Finalist: Staff of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minn.

Minnesota’s juvenile justice system is failing young people, families and victims of violence

By Liz Sawyer, Chris Serres and Maryjo Webster

Photos by Jerry Holt

Every so often, Cassie Carter collapses on her teenage son's empty bed after a long day at work and reflects on his childhood — his first day of kindergarten, the long afternoons they spent playing at Como Park Zoo in St. Paul. It is how she reminds herself that, until a couple of years ago, her son Jayden was "just a normal, big-hearted kid" adored by his siblings and cousins.

Those days now seem a distant memory. At age 12, the child who once dreamed of being a police officer fell in with a group of boys who skipped school and brandished handguns on social media. Before long, Jayden was vanishing from home for weeks at a time and roaming the streets of St. Paul — shoplifting from stores, burglarizing homes and fleeing from police in stolen cars.

Each time he was caught, Carter pleaded with law enforcement and county social workers to place her son in a locked juvenile facility with round-the-clock surveillance. Only then, she believed, would he get sustained treatment for his behavioral problems and reflect on the harm he was inflicting on his family and many victims.

But each time, he was returned to the community with little or no support services, only to resume his dangerous crime spree.

"His crimes keep escalating, but the outcome is always the same: Catch and release, catch and release," said Carter, a carpenter and single mother. "The system is teaching my son that he can break the law, over and over again, without any consequences."

More than a decade ago, Minnesota lawmakers, prosecutors and judges embarked upon a quiet revolution in the way minors were held accountable for their crimes. Locking kids up, routine for even some petty offenses like truancy and shoplifting in the 1990s, became a last resort in many counties. The emphasis shifted instead to rehabilitation, with teens being steered toward community-based programs such as mental health counseling, mentorship and job skills training.

The reforms spared tens of thousands of children a criminal record, especially Black youth, who were far more likely to be arrested and confined to locked detention centers than their white counterparts. But a Star Tribune examination of hundreds of juvenile-court records finds that the new approach is failing to effectively intervene in the lives of Minnesota's most troubled kids, often despite anguished pleas from parents.

In the last four years, about 30% of youth arrests in Minneapolis and St. Paul were teens who had been arrested at least one time in the previous year by the same law enforcement agency. Records show that, in Minneapolis, 22 children were either arrested or sought in connection with six or more carjackings or robberies since January 2020. Some suspects were as young as 12 or 13.

Even after children are charged and prosecuted in county courts, they continue to reoffend at alarmingly high rates, court records show. In 2020 in Hennepin County, 40% of youth who were adjudicated delinquent, or found guilty by a judge, were charged with new crimes within 12 months. The recidivism rate is similarly high for Hennepin County youth who are being supervised in the community by probation officers. In Minneapolis, a startling two-thirds of minors arrested for carjackings between June 2020 and last November had at least one other arrest within the previous year, police records show.

Many of the rehabilitative services promised as an alternative to detention and other punitive measures have been outsourced to a patchwork of underfunded nonprofits. The burden of making sure children participate in the programs often falls on parents and guardians who are sometimes struggling with their own problems, including housing instability and substance abuse. Tracking of attendance or outcomes is so haphazard that some county officials acknowledge they have no idea if the community-based programs are benefiting youth and their families.

Meanwhile, some of the most essential services, such as chemical dependency treatment and psychotherapy, are made available only after a minor has been formally charged with a crime. That revelation can be a shock to parents desperately trying to change their child's trajectory. "It's very sad to see youth falling through the cracks of the juvenile justice system, but we see it happening all the time," said Beth Holger, chief executive of the Link, a Minneapolis nonprofit that provides housing and other support services for youth.

In her 15 years on the juvenile court bench, Hennepin County District Judge Tanya Bransford said that she has never seen as many exasperated parents — and such a high demand for mental health and other support services. She said the juvenile system lacks adequate residential treatment centers where adolescents who have committed serious offenses can be evaluated by trained professionals and learn how to change their behaviors.

"If you have young people who are shooting other people, then I don't think it's safe to say, 'Fine, now just go back to the community,'" Bransford said. "I don't think the community thinks that's safe either."

For five years, LaTonya Reeves begged for mental health therapy and other support services for her son, who began lashing out — smashing furniture and assaulting his siblings — at age 10.

Soon he was being picked up for trespassing, assault and disorderly conduct. Convinced his behavior was a symptom of mental distress, Reeves sought in-home therapy for her son and an after-school mentorship program. Her pleas for assistance were ignored even as his behavior escalated.

Now 19, her son is sitting in the Hennepin County jail, facing up to 20 years in prison for his alleged role in a gang-related shooting in November 2020 that seriously wounded two people. 

"Had my son got the services he needed when I begged and pleaded for them, then he wouldn't be in trouble today," said Reeves, who works as an adult probation officer. "As parents, we feel invisible, that we're out here on our own without any idea of how to get help for our kids." 

Victims feel betrayed

The failings of the juvenile justice system are being felt across the Twin Cities. Survivors of violent crimes say they feel betrayed when teens are not accountable for their actions. And parents of those youth feel abandoned by a convoluted system that promises rehabilitation yet allows their children to hurtle down a dangerous, sometimes deadly path.

The consequences of that inaction can be devastating: At least eight youths have died since early 2020 while joy riding in stolen cars. Just before the holidays last year, a group of kids attempting to evade police in a stolen Mercedes-Benz SUV lost control in northeast Minneapolis and crashed, severing the vehicle in half and killing two young passengers on impact. It marked the fourth such fatal pursuit in just two years.

Documents show that each case involved minors who already had lengthy criminal histories.

Some teenagers were caught only after brazenly streaming videos of themselves while driving at high speeds in stolen cars.

"It's an idle-hands thrill ride," said Booker Hodges, Bloomington police chief and former assistant commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. "Social media and unsupervised kids is a bad combination."

Alex Swenson is still grappling with the terrifying memory of seeing his children swept away during a violent carjacking outside their St. Paul home two years ago.

Swenson was adjusting his 1-year-old daughter's car seat one afternoon when an approaching teenager battered him to the ground. Several others swarmed and began kicking him. Jodi Swenson-Weisser stepped outside to find her husband lying in the street, curled in a fetal position to protect his body from repeated blows. In shock, she dropped her 8-year-old son's birthday cake as another teen peeled away in the family van carrying two of their children. 

"My kids are in there!" Alex Swenson screamed as his son wailed from the back seat.

The teenage driver accelerated through the intersection, stopping suddenly before running away.  

Fifteen minutes later, an off-duty police officer caught 10 minors attempting to use Swenson's credit cards to buy gift cards at a nearby Target. Prosecutors pursued aggravated robbery and kidnapping charges against seven boys. One case was dropped, but six pleaded guilty to reduced robbery charges. 

The Swensons attended every court hearing they could. Jodi wanted the teenagers to see their faces and understand the suffering they had caused. Alex wanted them to know the terror of watching his children be stolen from him — and how, for weeks after the assault, he and Jodi were forced to repeatedly explain to their 3-year-old that 'no, Daddy isn't going to die.'"

In a victim impact statement, Alex Swenson asked the carjackers to learn from their actions. "I hope they never cause anybody else this kind of emotional or physical pain," he wrote. "I hope they think of somebody else besides themselves."

All the boys were eventually released on probation and, according to police and court records, most began committing a string of robberies in the months to follow.

One was caught with a group holding up suburban gas stations, including one crime in which a Golden Valley clerk was shot and paralyzed. Authorities tied another boy to the back-to-back carjackings outside Lunds and Byerly's stores in St. Louis Park and Edina last December. Rayevan Smith, now 18, was recently sentenced as an adult to seven years in prison for his role in four armed carjackings. 

One of the youngest suspects in Swenson's case, 15-year-old Jamontae Welch, died eight months later when the stolen vehicle he was riding in crashed during a police pursuit. 

The tragedy stirred a complicated set of emotions in Alex Swenson. His heart ached for Jamontae's parents, because no one should ever have to bury their child. But how had no one intervened? Why were the teens allowed to continue hurting people? 

"The juvenile system literally is just a slap on the wrist," Swenson said. "The whole community is failing them." 

A tougher approach

The recent surge in carjackings belies the fact that the arrest rate for teenagers in Minnesota and elsewhere has been steadily dropping over the past five years. But the frequency and ferocity of these crimes is provoking outrage in community forums, at city halls and the State Capitol.

Abdullahi Abdi, an Uber driver who lives in Burnsville, was found covered in blood and barely able to walk after a 16-year-old boy repeatedly struck him with a metal rod while trying to steal his phone. The assault was so severe that, six months later, Abdi was still unable to lift both arms above his head and has had to learn how to read lips because the many blows permanently damaged his hearing. He also learned to scrutinize each of his Uber passengers for hints of trouble, and to cancel rides when he sees people who look like the teenager who left him bleeding along a dark road.

"For 16 years I have lived in this country and had no problem," said Abdi, 62, who fled Somalia's civil war in the 1990s. "Now I think it is unsafe to live here."

Criminal justice reformers and many county officials blame much of the problem on the pandemic that upended children's lives and a dearth of child and family services. DFL Gov. Tim Walz recently recommended allocating more than $20 million over the next four years toward after-school programs, mentoring and other programs for youth, as well as conflict resolution centers that help connect teens with services.

