Officials take a tour of Kane County's youth jail
Behind two-way mirrors, a flat-screen monitor a sports bar would be proud of and a control panel that looks like it was designed by Atari, two sets of eyes watch every move in and out of the Kane County Juvenile Detention Center in St. Charles.
It's not the spick-and-span sights of the center that are the most striking. It's the silence. Sections of the building could pass as a school if not for the insitutional jumpsuits. And for more than five hours a day for the 48 inmates, a school is exactly what the detention center is.
“If it was your own son who made a mistake and came here, how would you like them to be taken care of?” said Rick Anselme, superintendent of the facility. “That's how we approach the process here.”
Anselme, Kane County Chief Judge F. Ketih Brown, and a host of other officials from Kane and DuPage counties toured Kane's juvenile justice center Wednesday. If everything goes the way DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin envisions it, DuPage's youth offenders will join inmates from McHenry, Kendall and DeKalb counties at Kane County's facility.
Not even a pane of glass stands between the inmates and staff for the entire time the youths are out of their individual cells. Just about all youths will spend 10 days or fewer at the center in a typical sentence. When the youths get out, Anselme and staff hope they've done enough teaching of life skills so there is no return trip. Oftentimes, that includes parenting classes for the parents of the offenders as well.
“You can detain someone, put them right back in that environment, and if that environment doesn't change you're still going to have a problem,” Brown said.
Cronin fended off public criticism that DuPage officials are concerned only with saving money in the deal.
“That may be an ancillary benefit,” Cronin said. “All of this is about creating a way of governing that is necessary in this day and age.”
Cronin was joined by DuPage County Board members Robert Larsen and Paul Fichtner in saying officials will vote based first on their faith in Kane County to provide as good a program or better than DuPage does for youth offenders.
“This is not about saving money at the expense of kids in DuPage County,” Larsen said.
Larsen believes the relatively low number of youth offenders DuPage serves no longer justifies the cost of a mostly empty DuPage juvenile jail. Moving the youths to Kane may save DuPage up to $1 million a year. The county would still pay Kane officials a fee to house the 24 or so youth offenders DuPage typically houses at any one time.
The fee is expected to be in the range of $110 per inmate per day. At 24 offenders, that's $2,640 a day in new revenue for Kane County. That compares to the $423 per inmate per day cost DuPage currently incurs.
Kane would hire up to nine people to handle the new inmates. Brown said some of the nine might come from DuPage's existing 27-person staff if they are the best candidates. DuPage's money would more than pay for the added overhead.
“We are not doing this to lose money,” Brown said. “There will be a positive cash flow to Kane County.”
If both county boards agree to a deal, Kane County may begin housing DuPage's youth offenders as soon as December.
There might be a couple hitches. DuPage officials will face criticism that Kane's facility is 13 miles from DuPage's juvenile facility. That represents a half-marathon trek for DuPage parents and relatives beyond what many of them already endure to visit the DuPage youth facility. Cronin said the county will try to facilitate transportation for DuPage residents wishing to visit the Kane facility.
The other hang-up could come from the state. Illinois lawmakers are investigating raising the age at which someone can be charged with a crime as a juvenile to 17. Such a change would create a juvenile population spike in Kane's facility. The detention center can currently host 90 inmates, but it has the build-out potential to house 160 — at an undetermined construction price. Brown said a study on the potential juvenile age change is due in December. If the law changes, then Kane County would address the added population spike with an expansion. The costs of that expansion would most likely shared by the counties utilizing the facility at the time.