Just north of Highway 63, a row of trees separates a service road from a gray one-story building dotted with windows just wide enough to allow the width of a face.
The campus expands to reveal an arts center. An American flag waves out front.
Albeit run by a superintendent, this is no school.
A metal fence laced with barbed wire snakes the perimeter of the Robert L. Perry Juvenile Justice Center, where 209 youths were admitted over the last recorded year.
More than half of them were Black.
Since 2020, the total number of admissions has held relatively constant, yet the Black youth population at Perry more than doubled — admission rose by 129% since 2020 at Perry. Meanwhile, white youth admission fell by a third.
“That is deeply troubling,” said Jessica Feierman, Senior Managing Director at the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia advocacy group that works for young people in the legal system. “This dramatic jump in disparities is really heartbreaking.”
She said racial disparities are all too common in the juvenile justice system, but Perry presents an exceptional case.
Missouri has the seventh-most juvenile detention centers of any state. The state has no minimum age for detention, and in its 21 total facilities, one out of every 100 young people in Missouri is incarcerated.
White youth and youth of color have similar patterns of offending. The difference is that youth of color are disproportionately arrested, and are often dealt harsher sentences than their white peers.
Youth come in contact with the Juvenile Justice system at five major points. There is a recorded bias that favors white youth at each point in Missouri. Those points are:
- Referral: In Missouri’s legal nomenclature, "referral" is used in place of “arrest” for juveniles. At this point, Black youth are referred at 2.32 the rate of white youth.
- Diversion: Sometimes called “informal adjustment,” diversion is an opportunity for issues to be resolved outside of a formal case proceedings. Instead of punishment, youth are directed towards community service or restitution. If successful, the youth will not carry the charge on their permanent record. 88% of white youth exit the juvenile justice system at the point of diversion, compared to 79% of Black youth.
- Pretrial Detention: Black youth are twice as likely to be detained pretrial than white youth.
- Secure Confinement: This is when a youth is transferred to the Division of Youth Services and held in a juvenile detention or correctional facility. Black youth are moved to secure confinement at 1.42 the ratio of white youth.
- Certification: In Missouri, the process of transferring a youth to the adult criminal justice system is coined “certification.” Black youth are 8 times more likely to be tried as adults than white youth. In FY2023, 114 Black youth were certified, compared to 32 white youth.
Tara Eppy, Perry’s superintendent, acknowledges the facility’s admissions disparity but attributes it to external factors. Judicial Circuits use the relative rate index to quantify racial disparities in their region.
Eppy explained that Boone County started with a Relative Rate Index (RRI) of seven — meaning for every white a youth, a youth of color is seven times more likely to be arrested.
“We put a lot of things into place to reduce that number. Then COVID hit,” said Eppy.
According to Eppy, the pandemic disrupted community programs that would typically serve as alternatives to arrest. She describes it as a “snowball effect:” once those programs stop, referrals go up, which leads to more convictions and then more youth in confinement.
But Josh Rovner, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for humane treatment for those within the criminal and juvenile justice systems, doesn’t cite COVID as the full explanation for Perry’s disparity.
Rovner said arrests dropped on many offenses during the pandemic. By 2021, the number of youth in juvenile facilities around the country was a third of what it was in 2019. By 2022, the rate of juvenile incarceration had started to rebound, but it remains much lower than in pre-pandemic years.
Since the national rate of arrests fell, it's unusual that Perry’s total admissions held constant. Perry reported only a 5% decrease in total admissions over the pandemic years, even as the disparity between Black and white admission continued to grow.
Perry participates in the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a national program that works to reform the juvenile justice system and its racial and ethnic disparities.
Think of JDAI as a coach that gives a playbook to its players, which are juvenile facilities across the country — while the coach designs the plan, it’s ultimately up to the players to put it into action.
JDAI is organized by The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Carol Abrahms is Casey’s Senior Communications Associate.
“One of the plays in the playbook, if you will, is having a collaborative,” Abrahms said. “The collaborative will often have someone from schools, someone from law enforcement, from the schools, the facility. ”
As of 2020, Perry’s collaborative included representatives from the Division of Youth Services, local schools, county government and mental health professionals.
JDAI spurred improvement. Since its implementation at Perry in 2011, Perry’s 45 beds are no longer at capacity. Even during COVID, when Perry was leasing beds to other counties it remained under full occupancy.
Now days, the building is usually at half-occupancy.
Eppy said COVID paused Perry’s JDAI efforts. Abrams isn’t sure why that is.
“The question would be more of a local one — did the facility administrators stop following the principles of JDAI or the strategies?,” said Abrahms.
JDAI’s work is often community and values based, working to reduce racial disparity systemically. While COVID may have thrown a wrench in the juvenile justice system’s infrastructure, it should not have undercut the foundational JDAI work implemented in years prior.
Abrahms noted that while total admissions decreased nationally, the average length of stay for a youth in these facilities increased.
Admissions count the amount of youths who arrive at the facility. Length of stay measures the time from the moment a youth enters to the moment they leave. When a youth is first committed to DYS, their length of stay averages 15-20 days. If a youth is tried as an adult, their length of stay can average 310 days to a year after their certification.
As Perry’s rate of Black admission rose, so did its revenue. According to a report facility leaders authored earlier this year, Perry’s annual revenue has grown by more than $100,000 since 2019.
Eppy says the numbers are misleading, as the facility updated the intercom and lock system, which made revenue appear lower in 2019. However, reported data shows that revenue continued to grow even as Perry’s expenditures rose until 2022.
A report from FY2022 published by the facility attributes the increase in revenue “in large part to the increase in average daily population and resident days from other circuits.”
Perry is not a for-profit facility, but it does receive payment via per diem reimbursements from the circuits to which it leases its extra beds.
Perry recently published its FY2024 report, and Black youth were again admitted at more than double the rate of white youth. However, revenue has decreased from FY2023.