Republican lawmakers and law enforcement officials argue the attacks demand a tougher approach. Former Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, a Republican candidate for governor, has called for mandatory minimum sentences for carjackers and other juvenile offenders he accuses of terrorizing the urban core. "Instead of learning math and science and social studies, they're learning to become hardened criminals," Gazelka said.

The rhetoric echoes that of an earlier era.  

In the early 1990s, a surge in homicides and other violent crimes among youth ushered in a wave of intensified policing and tougher sentencing laws that blurred the once-stark distinctions between the juvenile and adult criminal systems. Some criminologists warned of a new breed of violent youth, or "superpredators," who terrorized victims without remorse. Lawmakers in Minnesota and more than 40 states responded by enacting laws that made it easier to prosecute children as adults.

But the projected youth crime wave never materialized. Homicides and other violent crimes by adolescents plunged before tougher sanctions were even imposed.

By the early 2000s, the pendulum began swinging back toward rehabilitation. New research showed that locking up youth often resulted in them dropping out of school and becoming permanently entangled in the criminal justice system. There was also growing outrage over the harsher treatment of kids of color, who were being arrested and incarcerated at rates far exceeding their white counterparts. Black youth in Minnesota are more than eight times likelier than their white peers to be held in juvenile facilities — the 10th highest rate in the nation — despite studies showing few differences between white and Black youth in common categories of arrests for delinquent behavior.

"Historically, we have allowed white children, or folks with means, to engage in developmentally appropriate behavior," said Sarah Davis, executive director of the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis. "Our youth of color have gotten an entirely different system, which is criminalizing those behaviors and then funneling them deep into the adult justice system."

In 2005, several of Minnesota's largest counties signed on to the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), an ambitious national effort to reform the juvenile system by shifting the emphasis from punishment to rehabilitation.  

They adopted a screening tool to gauge a child's risk of reoffending or failure to show up for court. Designed to remove racial bias from the juvenile system, it also raised the threshold for who would be detained and for how long. Teens accused of low-level assaults and auto thefts, for example, no longer qualified for a bed in most instances.

Overall admission to juvenile detention centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul soon plummeted. Corrections officials became more reliant on electronic home monitoring 

to keep track of youth, even if some occasionally snipped off the ankle bracelets and vanished from oversight.

Over the past four years, between 20 to 25% of youth who were arrested for crimes in Hennepin and Ramsey counties were diverted away from formal court proceedings and into community-based programming such as mentoring, mental health counseling and jobs training.

Restorative justice practices, once rare, are now widespread. Counties are hiring outside providers to conduct group dialogues, or talking circles, in which youth are encouraged to confront the impact of their crimes on victims and the community.

But the effectiveness of these programs, largely operated by nonprofit agencies, is poorly understood.  Many counties do not monitor what happens to children after they have been diverted away from the formal court system. A Star Tribune survey of 44 counties, including all in the metro area, found that nearly half do not follow up to determine whether youth complete these community-based programs. And less than a third track recidivism rates, meaning most of the counties do not know if youth commit new crimes once they complete the programs.

Unlike many states, Minnesota lacks a central state agency tasked with overseeing juvenile justice programs, which has created a complicated patchwork of local rules. Individual corrections departments and prosecutors largely determine who qualifies for community-based programs and the intensity of services they receive. And data collection varies widely from county to county, which makes it difficult for policymakers to determine what programs are effective at reducing youth crime.

"At every stage of our youth justice system, people are making grave decisions about young people's lives without taking outcomes into account," said Danielle Lipow, senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national children's advocacy and research nonprofit. 

Pleading for intervention

On a bright afternoon days before Christmas, Cassie Carter left the construction site where she worked as a carpenter to make a phone call. She hoped it would save her son's life.

Just weeks earlier, Carter saw a troubling photo on Instagram of Jayden, grinning as he flashed a gang sign while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an older-looking boy brandishing a handgun. On another occasion Carter discovered a bullet in the pocket of her son's pants.

From her car, Carter pleaded with the judge and county social workers for help in finding a safe shelter for Jayden. There, he could stabilize in a setting far removed from his gun-wielding friends and begin to transition back to school and family life. "I am terrified of losing my son, absolutely terrified," Carter said. "My son is on the streets. It's 20 degrees below. And he's robbing people to live."

But the remote hearing ended like so many others. County social workers and the judge recommended more in-home therapy and mentoring for a boy who was almost never home. Enraged, Carter yelled and pounded her fists against the steering wheel until her thin body, swallowed up by work overalls, sagged in defeat.

"Our kids are dying because they're not facing any consequences for their actions," she said. "No one seems to appreciate the urgency here."

Only three weeks later, Jayden was apprehended again — this time, for shoplifting and threatening someone with a weapon at a Roseville shopping mall. He was held several nights at a juvenile detention center before being released to a non-secure group home for youth in St. Paul. Within hours, Jayden slipped out of the home and was back roaming the streets of the East Side of St. Paul with his friends, Carter said.

Police and court records show that Jayden has been picked up more than a dozen times over the past two years. Last November, Jayden was among five teenagers caught in a stolen SUV after they led police on a dangerous chase near Stillwater. As he was taken into custody, Jayden dropped a bag of marijuana on the floor of a squad car, an arrest report says. Hours later, he was released and would vanish again.

Some nights, Carter drives the streets of St. Paul, looking for Jayden's face among the groups of teens she spots at street corners and bus stops. She gave up filing missing persons reports with police and county social service agencies because they were typically ignored.

Carter lamented the fact that Jayden had been missing for so long that his twin infant brothers, now 2 years old, barely recognize him.

"I cry every day over my son," Carter said, "because I've already lost two years of his life and I'm never getting those years back."

Officers see festering problem

Catherine Johnson struggled to control her emotions as she described how the wave of youth violence was affecting officers in her department, who are tasked with supervising troubled teens in the community after they have committed crimes.

"I will tell you that my probation officers have lost more youth to violence in the last year than in any year they can remember," said Johnson, a former Minneapolis police officer and director of Hennepin County's Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation. "They are devastated by the phone calls they are getting."

To Johnson, the deadly toll is a symptom of a long-festering problem. Too often, she said, youth are arrested and dropped off at juvenile detention centers, then released back to the community without being evaluated or connected with social services. They frequently reoffend, she said, and the cycle repeats until a child commits an offense serious enough to merit detention or supervised probation.

This revolving door became more pronounced during the pandemic, as children struggled with isolation and a lack of structured activities.

Putting fewer children behind bars was meant to be part of a broader package of reforms. Under the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, money saved by not incarcerating children was supposed to be redirected to mental health services, chemical dependency treatment and other programs to support children and keep them out of trouble.

But parents complain there are typically no consequences if their children do not participate in rehabilitative programs.

Tinikia Jones, of Richfield, said her teenage son was diverted to mental health counseling at age 15 after he began committing a series of minor thefts. When he quit after just a couple of therapy sessions, the provider never got in touch, she said. Her son's crimes have since escalated, and he now faces five felony charges related to a vicious carjacking on Christmas Eve, in which a woman was threatened at knife point and severely beaten.

"Right now, these kids aren't afraid of anybody," said Jones. "And why would they be? What do they have to fear if there's no one to hold them accountable?"

Some parents are so desperate for assistance that they are begging detention centers to hold their kids in custody, even for a short while.

In separate interviews, four mothers told the Star Tribune that staff at the Hennepin and Ramsey County juvenile detention centers refused to hold their sons, saying their crimes were not serious enough. The mothers, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said they were warned their children would be considered "abandoned" and at risk of being placed in a temporary shelter if they were not picked up.

Hennepin and Ramsey County corrections officials say they are sometimes forced to refer a youth to child protective services because confining children who do not meet the detention threshold would violate their civil rights.

T'Lisa Williams, a restaurant worker from St. Paul, said she pleaded with staff at the juvenile detention center in St. Paul to hold her 13-year-old son, even for a few hours, when he started skipping school and acting out aggressively at home. She was told that he did not meet the criteria for custody. Soon after, he began carrying a handgun and now faces multiple felony charges, accused of beating and robbing an older woman at gunpoint before fleeing from police in a stolen car.

"No mother wants her child incarcerated, but we have to intervene before it becomes a crisis," said Williams. "I would rather my son face consequences now, when he can still be saved, than when he's an adult."

Unbearable loss

As dusk fell on a brisk winter evening, Tanya Gile gazed out her kitchen window at the deserted playground where her 14-year-old son Marcoz used to run, laugh and shoot baskets with his younger brothers. When she thought about how his life could have turned out, she remembered a short essay that Marcoz wrote in seventh grade.

"I have a dream of doing bigger things," he wrote, "and to have people look up to me." 

The words would be read aloud at Marcoz's funeral.

On the fourth day of his first year in high school, Marcoz climbed into the back seat of a stolen SUV with five of his friends and asked to be taken home. His friends had other plans, and the car weaved erratically through rush-hour traffic and residential neighborhoods in Maplewood.

