Gov. Bev Perdue is trying to save some money with her proposed government reorganization. A coalition of child-advocacy groups has sound concerns, however, that one element of that plan will unnecessarily harm services designed to help children stay out of trouble with the law.
Perdue has proposed reducing the number of state departments from 14 to eight. In the process, she expects to reduce administrative costs and improve efficiency. One move would group the current Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention into a larger Department of Public Safety that would be focused on criminal punishment.
The coalition isn't criticizing the effort to save money. Instead, the organizations think that juvenile justice and delinquency prevention efforts should be handled by a social-service agency, not one focused on corrections.
In this regard, the advocates have history on their side.
It was only a few years ago that the legislature created a department for juvenile justice and delinquency prevention. Legislators had come to identify that juvenile-delinquency problems are much different from those involving adults. Programs had to be much different, too. And that meant this effort to keep kids out of trouble had to be considerably different from those aimed at punishing adults who had run out of second chances.
Perdue should abide by the suggestions of the advocacy groups and put these juvenile functions into the new Department of Health and Human Services, where other state services for children reside.
Perdue and the legislature face an enormous challenge in the months ahead. They must fill a projected $3 billion to $4 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2011, and they are likely to do most or all of it with budget cuts. Given that amount of cutting, there is no way that the effectiveness of all state programs can be preserved.
But at the least, state leaders can avoid harming programs unnecessarily, and moving juvenile-justice programs into a corrections-oriented department would lead to such unnecessary harm. We know that because, in the past, some of these programs were in such departments and they didn't work well. The legislature created the separate department to improve programs, and the move worked.
The number of commitments in 2009 to the state's youth-development centers was less than one-third that of the 1998 level. That's exactly the kind of success anticipated when the department was created.
Perdue should get out her pencil and eraser and change her reorganization plan to one that will better serve North Carolina's troubled youngsters.
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