Eye On Illinois: If kids are too young for detention centers, who will reset their paths?

There is a persistent pattern in Illinois government, and Senate Bill 1784 is a textbook example.

The proposal would increase the age – from 10 to 12 – at which children accused of most crimes could not be held in a detention center. The Senate advanced the legislation 33-17 April 10, so now it sits with nine other bills in the House Judiciary-Criminal Committee.

We’re dealing with a fraction of the population. Year-end data from the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission (tinyurl.com/IJJC2024) shows 77 admissions total of those ages 12 and younger to the state’s 14 facilities in 2024, compared to an all-ages total of 5,490. It’s also not an abundance of time, as almost 47% of all admissions stay up to three days.

However, if you’ve been around kids that age (the youngest of my four is currently 11), it’s not difficult to understand the trauma potential for a child that young subjected to those conditions even for a little while. Nor is it a reach to consider the conflagration of life circumstances likely required to put a young person in such a situation.

Setting aside the portion of the adult population uninterested in waiting for criminal convictions or unwilling to see a person as more than a singular action, and the pattern begins to emerge: People who work in the field observe a challenge, secure buy-in and support from advocacy groups then bring in compassionate lawmakers to propose fixing the problem by creating another.

It’s very easy to argue that young children facing accusations that would warrant detention are far more likely to have their lives set on a new course if kept out of institutional punitive settings. However, developing a viable alternative is another question altogether.

There’s little wisdom in just sending the kids back home to the conditions that quite likely contributed to the incidents prompting an arrest. Our statewide foster care and family supervision network cannot handle its own obligations as is without mixing in a few dozen additional high-stress wards of the state.

Burdens on state agencies likewise give rise to hesitation about the resources available for guaranteeing sufficient legal representation to people accused of crimes, monitoring which homeschool students might be neglected or abused or broadly imposing new requirements to streamline the public college admissions process.

Proposing institutional solutions for individual problems hasn’t worked well for adults with developmental disabilities, so it’s fair to question why we’re any better equipped to care for juveniles accused of serious crimes. Compassion alone can’t render effective services, even when resources abound.

Kudos to lawmakers for acknowledging and addressing problems of vulnerable, small populations. The state shouldn’t make those lives worse. But what are the real steps to meaningful improvement?

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.