Ramsey County sheriff's deputies gave chase at speeds topping 100 mph until the car flew off the side of an embankment and severed a telephone pole.

Marcoz and another boy, 15-year-old Alyjah Thomas, of Oakdale died from injuries sustained in the crash.

Later, Gile learned that her son's last cries for help from the back of the crushed vehicle could be heard from blocks away. "My heart was ripped from my chest," Gile said. "Right then, my motivation to live, my willingness to tend to my other kids — my will to do anything — was gone."

Gile and five of her children live at Emma's Place, a complex of low-income townhouses scattered around a courtyard, playground and community center in Maplewood. The close-knit development serves families who were formerly homeless or those with parents who struggled with substance abuse. Known in the community as "Miss Tanya," Gile is the self-appointed guardian of Emma's Place, and she keeps a close watch on the dozens of children who live here.

She began noticing signs of trouble last spring. Her three sons — Marcoz, Nycio, 12, and Santino, 9 — and other neighborhood children began vanishing from Emma's Place for hours at a time, and then returning with new clothes and small weapons like knives and pepper spray, she said. Recognizing the items as stolen, Gile admonished the children and grounded her sons for weeks to their two-story townhouse. 

But the crimes continued, and Gile pleaded with police for help in holding the children accountable. After not getting a response, she traveled up and down White Bear Avenue, a busy thoroughfare near her home, and urged shop owners to call her if they saw children from Emma's Place. Maplewood police records show that calls to the complex and the surrounding neighborhood reached a fever pitch last summer, with nearly two dozen reports of shoplifting, stolen cars and vandalism involving youth. 

"It was spiraling out of control and you had to be watching the kids 24/7 to stop it," said Gile. 

One event stands out in Gile's memory that, handled differently, might have altered the tragic course of events.

On a warm June afternoon, three months before Marcoz died, her younger son Nycio stole a car idling outside a drugstore just a short walk from Emma's Place. Though barely able to see over the steering wheel, Nycio drove the car through the neighborhood and abandoned the vehicle in a nearby subdivision. Before long, children were racing through the playground of Emma's Place, shouting about how Nycio had just stolen a car.

Gile, who was pulling weeds in her yard, flew into a rage and called the police on her own son.

Minutes later, a Maplewood police officer arrived at Emma's Place and questioned Nycio, who calmly escorted the officer and his mother through a field to the spot where he had left the stolen vehicle. The officer's body camera video then shows Gile pleading with the officer to put Nycio in handcuffs and take him into custody as a lesson. The officer could be heard laughing in the video before politely explaining to Gile that it was not worth the effort of bringing the child to the juvenile detention center.

"All it's going to do is inconvenience you," the officer said in front of Gile and her sons, according to the video. "Right now, if I take him down there, all they're going to do is book him in and call you to come get him."

During their exchange, Gile yelled a warning that would prove prophetic: "I'm gonna end up with a dead son!"

Gile believes the encounter that afternoon sent a dangerous message to her sons and other children in the community: that they could engage in criminal behavior without consequences. "I think that if the people we pay to protect and to serve our community had done their job, then my son would still be alive today," said Gile, breaking down in tears. "How do you watch kids steal cars and then tell them that nothing's going to happen to them?" 

A spokesman for the Maplewood Police Department said officers lacked probable cause to arrest Nycio because the vehicle owner recovered the car before officers arrived, and a victim could not be identified.

Not far away, the 15-year-old teenager who drove the car that carried Marcoz to his death was living through a nightmare of his own. 

Local police knew Mekhi, whose shock of tall hair makes him appear older than he is, as someone who went joy riding in stolen cars, sometimes streaming live videos of himself inside the vehicles, according to a search warrant. He attended the same high school as Marcoz, and both liked basketball and rap music.

Only a week before the fatal crash, Mekhi invited Marcoz to his father's apartment in St. Paul for dinner. Over plates of spaghetti and meatballs, Mekhi's father, Stevie Bryant, a maintenance technician and musician, steered the conversation toward the future, and what the two boys planned to do after graduation. At one point, Bryant pulled out a pencil and paper and sketched how they could buy property and eventually start a business.

"I was trying to get the boys to imagine a better life — a life away from all this chaos and violence," said Bryant, gesturing toward the street outside his window.

Those dreams were cut short. Hours after crashing the stolen car and running away, Mekhi appeared at the doorway of his father's apartment. Bryant recalled that his son collapsed on the floor of his living room, sobbing and repeating over and over, "Dad, I killed my friends, I killed my friends." Soon, Bryant's phone was buzzing with calls from the police looking for his son.

Mekhi spent much of the next three months in a cell at the juvenile detention center in St. Paul. On phone calls with his father, the boy described a recurring dream in which his two friends who died in the crash appeared by his bedside, urging Mekhi to come outside and play.

In December, Mekhi pleaded guilty to criminal vehicular homicide and was sentenced to at least six months at the juvenile facility in Red Wing. Bryant and his family said they were relieved by the sentence — hopeful that a prolonged period in a secure setting would enable the boy, who just turned 16, to get sustained mental health therapy.

"The guilt is tearing him apart," Bryant said.

In February, Bryant found a new apartment on the outer edge of the Twin Cities, far removed from their old neighborhood. Bryant said he hoped the move would help Mekhi make a "clean break" from his old friends and past behavior. No one would know their new address except for Mekhi's closest relatives.

"I told Mekhi, 'You owe it to your friend Marcoz and to everyone you hurt to become a great person,'" Bryant said. "Let's see some greatness. Otherwise, this is just another meaningless tragedy."

Fearing that his son was growing despondent, Bryant wrote and recorded a love song to Mekhi, hoping it would lift his son's spirits and keep him thinking of a brighter future. In a basement recording studio, Bryant belted out the gospel-like chorus over and over again, stretching out the harmony and the words until he had them just right.

"It won't be long

Until you get home

We'll be here

Don't you fear …"

Finally satisfied, Bryant wiped the sweat from his forehead and tucked the handwritten lyrics into his pocket.

Then he closed his eyes and swayed alone to the sound of his own voice, humming "It won't be long," until the lights went out in the studio.

Star Tribune intern Maya Miller contributed to this report.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Paul Gazelka's title. He is former Minnesota Senate Majority Leader.

Minnesota has no uniform standards for who can join diversion programs or what they offer

By Liz Sawyer, Chris Serres and Maryjo Webster

Photos by Jerry Holt

The stolen SUV roared through the quiet residential streets, its teenage driver racing at 90 miles an hour before crashing through the front of a north Minneapolis home.

Police arrived quickly, guns drawn, as two girls emerged from the tangled wreckage: Debra and her cousin Arriell, both 16.

Police ordered them to the ground. Both were arrested, handcuffed, put into the back of squad cars and taken to the juvenile detention center downtown.

But after that day in April 2021, each girl experienced starkly different versions of Minnesota's juvenile justice system.

Arriell was given a rare opportunity to turn her life around. Instead of being summoned to court to face criminal charges, she attended a series of monthly sessions in which victims of car thefts and other crimes described how they were traumatized by their experiences. Free mental health counseling helped Arriell address her struggles with anxiety. She wrote several apology letters to people affected by her crimes, and emerged from the program with a clean record.

Her cousin and best friend was not offered those services because she was the driver of the stolen vehicle. Instead, prosecutors charged Debra with a series of felonies, triggering a protracted legal case that dragged on for months without resolution.

Then, just before last Christmas, Debra joined a group of teenagers who stole a car at gunpoint. Again, a high-speed chase ensued and the driver lost control and crashed, severing the vehicle in half.

This time, Debra did not survive.

Her grieving father, Ray Muse, still wonders why the county or the juvenile courts did not do more to help his daughter. What if, like her cousin, she had met face-to-face with crime victims? What if she had been assigned to a female role model in the community?

"Maybe she would be alive today had she connected with more people who understood what she was going through," he said.

Each day, Minnesota judges and prosecutors make life-altering decisions about children who break the law. Most kids end up entangled in the county court system, where their cases can drag on for months or years.

But some youth are offered an alternative, known as diversion. Instead of cycling through court hearings and meetings with probation officers, teens can access a host of rehabilitative programs meant to address the root causes of their behavior and help keep them from reoffending.

A child's future can hinge on the path that is chosen. Those who complete diversion are more likely to stay in school and less likely to commit more crimes than young people who are criminally charged.

But in Minnesota, the promise of diversion is going largely unfulfilled.

State law requires every county to have a diversion program, but Minnesota has no uniform standards for who can participate, no guidelines about what services those programs should include, and little insight into whether they are working.

Local prosecutors and probation departments have wide discretion over whether to offer a child diversion, meaning the course of juvenile justice can vary widely from one ZIP code to the next.

A youth who steals a new iPhone in Anoka County would probably face criminal charges and end up having to meet regularly with a probation officer. Swipe that phone in neighboring Ramsey County, however, and the same youth might be able to avoid the criminal justice system entirely.

"Our whole process for making decisions about who does and doesn't qualify for diversion is shortsighted," said Judge JaPaul Harris, a Ramsey County juvenile judge. "We're too focused on the offenses — and not on what's best for the child and the family."

The quality, breadth and oversight of diversion programs also vary widely, sowing confusion and undermining public support for alternatives to criminal prosecution.

