Hope for youth

It used to be that when kids in Blaine County got in trouble with the law, there was nowhere for them to go but away. Hope was hard to come by.

With no juvenile detention facility in the county, young offenders were sent to the Snake River Detention Center in Twin Falls. There they were displaced from their homes and community and separated from family and friends.

However, due to the cooperative efforts of the Blaine County Sheriff’s Department, Prosecutors Office and Probation Department, uprooting troubled youth in the Wood River Valley may soon be a thing of the past.

The Blaine County Juvenile Weekender Program, the first of its kind in the Wood River Valley, is set to begin this Friday in the existing adult work-release/minimum security facility located at the Airport Way commercial area.

The three-day program for non-violent offenders will include education and rehabilitation. It will include substance abuse counseling, educational and life-skills training. It will involve teaching juvenile offenders to be responsible for their actions by acknowledging the consequences they face if they break the law. Judges will decide how many weekends a youth may be required to attend the program.

According to the county officials involved, the advantages of the program are many. The program will allow juvenile offenders to remain within the community and close to a support system. Plus it will provide them with rehabilitation, a critical component that wasn’t available at the Snake River Detention Center.

The program will also save the county money. According to Blaine County Sheriff Walt Femling, the county spent $75,000 sending juveniles to Twin Falls last year. Blaine County Prosecuting Attorney Doug Werth said the local program will not result in additional cost to the county. During weekends, adult offenders will be transferred to the county jail to make way for the juveniles.

According to Werth, a key to the program is the cooperative effort among the Prosecutor’s Office, Probation and Sheriff’s Departments, courts and judges.

"For the first time we’re bringing everyone involved together in a program aimed at dealing with problems facing the youth of our community," Werth said.

Organizers say that community involvement is critical to the success of the program.

Teresa Espedal, Blaine County chief probation officer, said a key to the program is to bring in members of the community with a wealth of knowledge and experience to talk to kids about the issues and problems in their lives.

Werth said the program’s organizers are looking for "people with a commitment to youth who have expertise in areas that can help kids with the problems they are facing, to act as mentors in the program."

According to Femling and Werth, substance abuse is a major contributing factor in juvenile crime.

"Substance abuse is prevalent in kids going through the juvenile court system," Werth said. "They need a place to go as a sanction and sort of forced education. To just lock kids up with substance-abuse problems and not provide them with rehabilitation is like throwing the future away."

Femling called the program the first step in substance-abuse intervention for juveniles.

"Hopefully, in the three-day program, we can begin to identify problems, then bring in the parents and get them involved," he said.

Kevin Boender, founder of Project Respect, an outpatient program in Hailey that provides substance abuse rehabilitation for juveniles, said the Weekender program is a good idea. However, Boender emphasized the need for a substance-abuse treatment element within the program.

"Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous need to be willing to come up to the plate and take some meetings in there on weekends," he said.

Femling said that according to national statistics, 83 percent of adult offenders incarcerated in America today have committed drug- or alcohol-related crimes. For many, the abuse began when they were young.

"Of the 1.7 million in prisons and jails across the country, 1.4 million are in desperate need of substance-abuse treatment," Femling said, adding that very few are getting the rehabilitation they need.

"It all goes back to addictions," Boender said. "Substance abuse is ever increasing, yet there is little or no increase in substance abuse treatment programs for juveniles."

Despite the discouraging numbers and percentages, Espedal said, "for the most part we have hope for these kids, the offenders we’re dealing with. I see positive changes everyday."

"They will not leave our facility without some kind of success," Femling said.

However, Femling acknowledged the connection between substance abuse and recidivism.

"I see offenders come into the system as juveniles that I know will be back as adults," he said. "We want to refocus and redirect kids involved in substance abuse toward a new way of thinking before they get in too deep."

Femling called the Weekender program a way to solve a problem rather than just react to it.