight youths were charged with murder; five were tried as adults.
In 2018, Maine’s highest court urged the state to create more alternatives to incarceration. Though shortages persist, judges and corrections officials have pared back on sending youth to Long Creek, where some are committed to serve sentences and more are detained awaiting resolution of their cases. In 2017, courts ordered 46 commitments to the prison; in 2022, they ordered not quite half as many.
Harry struggled in school, and by seventh grade, his mother said, he had given up. The next year, he began smoking marijuana daily. After failing every class as a high school freshman, she recalled, he was evaluated and diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, anxiety and a cannabis use disorder. His troubles with the police started after he and Timmy were suspended from school for fighting.
“We feel like the new Long Creeks,” said Dr. Nir Harish, an emergency physician at Pen Bay Medical Center, increasingly a destination for adolescents in crisis. Credit: Ashley L. Conti for The New York Times Nearby Pen Bay Medical Center, after seeing a rise in the volume of adolescents coming through the E.R. and the severity of their behavior, created a locked three-room unit in October, a hospital spokeswoman said. The largely unfurnished rooms are designed to keep people safe for a few hours, though some stay for days or weeks waiting for a residential facility or other care.
The judge reviewing his case noted that his name had come across her desk too many times, Timmy’s mother recalled, so he spent more than two weeks at Long Creek. There, Timmy said, he met teens accused of crimes like drug trafficking, shootings and robberies. Officials are considering building a residential-style unit adjacent to Long Creek to transition some youth out, he said, though it would not replace the prison. He complained that critics were too “hung up” on closing Long Creek, which he said “has all it needs to be successful” and ensure public safety.
Juvenile officers responsible for creating treatment plans routinely encounter long wait-lists and few options for Health Department services, according to law enforcement and former corrections officials. The agency has also identified priorities for enhanced services and put more money into behavioral health programs. Last year, it significantly increased payment rates for some service providers, which has helped improve access.
Maine’s relatively small number of juvenile offenders could make it more feasible than in many other states to build up a more robust approach to combating youth crime. That likely would require more initial spending than current levels, some criminal justice experts say, but should save money eventually by preventing more teens from entering the juvenile system and having fewer needing the highest-cost services, including secure facilities.
“I really admire and support Janet Mills,” she said in an interview. But, she added, “she’s held on to this primitive prosecutor’s view of children that when they do bad things they have to be punished to learn their lesson.” “Shame on us if Maine can’t create better alternatives than incarceration,” Representative Grayson Lookner, a Democrat from Portland who sponsored the vetoed 2021 bill, said in an interview. “It’s infuriating to me that we can’t look at the data, can’t trust the experts and create a better way of doing things.”
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