Many counties do not track whether children complete diversion or go on to commit more crimes, making it impossible to know whether the programs are effective. Crime victims are often left out of the diversion process, and the organizations that operate the programs are rarely held to performance standards by the counties that hire them.

A Minnesota law requiring counties to provide regular progress reports on their diversion programs — including which kids succeed or fail — is not being enforced.

"It's justice determined by ZIP code, not fairness," said Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, who has proposed legislation that would expand state oversight of youth restorative justice programs, one form of diversion. "Each county can do what it wants, which means that no one understands how restorative justice works and its power."

A more intensive approach

Kaylee, 12, glanced nervously around the room, her sneakers dangling just above the floor.

In a voice barely above a whisper, she described the day she threatened a boy with a deadly weapon. Slowly and with gentle prodding, the girl revealed details of that summer afternoon: the heated argument by the lake, the grabbing of a knife from a picnic table, and the prolonged chase and death threats. A school counselor, a community member and a probation officer listened in silence.

When she finished speaking, the head of Pine County's juvenile diversion program, Terry Fawcett, slid a blank piece of paper across the table and asked Kaylee to write her name at the center. Then he asked her to list every person who "felt bad because of what she did" that August afternoon. Soon, the names of the boy she threatened, her parents, friends, police officer, lifeguard and other witnesses to her violent behavior poured onto the empty page.

Then, at Fawcett's urging, Kaylee drew lines connecting their names to hers.

"That's a pretty good list," Fawcett said with a smile, as he reviewed her work. "Now, why do you think we had you place your name in the middle of this paper?"

Kaylee twirled her long brown hair for several minutes before answering, "Because I was the one who did it?"

"Yes, that's exactly right," Fawcett said. "And because it's important for you to take full responsibility for what happened — and to know how many people were affected by your actions."

These group dialogues have become the standard way that officials in this central Minnesota county handle children who commit crimes.

Here, young people accused of all types of offenses — from disorderly conduct to assault and sexual misconduct — can have their charges dropped if they agree to participate in a series of restorative talking circles with trained mediators. They must acknowledge the impact of their decisions and apologize to victims and community members. School administrators and social workers also work with the kids' families to help them access a host of services, from chemical dependency treatment to housing.

"The goal is to nip problems in the bud by surrounding these kids with good people — and then not letting them out of our sights," said Fawcett, a former high school football coach. "We are not afraid to take on difficult cases."

The program is popular with local judges and prosecutors in part because it is more demanding than court-imposed sanctions like probation.

Nearly 90% of the 138 young people who have completed Pine County's program since its inception six years ago did not commit further crimes in the year after they participated. Not a single participant in the county's diversion program has ended up in adult prison.

"There is a huge misunderstanding that restorative justice is a 'feel good' concept and the only way to hold kids accountable is by punishing them in court," said Pine County Attorney Reese Frederickson. "Nothing could be further from the truth. We're interested in what's going on with these kids' lives and how they're doing at school and at home — and you can't get that level of consideration in the courtroom."

Most kids not eligible

The idea of diverting kids to community programs instead of charging them in court is not new. Since 1995, Minnesota has required every county prosecutor's office in the state to establish a diversion program. The state also set forth broad goals for the programs, including minimizing crime and reducing caseload burdens on juvenile courts.

But most Minnesota counties stick with the traditional process of summoning the offending youth to court, and then turning to probation officers to supervise them.

The Hennepin County Attorney's Office has a wide array of juvenile diversion programs through 14 community-based providers. They offer mental health therapy, boxing classes, one-on-one mentorship and restorative talking circles.

Those efforts have proved successful in redirecting teens accused of low-level crimes. Data shows that fewer than 15% of kids who completed its diversion programs between 2016 and 2020 were charged with another crime within a year.

By comparison, the recidivism rate for young people charged and convicted in Hennepin County court has hovered near 40% for the past five years, records show.

The county's results mirror national trends.

An expansive study two years ago found that boys diverted after their first arrests were less likely to be arrested again, more likely to graduate from high school and have a more positive outlook on their futures than kids who had been formally charged in court. An earlier, widely cited study of 73 diversion programs across the country found that diverted youth were up to 2.5 times less likely to reoffend.

Despite this promising evidence, the share of diverted juvenile cases has fallen each of the past five years, according to federal data. In Hennepin, the state's most populous county, 25% of arrested youth are diverted from the courts, down from 35% four years ago, county records show.

Strict eligibility requirements bar most children from these services. Teens who commit carjackings, robberies and felony-level assaults are excluded, for example, even if they have no prior criminal record.

In many counties, elected officials are reluctant to expand diversion beyond petty crimes, fearing a lack of public support. Others believe leniency should be afforded only to those accused of nonviolent acts.

"Diversion, in my view, has never worked for the most serious crimes," Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said in a recent interview. "Many of these kids, particularly the repeat offenders, need significant consequences."

In 2014, the Minneapolis Police Department rolled out a new program that diverted youth arrested for low-level crimes to one of several community-based organizations that would help them access a range of support services. More than 700 youth were referred to the program within the first few years.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that kids who participated were less than half as likely to reoffend than youth who went through the traditional court system.

But last year, the police sent only three dozen cases to restorative justice practitioners. Those referrals dwindled to two cases during the first six months of the year, records show.

Minneapolis Police Commander Giovanni Veliz, who oversees the department's juvenile unit, said police are seeing far fewer of the low-level crimes that would typically qualify for diversion. The departure of nearly 300 officers during the last two years also means prioritizing more serious juvenile cases like armed carjackings, department officials said.

"How can the community get behind programs that often feel random and arbitrary across the state?" said Cynthia Prosek, executive director of Restorative Justice Community Action, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that organizes dialogues with youth and community members.

Numerous law enforcement leaders told the Star Tribune they believe in the merits of diversion, particularly to correct common "knucklehead" behavior by teenagers.

But if the offense escalates to violence, or involves a firearm, authorities agree the penalties must be more severe. "How many chances is too many before there are consequences?" said Shakopee Police Chief Jeff Tate. "If you're a 13-year-old who's filing a serial number off a gun, what is diversion going to do? There has to be some form of accountability that's equal to the facts of the case."

Restorative justice 'still the Wild West'

For victims of youth crime, diversion can be frustrating and opaque.

Sheila Hubbard, 71, was getting into her car one Monday morning when four teenage girls assaulted her. One jumped in the back seat and yanked on Hubbard's hair, while another repeatedly punched Hubbard before stealing her keys and wallet.

Hubbard screamed so loud — "like a wounded animal," she recalls — that a dozen neighbors chased the girls through her south Minneapolis neighborhood until they were caught by police. The assault strained Hubbard's neck and left one side of her body badly bruised.

Five months after the attack, Hubbard received a form letter from Hennepin County stating that one of her assailants, who was 12 years old, qualified for a juvenile diversion program. The letter spelled out the many benefits of diversion — that the girl would have to admit responsibility for her actions and "stay out of trouble," while receiving counseling and a variety of other support services.

To Hubbard, the idea of an alternative form of justice — one that would hold a child accountable without incarceration — sounded promising. Yet more than two years have passed since the attack and Hubbard has received no formal apology from the girls. Her requests for basic information about the status of their cases sometimes went ignored. "I never imagined this process would drag on this long," she said.

Hubbard's experience highlights another shortcoming of diversion: the quality and rigor of the programs can vary dramatically.

Some last for up to six months and offer a range of "wraparound services" such as mental therapy and mentoring. Others consist of a single Zoom session. Youth are not always required to admit guilt or make amends to victims. And children may face few consequences if they drop out of a diversion program. In Ramsey County, they can rotate in and out of diversion programs multiple times, even if they do not successfully complete them, according to the county's guidelines.

"The restorative justice movement is not in a place where it's established best practices," said Mikhail Lyubansky, a restorative justice expert and psychology professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "It's still the Wild West."

Public skepticism about the benefits of diversion also can undermine its effectiveness.

Tamara Mattison owns a St. Paul-based organization that conducts more than 100 restorative talking circles a year under contracts with counties in the Twin Cities metro area. To her dismay, victims only show up for the group dialogues about 15% of the time. Without their presence, children do not fully appreciate the impact of their crimes, she said.

"Restorative justice is about building trust, but too often it feels poorly explained and misunderstood," Mattison said. "Victims are what make the process authentic — and their nonparticipation is a major source of concern."

Most Sunday mornings, Hubbard lights candles for the girls at a church near her home and prays that her attackers "find peace" in their lives. "All I want is to meet these girls, to look them in the eyes and see that they understand the pain they have caused," Hubbard said from her living room. "I'm not interested in seeing them punished. It's enough to hear them say, 'I'm sorry.'"

Justice by geography

Sarah Amand wonders why it took so long for her teenage daughter, Scarlet, to be offered the chance of a diversion program.

In ninth grade, Scarlet was charged with assault after she got into a fight at school. For the next year, she was summoned to hearing after hearing before a judge finally placed her on supervised probation. A probation officer would call every month, but otherwise left her alone. When Scarlet ran away for weeks at a time, Amand begged the probation officers to intervene and have her brought home — but they repeatedly refused, she said.

