Over the past twenty years, Chicago's leaders have spent millions aiming to treat arrested children more compassionately, diverging from punitive measures like handcuffs and jail. This shift reflects a national move towards more effective crime reduction and rehabilitation. However, an investigation into Chicago's youth justice reforms, based on extensive interviews, records, and arrest data spanning a decade, exposes a slow and inadequate response to juvenile crime—an insufficient remedy for a profound issue, Injustice Watch reports. The investigation showed the city has hired contractors with records of failure, the Chicago Police Department didn’t buy into key reforms, and a long-promised new program has delivered barely any help to the thousands of kids who might need it.
The latest failure is a $10 million initiative offering some kids arrested one to three months of services — including help with school, legal support, or counseling. While police arrested about 3,600 kids last year, they referred only 286 to the program in its first 11 months. Of those, only 35 completed the program. City officials have also promised for years to begin offering these services to kids instead of arresting them. No such program has begun, and the city has offered no timeline to start. The post-arrest services the city did manage to provide came from nonprofit groups, including some with tainted records. The city rehired a nonprofit that lost a previous contract after failing to keep adequate records. Another group is getting city money, even though it failed to file its paperwork to operate as a charity in Illinois. A third group was involved in a controversy over the alleged misuse of confidential information about child defendants. The police department also disregarded the federal consent decree for nearly five years following the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by an officer. The order commanded the department to encourage officers to route kids away from arrest and toward services. The city’s flailing effort illustrates how then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Mayor Brandon Johnson have struggled to overhaul systems inherited from former Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley.