BAND-AID OR AMPUTATION

Imagine making a doctor choose between amputating a patient's broken
arm and putting a Band-Aid on it. In Louisiana, prosecutors and judges
face choices that are about that stark.

N.B. and a friend vandalized two cars outside a school near his
family's Kenner home. The boy was later caught with marijuana.

Grace Bauer, who lives in the southwest Louisiana town of Sulphur,
says her son had a drug problem, helped break into a truck and took
his parents' gun to another child's home.

Terrance, a New Orleans teenager, was unruly at school, but his record
was clean until he got into a fight at a state group home.

These three teenagers entered the juvenile justice system with
different problems -- problems that, over time, might have responded
to drug rehabilitation, mental health care or educational adjustments.
All three ended up in juvenile prison. If they had broken the law in,
say, Missouri, these young men might have found themselves somewhere
in a network of small residential treatment programs.

But Louisiana skimps on alternatives to incarceration. That imbalance
wastes money, jeopardizes public safety and ruins troubled but
salvageable youths. Lawmakers ought to address the problem
immediately.

Right now, our state has about 1,300 juveniles in prison. The
Legislature's Juvenile Justice Commission asked the Annie E. Casey
Foundation last year to analyze what those inmates had done. The
foundation found that burglary and theft are the most common property
charges; assault and battery are the most common violent offenses.
Three-quarters of juvenile inmates were convicted of nonviolent
crimes, and most had no prior offenses on their records.

Even so, there are more slots available in Louisiana's youth prisons
than in residential programs, day treatment and other community
programs combined.

Moreover, the alternative programs are substantially cheaper than
jailing youths. By a conservative estimate, incarceration costs $120
per offender per day, or about $44,000 per year. That's at least half
again as much as residential programs, twice as much as day treatment
and eight times as much as asking so-called "trackers" to keep tabs on
low-level offenders who live at home.

Our state doesn't rely heavily enough on those programs, and probation
isn't much of an option, either. The state has more than 5,000 youths
on probation and parole but fewer than 200 officers to monitor them;
the average caseload per officer is 38. Hardly anybody believes that a
few phone calls and the occasional face-to-face visit will help
wayward youths change their ways.

The end result is that, in many cases, Louisiana leaves troubled young
people mostly to their own devices until the courts throw them in jail.

Unfortunately, keeping bureaucrats happy is more important in
Louisiana than rehabilitating juvenile offenders. Once the state opens
a large prison, it has to have the bodies present to justify operating
it. Because prisons gobble up so much money -- $89 million out of the
Office of Youth Development's $128 million annual budget, it has less
money available for community-based programs.

The sheer size of Louisiana's four youth prisons -- the largest,
Jetson Correctional Center for Youth in Baton Rouge, has room for
about 560 inmates -- creates other problems. It's harder to maintain
order in our state's jails than in Missouri, where youth-corrections
facilities hold between 20 and 40 beds each.

In Louisiana's vast juvenile prisons, inmates with educational
deficits and emotional disorders are less likely to get the treatment
they need to become productive citizens. Ms. Bauer, whose son served
time in Jetson, says his drug treatment program there consisted of
watching a video -- the same video -- once a week. Former Jetson
inmate Jennifer Kiefer says her substance-abuse treatment consisted
mainly of pamphlets on why drugs are bad.

Clearly, there are better options. Missouri, home to two large metro
areas and a million more people than Louisiana, has just 720 juvenile
detention beds, which is a little more than half of the capacity in
our state. Juvenile centers there generally don't look like jails. The
typical employee isn't a guard but rather a college-educated counselor
who helps young offenders understand how their actions affect victims.
To skeptics, this approach may sound hopelessly New Agey, a fusion of
psychobabble with "Sesame Street."

But most members of the Legislature's Juvenile Justice Commission who
visited Missouri in the past year came back dazzled. Recidivism is
lower than in Louisiana, and Missouri is spending barely half as much
on juvenile corrections. Remaking Louisiana's system along those lines
has to be a long-term goal.

The Department of Corrections has announced plans to reduce the
population at all four juvenile prisons. But shutting one down
entirely will generate more savings -- and more money to pay for
alternatives to jail. Tallulah, which houses 240 youths and has been
an albatross since it opened, is the obvious candidate.

The Casey Foundation believes that Louisiana could free up 350 or more
beds by processing cases faster, shortening its boot camp program,
reducing sentences for minor felonies and drug offenses and
incarcerating fewer youths for misdemeanors. In a separate study, a
George Washington University consultant hired by the Department of
Corrections and the U.S. Justice Department concluded in November that
75 youths in state custody should be released within three months, 150
juveniles should be released immediately and 40 never should have been
committed in the first place.

It would be naive to think that all of Louisiana's juvenile offenders
are angels who can go peaceably into society. But there's little doubt
that the state can release low-level offenders from prison now and
begin placing them in treatment programs closer to their homes.

Parents like Ms. Bauer, N.B.'s father and Terrance's mother, Flora,
aren't in denial. They're full of anguish over their children's past
troubles and worried about the future. Those emotions are
well-founded, because the present system is deplorable. Young people
shouldn't go to jail just because the state can't figure out any
better options.