"It was terrifying not knowing where my daughter was," said Amand, a nurse from Brooklyn Park. "And it was all the more frustrating that the [juvenile] courts and probation didn't seem to care."

Then, months after the assault, an opportunity came that would reshape Scarlet's future.

Hennepin County offered to enroll her in an intensive restorative justice program known as the Power Program. Overnight, Scarlet gained access to a team of trained professionals, including a case manager who helped her find a job, return to school and begin to repair her fractured relationship with her mother. Twice-weekly group meetings and individual sessions with therapists taught her ways to cope with her impulsivity.

Scarlet was fortunate. Had she lived in the nearby counties of Anoka or Scott, she never would have been given the chance to participate in such an intensive support program. That's because those counties, like many across the state, exclude children from diversion if they have committed felony-level personal crimes.

Lack of money can also limit participation.

Even though Minnesota law requires that every county offer juvenile diversion, funding is left to individual counties. In many cases, county diversion programs are paid for through a mix of short-term grants.

Brown County in south-central Minnesota had to eliminate a promising teen court program after funding dried up. Officials in St. Louis County have dramatically scaled back its main restorative justice program after a $90,000 state grant ended in 2019. As a result, just one part-time staffer handles juvenile diversion cases for the state's sixth most populous county.

"It's had a huge impact on the amount of time and resources we can devote to these kids." said Laura Gapske, program director at Men as Peacemakers, a nonprofit that provides restorative justice programming for youth in St. Louis County.

In June, a joyful Scarlet — her long, red-dyed hair flowing from beneath her blue cap — arrived at her high school graduation ceremony in New Hope. Diploma in hand, she darted through a tunnel of screaming well-wishers until she found her mother. It was a moment that a tearful Amand once doubted she would ever see.

"To be honest, I probably would still be out on the streets, and nowhere near graduating, were it not for the love I got here," said Scarlet, speaking from the Power Program's meeting space in a north Minneapolis church. "The problem with the county and the courts — that whole world — is they focus on what you did, and not on the why, all the events that lead up to it."

Racial gap, revolving door

The boy arrived at the office beside his mother, then slumped in a chair with his hoodie pulled up and eyes cast down. He did not want to be there and had no intention of participating.

But he had no choice. Last fall, a Hennepin County judge ordered Jerome, a lanky 15-year-old from St. Louis Park, to complete the mentorship program as part of his probation after bringing a knife to school to confront a bully. No one was seriously injured, but the fight saddled him with a criminal record.

Trahern Pollard, 49, founder of the violence prevention group We Push for Peace, leaned forward from across the table, demanding attention. "Maybe you wanna be a doctor or a lawyer — you can't accomplish any of that shit with this," he said, waving a manila folder containing charges related to the assault.

Over the next hour, Pollard and his team of formerly incarcerated men urged Jerome to choose a different path, relying on personal anecdotes to convince him that felonies can plague young Black men for a lifetime.

And they would know.

During a tumultuous childhood on the South Side of Chicago, Pollard learned what it felt like to be on both ends of a bullet. Not long after surviving a gunshot wound, Pollard pulled the trigger on a rival gang member — a decision that ultimately earned him 13 years in prison.

That experience gives Pollard credibility with the troubled youth he now serves. Last year, his organization signed a $400,000 contract to provide mentorship and work readiness training for about 60 young adults as a form of post-charge diversion.

The goal: jam a crutch in the revolving door that disproportionately affects youth of color.

In both Hennepin and Ramsey counties, Black youth make up a larger share of kids charged, but they are significantly less likely to be offered diversion than white offenders, county data shows. Nationally, white youth are 30% more likely than Black children to have their delinquency cases diverted away from formal court processing, according to data from the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Pollard acknowledges that the cards are stacked against the teens, who are often overwhelmed by troubles like poverty, trauma and community gun violence. But in his office, he forces everyone to confront the magnitude of their own actions and accept fault.

During weekly sessions, Pollard and his team teach kids how to create a résumé, conduct mock job interviews and navigate the terms of their probation. For some clients, that means dropping them off at school to avoid an altercation with other kids they might be fighting with — then returning promptly after the bell. Other times, it requires homing in on a child's interests to redirect energy into a more constructive outlet. One mentor, a licensed barber, even keeps clippers in his office to dole out free haircuts upon request.

With their assistance, Jerome found a job stocking produce at the neighborhood grocery store and developed more confidence, no longer needing to be prompted to make eye contact. At home, he began speaking to his mother in a new, respectful tone. She was delighted.

"Those men weren't cutting J no slack," said Antoinette Jones. "He's humbling himself through this."

Four months after he first walked through the door of We Push for Peace, the men held a graduation ceremony for teens who completed the program. Jerome beamed as he clutched the certificate, promising to keep coming around the center each week even though he no longer has to.

His mom vowed to drive him.

'A token of grace'

Wearing shiny gold shoes, Arriell seemed to fly as she ran the curve of the 200-meter race at Orono High School. Despite a strained hamstring, Arriell gained on her rivals in the backstretch, finishing near the front of a crowded race. Then she rushed to embrace her mother and two younger sisters who were screaming from the sidelines.

"You dig deep, girl!" shouted her mother, Lashawnda Demry, a nurse.

A year earlier, Arriell had emerged from the wreckage of the stolen car with a bruised lip and a sore back — but amazed that she and Debra were still alive. Her biggest fear was that her mother might find out, so she made no mention of the incident or her arrest after she returned home that evening from the juvenile detention center.

Like many adolescents, Arriell struggled socially and academically during the first year of the pandemic. She leaned on her younger cousin for emotional support. Despite living on the opposite side of Minneapolis, Debra would sometimes rush over to comfort Arriell.

"We were the only support system we had for each other," Arriell said.

To alleviate their sense of helplessness and boredom, she and Debra began hanging out with peers who skipped school and went on joy rides in stolen cars, Arriell said.

"People tell you about all the good things that will come to you if you do this or that, and you start to actually believe them," Arriell said, reflecting on the time. "Right from wrong becomes less important than the thrill that awaits you."

Two weeks after the crash, Arriell's mother received a letter from the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, disclosing that her daughter had been arrested. Her initial shock and anger was followed by relief. The letter said that Arriell, a first-time offender, qualified for a restorative justice program that would enable her to avoid criminal charges.

"That letter felt like a token of grace," Demry said. "I didn't really know much about restorative justice, but it sounded a lot better than a criminal record."

Over the next three months, Arriell was repeatedly encouraged through group dialogues to reflect on the underlying causes of her behavior. She began to think about her small circle of friends, and how they were taking advantage of her weaknesses — including her "hunger to feel like she belonged," she said. For the first time, she began to think about her own aspirations — including the possibility of attending college.

"They made me feel like a human being, and not a criminal," she said.

Yet Arriell has been left wondering what might have been. There are times, often late at night, when Arriell will send a text message to her favorite cousin, the one who always lifted her spirit with a joke or a compliment. Only after sending it does she remember that Debra is gone.

"I feel lucky that I got a second chance," said Arriell. "But why didn't my friend get that chance?"

As youth detention centers close, Minnesota runs out of places to rehabilitate kids who commit serious crimes

By Liz Sawyer, Chris Serres and Maryjo Webster

Photos by Jerry Holt

Scores of protesters holding signs reading "Community Not Cages" streamed into a park in downtown Winona, Minn., pumping their fists in the air and yelling, "No new jails!"

The focus of their anger: A plan to house up to eight youth at the county jail. Officials hoped it would end the practice of sending local children arrested in serious crimes to detention centers hundreds of miles away.

"There will be zero youth incarceration in our county for as long as I live — and hopefully for long after I'm gone," declared Tova Strange, 21, a student and one of the organizers of that July protest.

Winona County commissioners quietly abandoned the proposal.

The uproar in this southeastern Minnesota city reflects the growing clout of a national movement to end all forms of confinement for young people, and to replace incarceration with community-based rehabilitation programs.

In Minnesota, more than a dozen licensed facilities that once housed and cared for high-risk children have shut their doors over the past decade. Three of the state's biggest — Hennepin County Home School, Boys Totem Town in St. Paul and the Hills Youth and Family Services in Duluth — have abruptly closed since 2019. The number of beds in Minnesota's juvenile correctional facilities has shrunk by about 40% since 2015, state records show.

But the millions of dollars saved from closing juvenile detention centers has not been redirected into rigorous statewide rehabilitation programming that criminal justice advocates envisioned. Adolescents troubled by trauma and behavioral health problems who have committed violent crimes often bounce from one improvised placement to another. Many spend years on supervised probation or in short-term shelters without ever receiving sustained therapy, increasing the risk they pose to the public and themselves.

"Kids are ending up in prison or dead because we have nowhere to send them," said Christine Rickart, former program director of an emergency shelter for behaviorally troubled children in Hennepin County that closed last fall. "We talk about community resources but there is no plan when those are exhausted."

Anoka public defender Sarah Ellsworth likens the situation to when the state began closing large public mental hospitals in the 1970s and flung open the doors for institutionalized patients. The government assumed community programming would fill the gap. That never happened.

