January 17, 2012. News Brief: Governor decides—in juvenile justice, city kids belong near home. by Abigail Kramer. — If Governor Cuomo gets his way, New York City will cut the number of children it sends to state-run juvenile justice facilities by more than two-thirds over the next two years, receiving more than $35 million per year from the state to create a new spectrum of services and incarceration facilities for juvenile delinquents within the five boroughs.

… Jeffrey Butts, a justice scholar at John Jay College who has worked with the city on analyzing its juvenile capacity needs, notes that a city-administered system could create new financial incentives to keep kids out of lockups altogether, since incarceration is many times more expensive than alternative programs that provide community-based supervision alongside services like family counseling and job training. “If you have $100 to spend and you can either use that money to put one kid in a facility or work with three or four kids in the community, you’ll find that the impulse to put kids in secure facilities goes way down,” says Butts.

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