Juvenile Justice through Diversion Programs and Case Management

By: Vaughn Bangash, Madison Maklansky, Hannah Salamon, Skylar Schumann

What are Diversion Programs?
Diversion programs are pretrial sentencing programs and intervention programs that allow the juvenile to join a rehabilitation program to help the juvenile change their behaviors leading up to the arrest.

Why Diversion Programs?
1. Diversion Programs are often a more suitable approach to dealing with juvenile delinquency than legal punishment. This response is more productive in preventing future delinquency.
2. There are disadvantages when formally processing youth through the juvenile justice system. The legal system labels youth based on their crime and exposes them to experiences within correctional facilities that often lead to more delinquent behaviors.

From 1985 to 1990, New Orleans saw a 19 percent rise in juvenile arrests and an 82 percent rise in juvenile charges in a five-year period (Landry & Neville, 1991.) To this day, juvenile delinquency is still rising at an alarming rate, increasing more rapidly than adult crime rates in the New Orleans area. According to the United States Department of Justice, juvenile delinquency is any violation of the law committed by a person prior to their eighteenth birthday. In an effort to divert juvenile offenders from transitioning into adult crime, many states and cities introduced diversion programs.

Juvenile diversion programs are pretrial sentencing programs and intervention programs that allow delinquent children to join a rehabilitation program to help them change their behaviors leading up to and after the arrest. While diversion programs have demonstrated a positive outcome overall, this approach has been shown to be more suitable for cases of juvenile delinquency rather than with cases for legal punishment. The city of New Orleans offers a variety of diversion programs such as Teen Court, Girls Reaching Out Works Wonders (GROWW), and Men Engaging in Leader and Opportunity Works (MELOW). However, one program that stands out is Families In Need of Services (FINS). The Louisiana branch of FINS is “a non-profit association established to ensure that children, who are identified as status offenders (according to the LA Children’s Code) and their families have timely access to an effective local system designed to match the needs of the family with quality services to deter youth from more serious offenses, including delinquent arrest and/or delinquent adjudication”. (LaFINS) While not considered to be a diversion program, FINS assists families and children pre-delinquency.

The entrance to the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court

To get a closer look at the juvenile delinquency process, we interviewed Janelle Temple-Foye, the director of FINS at the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court, to hear her experience working with FINS. She goes into depth about the FINS formal process and their promotion of delinquency prevention. She explains why FINS wants to help and shares her thoughts. “We are a case management process that targets families that are dealing with issues with children prior to delinquency cases, helping before children are committing crimes and being arrested.” By providing services for youth and families who need help as part of the juvenile delinquency diversion process, FINS, and other programs are keeping our youth out of the criminal justice system.

For more information on diversion programs and FINS, visit https://nola.gov/juvenile-court/programs/ and http://lafins.org