Minnesota may be making the same mistake with youth, she said, by shipping them back to the same dysfunctional environments, where their chances of success are greatly diminished.

"There are no resources in the community to support them — especially when you get outside of the metro," said Ellsworth, who applauds the effort to move away from traditional forms of detention. "[But] I don't think the average mom who's struggling with her 15-year-old knows where to turn."

Judges say they are running out of places to send youth who require the kind of intensive therapy not available through community-based programs. As a result, more than 1,800 Minnesota children have been shipped out of state for residential treatment over the past decade, to facilities as far away as Georgia, Missouri, Texas and Utah, state records show.

Deddtrease Edwards was only 14 when she was first sent to a residential facility for troubled youth in Iowa because of a lack of beds in Minnesota. Isolated from her family, Edwards struggled with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. At night, she began cutting herself with metal objects to relieve her emotional distress.

A decade later, the dark scars still crisscross both her arms.

"The emotional damage that was done will never heal," said Edwards, who now lives in Richfield and is a mother of three children. "Suddenly I was ripped away from everyone I knew and loved and sent far away … it was too much for me at that age."

'No other options out there'

No single government agency in Minnesota tracks where children are sent once they are found guilty of a crime.

Children who are considered too dangerous to return to their homes are consigned to an array of institutional settings — including detention centers, group homes and treatment centers — that are run by a patchwork of public and private agencies. All told, these facilities have the capacity to house up to 1,000 children. However, unlike in the adult prison system, information is scarce. State corrections officials said they do not know how many of these juvenile beds are in use on any given day, or what happens to youth once they are released back home.

But the pressure to find help for some of Minnesota's most troubled teens is being felt in all corners of the state.

Village Ranch in Annandale is one of the last residential facilities in the state that provides intensive therapy and classroom education for girls convicted of crimes. Young women can spend months sorting out their lives and the root causes of their behavior with trained counselors and psychologists.

The care doesn't end when they leave Village Ranch; children still struggling with behavioral health problems can access three months of outpatient therapy.

"No one is left to sink or swim here," said Angelisa Mays-Andrews, Village Ranch's program coordinator. "We elevate everyone."

Mays-Andrews, 32, has made it her life's mission to provide a sanctuary for troubled girls. One Sunday evening a month, she transforms Village Ranch into a healing spa. For several hours, the 16 teenagers can forget their troubles and the crimes that got them sent here, and instead focus on their physical and emotional well-being. They submerge their bare feet into small tubs of mineral-rich water, rub clay on their faces and giggle at each other in their bathrobes.

"You look beautiful, just like Lady Gaga!" shouted one of the teenage girls from across the room.

The shortage of treatment beds statewide means that Village Ranch is being pressured daily to take children who have committed violent crimes, from carjackings to shootings, which the non-secure facility was never equipped to handle.

The wait list to get into Village Ranch can stretch for three months or longer, with dozens of girls turned away each year. Many are kids of color from the Twin Cities metro area — the very girls that Mays-Andrews, who is Black, longs to help rehabilitate.

"It's really hard to say no, when you realize there are no other options out there," she said. "The girls we turn away are the ones who end up in faraway places like Iowa or Texas."

James O'Donnell is facing similar challenges as supervisor of the West Central Regional Juvenile Center, a correctional facility in Moorhead.

A decade ago, West Central rarely admitted youth from outside of the 10 counties it serves in western Minnesota, O'Donnell said. But as facilities have closed, judges and prosecutors across the state have turned to his facility as a "place of last resort" for children who are too dangerous to be sent back to their homes, he said.

Many have been found guilty of violent felonies and have exhausted their treatment options in the community. Probation officers can no longer handle them. O'Donnell and his staff have to turn away these children because they have psychiatric disorders that have gone untreated for years and their needs exceed the capabilities of West Central.

"It's scary and bewildering that we are allowing children to get to such a desperate point where even we can't help them," he said. "We're seeing kids who have been on a downward spiral for four or five years — kids who have shot someone or taken another person's life — and we're expected to perform miracles."

Detention centers emptied

The tide began to turn against youth confinement nearly three decades ago amid a surge in youth violence, both in Minnesota and nationally.

In a 1995 analysis, the state Office of the Legislative Auditor concluded that most of Minnesota's juvenile facilities were failing to rehabilitate the children detained there. In some cases, nine out of 10 committed new crimes as adults.

In Minnesota and elsewhere, Black youth were more likely to be incarcerated than whites —even for the same crimes. Several national studies confirmed that a teenager who was incarcerated was more likely to end up in prison as an adult, or on public assistance, than one who was not. Confinement also significantly increased a child's risk for mental health problems as adults, researchers found.

Detention centers — once a dumping ground even for truants and low-level shoplifters — slashed daily admission rates. In Hennepin and Ramsey, the state's two biggest counties, admissions to juvenile detention centers plunged by more than 80% between 2005 and 2020, records show.

State officials and youth justice advocates envisioned replacing detention with a continuum of community-based services. In 2005, state corrections officials launched an ambitious reform effort, known as the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, to expand programs such as youth mentoring, job training and family counseling.

But designing those programs — and paying for them — was left largely to each of Minnesota's 87 counties.

"All we were doing was not incarcerating the kids," said Judge Gary Bastian, who served multiple stints on the juvenile bench and now presides as a senior judge. "But we weren't giving them programs, so they were going out untreated."

A series of scandals at state-licensed correctional facilities further solidified public perception that the places were rampant with abuse. Mesabi Academy, a private treatment center on the Iron Range, shuttered in 2016 after an investigation found that staff concealed allegations of sexual assault and sanctioned violence, allowing boys as young as 12 to compete in a "fight club." At Boys Totem Town in St. Paul, a therapist was criminally charged for having sex with a 17-year-old patient she helped escape, then hide at her home.

So when Hennepin and Ramsey counties in 2016 moved forward with plans to develop a joint facility to treat juveniles that would expand programming and replace the Home School and Totem Town, 100 protesters clogged the public hearing in Richfield to denounce what they called "youth prisons."

One week later, county commissioners abandoned the project.

Once a model for youth rehabilitation

In its best years, the Hennepin County Home School was an oasis of stability for troubled youth, and it was often held up as a model for other juvenile correctional facilities across the country.

Judges sent children considered too dangerous to live in the community to this 145-acre campus on the western edge of the Twin Cities. Founded in 1909, the school was one of the first in the nation to combine group and individual therapy with a structured classroom environment. On weekends, there were horseback rides, canoe trips and camping excursions designed to build relationships and more-positive identities.

"It didn't matter what the child did; we did everything humanly possible to make them believe in themselves," said Marion Barber Jr., a former University of Minnesota football star who was an instructor at the school's girls program in the 1990s.

For decades, the facility operated more like a treatment center than a correctional facility. Each child was surrounded by a multidisciplinary team of teachers, social workers, therapists and psychologists who met weekly to chronicle a child's progress.

"It was a pearl on the prairie," said Gloria Morrow-Peterson, who worked as a psychiatric social worker at the school from 1989 to 1997. "We took children who were broken and traumatized, and turned them into thinking, empathetic beings."

Rashid Barkadle, a home health care worker from Minneapolis, said the institution likely saved his teenage son's life.

In his sophomore and junior years at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, his son Mubashir Barkadle was arrested four times for stealing cars and once for attempted robbery of a phone store. He was quickly released after each arrest because none of the offenses was serious enough to meet the county's standard for detention. Twice, a judge ordered him to wear an ankle monitor to track his movements. Both times, he clipped it off with a pair of scissors and vanished from home and school.

When a judge finally sentenced Mubashir to five months at Hennepin County Home School, he yelled an expletive at the judge.

But now, two years later, Mubashir refers to his time at the facility as "the best thing that ever happened" to him.

He was required to wake early, attend classes and keep a daily journal of his progress. A visiting instructor, who was Black, delivered weekly lectures about the legacy of systemic racism in America and the damaging effects of incarceration on communities of color. At night, Mubashir had hours of uninterrupted time to reflect on the lessons and his plans for the future.

"For the first time in my life, people were focused on what I wanted to do with my life, instead of what I had already done," he said. "It was liberating."

This fall, Mubashir began taking technology classes at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. He hopes to start his own mobile computer troubleshooting business and hire young people who are from impoverished backgrounds, like he is.

Chenaya Johnson, who attended Hennepin County Home School two decades ago, remembers the horseback riding lessons over wide-open pastures, and the gifts that staff handed out to foster children like her, who did not have relatives who visited on holidays.

The school's campus felt a world away from the abusive home in Minneapolis where Johnson had spent most of her early childhood. From Day 1, Johnson said, the school made her feel "like a human being." They told her it was understandable that she was angry, given her history of family trauma, and taught her methods for coping with her anger, she said.

"Not only did they create a nurturing environment, they gave us the time and the support to work things out," said Johnson, now a human resources coordinator and mother of three. "Honestly, were it not for my time there, I'm certain that I would have ended up in prison."

But the population of the school plunged as judges and probation officers shifted toward community-based programs. By 2020, the average daily resident population at the school, which once housed up to 140 children, had dwindled to just 20 kids. Most of the school's seven cottages sat vacant. The operating cost to taxpayers had soared to nearly $500,000 annually per child, according to county estimates.

