Ten kids have come to Johnson Youth Center from Ketchikan since the fall of last year. Ketchikan kids detained by the Division of Juvenile Justice used to be housed in the Ketchikan Regional Youth Facility, but the division closed the facility in September.
Recent Juvenile Justice Director Rob Wood had said the facility was underutilized and state budget cuts made it too expensive to operate. So now, Ketchikan kids go to Juneau.
Juneau Juvenile Justice workers say they’re in good shape now, but transporting and housing the additional kids hasn’t been a completely smooth ride.
“Work-wise it has increased the work of my Ketchikan office in a huge way,” said Chief Probation Officer Joe Adelmeyer.
Adelmeyer is sitting in a conference room outside the detention unit. He is responsible for kids across Southeast Alaska. He says the biggest challenge from losing Ketchikan has been getting the kids to Juneau.
“We’ve got to detain the kid. I’ve got POs on the ground over there that have to bring the kid over. Flights being what they are, that means the POs (have) got to overnight,” Adelmeyer said.
He adds that money isn’t a problem. The flights and accommodations are still cheaper than running the Ketchikan youth center, but it does cost a lot of time.
“If it’s a local kid, we’ve got to get in front of a judge. It could be as long as 16 hours, it could be as short as a couple hours,” Adelmeyer said.
He explains that kids who aren’t from Ketchikan can just be taken on a plane to Juneau and then they can call into the right court, but kids from Ketchikan have to go to court there.
The other challenges are capacity and staffing. The number of kids detained in Juneau can change daily. Adelmeyer is struggling to remember how many kids Johnson has now.
“There’s six kids in the back and there are four Juneau kids and there’s two Ketchikan kids,” Adelmeyer remembered with help from Johnson Youth Center Superintendent Jess Lujan.
The kids in the detention unit weren’t actually visible during my visit. Superintendent Lujan says the state doesn’t allow kids in detention to be interviewed or photographed. It’s a way to protect their identities.
Lujan says since the Ketchikan facility closed, Johnson’s population has ranged between 15 kids and four. He says those numbers were standard before the closure, but Johnson’s detention unit only has eight beds.
“So what that means is we have eight rooms — eight secured rooms, and then we have two observation rooms,” Lujan explained. “So those rooms, we can comfortably house 10 kids, each getting their own room.”
Lujan says when the population is high, they can put two kids in a room.
“We’ve been very lucky to see numbers where we haven’t had to double up on rooms much. We have done it,” he said.
He says he was already hiring to fill a staff shortage before the Ketchikan closure. After the closure, when they were shorthanded in detention he would borrow staff from Johnson’s long-term treatment unit to help.
Right now, he thinks the ratio of kids to staff is good and he just wants to hire three more people for the treatment and detention units.
Adelmeyer doesn’t think uprooting the Ketchikan kids has had a huge impact on most of them.
“Overall, I think it’s ideal to have kids in the same community as their parents,” he said. “I think that you could make a real general kind of assumption that it’s a better deal. I mean the parents are right there. They can be involved if you’ve got any family work that’s going on therapeutically speaking.”
For some kids who have a very stressful or dysfunctional family environment, Adelmeyer thinks it’s actually better for them to be away.
“I think it could be a double-edged sword. I think for the right kid, it could be a good or bad thing. It just depends on the kid and the family,” Adelmeyer said.
Adelmeyer says parents are calling their kids by phone, and the center can set up a video link, but none of the parents have tried it yet. Lujan says one father has come from Ketchikan to visit his son.
Clarification: A reference to Rob Wood has been updated to clarify that he is no longer the current director of the Division of Juvenile Justice.