"It just didn't make any economic sense, from a long-term perspective, to keep the facility open," said Catherine Johnson, director of Hennepin County's Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Still, the decision to close the school was made early this year without a public hearing — and came as a shock to some local judges and youth advocates.

Some, like longtime Hennepin County juvenile Judge Tanya Bransford, argue that the home school was the only option available in the county for sending kids who were involved in shootings or other violent crimes and were not safe to return home.

In Bransford's view, the county behaved irresponsibly — and possibly put the public's safety at risk — by moving to close the school without developing other secure treatment options.

"I'm not saying it was perfect," said Bransford, who's spent 15 years on the juvenile bench. "But to say that no young person should be placed in any out-of-home placement at any time is unrealistic."

The large net of probation

Instead of treatment centers, the most common destination for Minnesota's high-risk youth is juvenile probation. Frequently underfunded and overburdened, county probation departments supervise more than 3,500 children statewide.

Jane Schmid, a youth probation agent from Brown County and president of the Minnesota Corrections Association, made her way toward the cluttered backyard of a home in Sleepy Eye in south-central Minnesota.

She was scanning the outside of the home for empty vodka bottles, spent bullet casings or any other signs of problems at the home of her client — a 17-year-old with a troubled past. Jacob had been on probation almost continuously since he was 10 years old for a rash of crimes, including three car thefts in which he led police on high-speed chases. His mother refused to take him back after he escaped from a youth shelter and was found days later in a stolen vehicle.

Schmid estimated that she's had "easily more than 300" one-on-one meetings with Jacob over seven years. "It's gotten to the point where I am the most stable adult presence in this boy's life," said Schmid as she approached the home. "And it shouldn't be that way."

It was a sweltering summer afternoon, and Jacob was waiting for Schmid at a shaded picnic table. For the next hour Schmid peppered Jacob with a series of no-nonsense questions. How was his new job? Why had he missed a work shift? Was he taking his anti-anxiety medications? And how was he getting along with his father?

"In the past my dad wasn't fully there, but he's there for me now — so I can really talk to him," Jacob said.

Schmid flashed a broad smile and replied excitedly, "Family is so huge, right? I mean, friends are great, but I don't want you to go back to hanging with people who aren't doing anything productive."

Jacob nodded but said nothing.

As the conversation ended, Schmid asked Jacob to hand over the clunky ankle bracelet that had been monitoring his movements for the past year — a milestone in Jacob's yearslong effort to make it off probation.

"This feels like a new chapter," Jacob said proudly as he handed over the device.

Three months later, Jacob's life unraveled.

Schmid began receiving text messages that he had run away from home again and was couch-hopping with friends. Then shortly after Jacob's 18th birthday, Schmid got a 3 a.m. text message from his mother saying police had picked him up with methamphetamines. When the two met at the Brown County probation office, Schmid was alarmed by his appearance: the disheveled clothes hanging off his gaunt body and open sores consistent with drug use.

But now that he was 18, Jacob would soon move beyond her jurisdiction. He was now entangled in the less-forgiving adult criminal system. "It's gut-wrenching," she said, "just knowing that he had come so far only to fall off that cliff."

To Schmid, Jacob's story is a cautionary one about the limits of community-based programming. Jacob spent seven years bouncing from short-term stays in youth shelters and treatment centers. But each time he returned home, he reconnected with a group of friends and would reoffend. Apart from prodding and cajoling, Schmid said she had few levers to keep him out of trouble.

"It's possible this tragedy could have been avoided had [Jacob] got sustained, collaborative treatment when he first offended" at age 10, she said. "Instead, he's maxed out all the community resources and it got him nowhere."

Minor offenses often funnel Minnesota youth from extended probation into adult lockup

By Liz Sawyer, Chris Serres and Maryjo Webster

Photos by Jerry Holt

At the sound of his mother's distant voice, a 2-year-old named Mau'rese suddenly dropped his toys, squealed "Mommy!" and darted across the living room of his family's apartment in north Minneapolis.

"I love you Mau'rese-ee-oh, my baby!" said the muffled voice over the phone.

The voice belonged to Makeysa Morgan, 20, who has spent virtually all of her son's life locked up at a women's prison in Shakopee for violating the conditions of her juvenile probation. Morgan wasn't there to see Mau'rese take his first steps, utter his first words or attend his first day of preschool. Their interactions are limited to 10-minute evening phone calls.

"I just want to embrace my child and let him know that he's loved," Morgan said. "That's all I want out of life."

Each year, Minnesota sends scores of young people like Morgan to prison for conduct that normally would not warrant such punishment. Many committed offenses when they were as young as 14 and 15 years old. Yet they are locked up in prisons — surrounded by much older adults — because they violated the terms of a youth probation program that has gone largely unexamined for three decades.

Extended jurisdiction juvenile, or EJJ, was once heralded as an innovative alternative to incarceration for adolescents who commit violent crimes. Instead, an alarming percentage of them end up serving prison sentences — the very outcome the program was created to prevent.

"Everything that could go wrong did go wrong" with extended probation, said Barry Feld, a retired law professor and early architect of EJJ, who now disavows the program as ineffective and unduly harsh. He is among a growing number of public officials and legal scholars who wish to see it dismantled.

About half of the 1,335 youths in Minnesota who have been placed on extended probation since 2011 have had their probation revoked and criminal sentences imposed, according to an analysis of state court data. Some end up in prison because they reoffend, but many kids are sent to prison for things like not completing court-mandated therapy or failing a drug test.

In Hennepin County, these technical probation violations accounted for nearly 60% of youth who fail extended probation and end up in the adult criminal system, according to a sampling of 2020 juvenile cases.

Black youth are significantly more likely to be placed on extended probation — and be sentenced as adults for failing the program — than their white peers. Statewide, youth of color consistently make up more than 70% of kids placed on extended probation — and nearly 80% of those who fail the program and receive adult sentences, according to state court data.

Children placed on extended probation stay under the close supervision of a probation officer until their 21st birthday — or as long as seven years. That's even longer than the statewide maximum probation sentence for adults, which is limited to five years for most felony convictions. Some probation officers and public defenders say it's unreasonable to expect young people to steer clear of trouble for such extended periods.

"Some people call EJJ a 'back door' to the adult criminal system, but it's very clear that it's a front door," said Sarah Davis, executive director of the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis. "It acts like a funnel directly into the adult system."

'No teenager is cut out for prison'

Matthew Doughty has spent 25 years trying to forget his painful experience with Minnesota's extended youth probation system.

The 41-year-old volunteer firefighter grew up in an abusive home and spent much of his adolescence bouncing from foster homes to dormlike group homes. By age 16, Doughty was skipping classes, taking drugs and hanging out at his 13-year-old girlfriend's home. Eventually, the girl's parents notified police and Doughty was charged with criminal sexual conduct for repeatedly having sex with a minor. If tried as an adult, he faced a prison sentence of up to 18 months.

When prosecutors offered him extended probation in lieu of prison, Doughty said he leaped at the opportunity without knowing the stakes. At the time, he did not understand that a technical violation of his probation could trigger an adult sentence.

"All I knew at 16 is that I had two choices: Either definitely going to prison, or possibly going to prison," he said. "It was the first time I was in real trouble with the law, and I would have done anything to avoid being locked up."

As part of his probation, Doughty was expected to successfully complete therapy at the Hennepin County Home School, a now-closed facility that once housed up to 140 kids. But he objected to the treatment methods and failed the program. A judge ultimately revoked his probation and imposed the 18-month prison sentence. He was 20 when he walked out of the Hennepin County juvenile courtroom in handcuffs and was taken directly to prison in St. Cloud.

Doughty described the next 18 months as "the most terrifying" of his life. As a teenager charged with a sex crime, he became a target of violence from much older inmates. Within weeks after his arrival, Doughty said he was badly beaten in the prison bathroom by four men. Another inmate cracked his skull with a sock filled with pool balls.

"I had to be hard and look like none of it affected me, but I cried for nights on end," he said. "No teenager is cut out for prison."

Today, Doughty owns 10 acres of birch forest along the banks of the Willow River in northern Minnesota, where his wife and three daughters enjoy fishing and hunting. He trains therapy dogs and works as a volunteer firefighter in the nearby town of Remer, Minn. He launched a nonprofit to help first responders deal with trauma, and gives regular talks on the subject.

Yet Doughty said he still suffers painful flashbacks from his time in prison. The sharp sound of doors slamming or the creaking of a metal bed is often enough to trigger his anxiety. He gets nervous in crowds and can't resist looking over his shoulder — a habit he acquired in prison.

"Prison screwed me up mentally and will haunt me to my grave," he said. "The reality is, you can explain a complicated program like [extended jurisdiction juvenile] to a 16-year-old, but they're not going to understand the stakes."

An approach that caught on

Three decades ago, Minnesota lawmakers were searching for ways to counter a surge in youth crime. Growing numbers of repeat juvenile offenders were being tried as adults and being sentenced to prison, raising fears they would become lifetime criminals. In 1992, a state task force devised a novel carrot-and-stick approach to holding kids accountable — one that caught on in more than a dozen states across the country.

Called "blended sentencing," Minnesota's experiment combined elements of both the juvenile and adult criminal systems. Youths convicted of a felony between the ages of 14 and 17 would receive an adult criminal sentence, but the sentence would be "stayed," or suspended, while the teen completed the terms of juvenile probation. To alleviate public safety concerns, probation under the new program would last much longer and involve more rigorous oversight.

Youth who complied with the terms of the extended probation would be released from supervision at age 21 — and avoid the stain of a criminal record that would follow them into adulthood. But if they failed to comply with the terms of their probation, a judge could immediately impose the adult sentence.

Former Hennepin County Judge Philip Bush, a member of the 1992 task force, said extended probation was meant to be a "middle ground approach" that gave youth more time to access rehabilitative services and change their behavior. "We were trying to address the very real problem that juvenile courts didn't have sufficient tools to deal with violent and chronic young offenders," said Bush, who remains a supporter of the program. "By hanging an adult sentence over their heads, we gave them a huge incentive to be law-abiding."

But soon after the program launched, evidence began to mount that EJJ was not meeting its core objective of rehabilitating kids and keeping them out of prison.

In an expansive 2001 study, researchers found that judges and prosecutors across Minnesota had widened the net of the program beyond its original intent, ensnaring teens who wouldn't normally qualify for adult criminal sentences. Many had committed minor property crimes and were not chronic or violent offenders. More than a third of these children were failing the program, and 76% were failing for technical probation violations rather than new crimes, researchers found at the time.

"Extended jurisdiction juvenile was designed to give kids one last chance at rehabilitation," said Feld, a co-author of the 2001 study. "Instead, it became a back door to prison. It swept up large numbers of youth into the adult correctional system who did not deserve to be there."

Local prosecutors were given too much discretion to determine who qualified, and the strict terms of the program often "set kids up to fail," Feld said. Youth on extended probation had to attend weekly meetings with their probation officers and undergo regular drug and alcohol tests for up to seven years. In many counties, children who committed even minor violations such as smoking weed or skipping school were taken off probation and sentenced as adults.

Statewide, more than 740 youths placed on the program have had their probation revoked — and adult criminal sentences imposed — since 2011, court records show. The state court system does not track how many of these children end up in prison. However, Hennepin County District Court recently found that nearly half of the youths who had their probation revoked over the past decade were sentenced to prison. Of those, 91% were youth of color, and 5% were white, the county found.

Those stark racial disparities are further evidence that extended probation is flawed and should be abolished, according to one of Hennepin County's top juvenile corrections officers. "You can't say there's a reason why this is happening other than, in my opinion, race," said Jerald Moore, who serves as the county's juvenile probation division manager. "So I would advocate for us to disband EJJ."

Fulfilling the terms of extended probation can be so burdensome that some young people ask the court to impose the adult sentence instead. In Hennepin County, records show that in 2020 nearly one quarter of teenagers placed on the program would rather serve time for a shorter period than remain under intense surveillance until their 21st birthday.

Sen. Bobby Joe Champion, incoming DFL president of the state Senate and a longtime juvenile defense attorney, said youth make those decisions — sometimes against the advice of legal counsel — without taking into account the long-term impact of having a criminal record.

"They may not understand the gravity of it until later. And then they sometimes have buyer's remorse," said Champion, who thinks lawmakers should take a "hard look" at whether extended probation lasts too long.

Others have criticized extended probation as too lenient. In emotional court hearings, some family members who have lost their loved ones to shootings, high-speed chases and other deadly crimes have pleaded with judges to try these adolescents as adults. In Hennepin County, approximately 30% to 50% of youths placed on extended jurisdiction reoffend within two years — evidence, critics say, that the program is failing to protect the public.

Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell said the high failure rate of extended probation points to deeper problems with the youth justice system, including the need for more mental health services for kids placed on probation. He cautioned that any move to abolish extended probation would probably result in more adolescents being tried as adults and ending up in prison — an outcome he described as "tragic."

"If we unwind EJJ, but then we don't create the kinds of supports necessary for these kids, then what are we doing?" Schnell said. "We know that the right interventions … actually make a difference."

In 2018, Ray Moss took over as coordinator of an ambitious, long-term initiative in Ramsey County designed to keep young offenders out of detention.

Almost immediately, Moss was alarmed by the consistently high failure rate of extended probation, and reports that participants were being sent to prison for technical probation violations rather than for new crimes. Moss, a former probation officer, said he was also surprised to discover that children were never released early from the program in Ramsey County for good behavior — even though the law allows for early discharges.

"When I found out that EJJ had a 50 percent failure rate and never let a kid out early — not even one — I was furious," said Moss. "It was clear that no one had looked at this program in more than 30 years and recognized it for the travesty that it is."

Moss said he spent three years trying to persuade Ramsey County officials to establish minimum guidelines for the early release of youths on extended probation. Frustrated by the lack of progress, he resigned from his county post last fall. He now runs a nonprofit dedicated to helping teens rejoin society after detention.

In Hennepin County, which sees the largest share of juvenile cases in Minnesota, incoming County Attorney Mary Moriarty said she will push the Legislature to dismantle EJJ and adopt a different framework for addressing youth violence. That blended sentencing model, however well-intentioned, ultimately failed to keep kids out of prison or prevent them from reoffending upon release, she said.

"When you have half of kids not succeeding in a particular program or service, that's not working," said Moriarty, a former chief public defender who was elected as Hennepin's top prosecutor last month on the promise of criminal justice reform.

In the meantime, Moriarty plans to direct her office to limit the number of petitions seeking adult certification or EJJ, with the intent of keeping more teens within the juvenile system.

"I understand my obligation to public safety," she said. "I also understand sending youth to prison is not going to keep us safer, or put them in better shape."

Continuous monitoring

Lewis McCaleb, 25, said he considers himself "one of the lucky 50 percent" who survived extended probation without ending up in prison.

The musician, who goes by the artist name Lewiee Blaze, was placed in the program at age 16 after he was convicted of beating and robbing a man near a south Minneapolis light-rail station with a group of accomplices in 2014 .

McCaleb estimates he had more than 200 one-on-one meetings with probation officers over the five years he spent on extended probation. Not once, he said, did his first few probation officers ask about his life at home and what help he needed to stay out of trouble. Had they asked, McCaleb said he would have told the officers about how his single mother was a victim of domestic violence and struggled with mental illness and drug abuse, and about how he and his three younger brothers would sometimes go hungry.

"I began to take matters into my own hands and make some bad decisions," he said, describing how, by age 15, he started running in the streets and selling drugs to help provide for the family. "I couldn't just be a kid anymore."

The law finally caught up with McCaleb after surveillance footage from the train platform captured an image of his high school letter jacket. Police marched him out of his high school science class in handcuffs. A public defender later told McCaleb that he faced five years in prison if a judge certified him as an adult. But since this was his first offense, he qualified for EJJ. The legal concept confused him, he said, yet any amount of time on probation seemed better than prison.

"I'm the man of the house, so me going away for five years was not an option," recalled McCaleb, who believes those family obligations motivated him to stay out of trouble. But after completing four months of house arrest, the idea of five more years of continuous monitoring felt excessive.

McCaleb made it to his 21st birthday without violating the conditions of his probation. He now helps lead group therapy sessions with adolescents who have been convicted of violent crimes and are being held at juvenile correctional facilities in Ramsey County, Moorhead and Red Wing. Many of the kids he is mentoring are on extended probation like he was.

A decision that backfired

Makeysa Morgan's odyssey with extended probation began on a March evening in 2020, when police arrested her for being an accomplice to an armed robbery.

Morgan, who was 17 at the time, lured a friend to a house in north Minneapolis where he was jumped by four boys wielding guns and an axe. After taking his vehicle, they led police on a high-speed chase that ended when they crashed into a wall. Morgan, who was in the back seat of the crushed vehicle, was immediately arrested.

Hennepin County prosecutors gave the teenager a choice: Be certified as an adult and face a 58-month prison sentence for aggravated robbery, or be placed on extended probation for the next four years. Morgan, who had given birth a few months earlier, said she was prepared to accept "just about any deal" that would keep her at home with her newborn son.

But Morgan's decision to accept extended probation would backfire — and ultimately land her in the prison cell where she remains to this day.

In interviews from Shakopee prison, the young mother said she was never told of what would happen if she violated the conditions of her probation. One of these conditions was that she complete a mental health treatment program at a now-shuttered facility in Duluth. But roughly two months into her treatment, Morgan was expelled for behavioral problems — violating a condition of her probation. The result was swift and harsh: Within days, a judge issued a warrant for her arrest and imposed a nearly five-year prison sentence on a 17-year-old girl.

"I had no idea they could send me here without me committing a new crime," Morgan said. "It was like a dagger in my heart."

For the past two years, Morgan has turned to her mother and father to care for her son, who turned 3 earlier this month. She's missed most of his major milestones, and had to listen on the phone while family members sang "happy birthday" to him each year.

"Tell me, why is my daughter behind bars?" asked her father, Patrick Ester, as he walked Mau'rese to a playground near his home. "How do you send a young mother to prison when she hasn't even caught a new [criminal] charge? It's inhumane."