Larissa Salazar grew up in Wyoming, and when she was in eighth grade, she got in a fight on a school bus. That snowballed into her spending 16 months in a state juvenile facility.
Reporter Tennessee Watson follows Larissa’s experience in the juvenile justice system in Wyoming, a state that locks up kids at the highest rate in the nation. Larissa’s mom says that instead of helping her daughter, the system made things worse.
Then Watson explores why Wyoming is clinging to its “get tough” approach to juvenile justice, even as many other states are moving away from punishing kids – especially for low-level or nonviolent offenses. Research shows that locking kids up doesn’t change their behavior and often creates a new set of problems.
We end with Watson visiting South Dakota, a state that in the past few years has changed how it deals with kids who get in trouble. South Dakota’s juvenile justice system recognizes that kids who are incarcerated are more likely to get in trouble again, whereas kids who are held accountable and receive support close to home are not.
Dig Deeper
Read: Juvenile Injustice in Wyoming (Wyoming Law Review)
Read: Grace – A Failure in Michigan’s Juvenile Justice System (ProPublica)
Read: The Future of Youth Justice – A Community Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model (Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy)
Credits
Reported by: Tennessee Watson | Produced by: Tennessee Watson and Eda Uzunlar | Edited by: Taki Telonidis | Production manager: Amy Mostafa | Production assistance: Brett Simpson | Mixing, sound design and music by: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Brett Simpson and Ameeta Ganatra | Episode illustration: Eda Uzunlar |Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Special thanks: The Abrams Nieman Fellowship for Local Investigative Journalism, Wyoming Public Radio and South Dakota Public Broadcasting | Executive producer: Kevin Sullivan | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
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| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Jennifer Salazar lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming where on a warm Saturday in October she meets up with reporter, Tennessee Watson at a park on the edge of town. |
| Jennifer: | I’m Jennifer. Nice to meet you. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Nice to meet you too. |
| Jennifer: | It’s been so crazy. |
| Al Letson: | They are at a park and not her house, partly because of the pandemic and because Jennifer has something to share that her husband, Andrew, isn’t ready to talk about. It’s still hard for her too. |
| Jennifer: | I will tell you, and I’ll apologize now, but this is the month that my daughter passed away so if you notice I’m not wearing makeup and I brought Kleenex because it’s going to be a little hard. |
| Al Letson: | It’s been three years since Jennifer and Andrew’s daughter, Larissa died. She’d just turned 16 when it happened and it made Jennifer question whether Wyoming was a safe place to raise her two younger kids. |
| Jennifer: | It freaks me out to raise kids here. Even though they say Wyoming is a good place to raise kids, I tell my husband, I don’t know. Is there a risk that we take raising them here that they make a wrong step and get into the system and the same thing happens? It just freaks me out like it does. |
| Al Letson: | The system Jennifer is talking about is the juvenile justice system. Jennifer’s daughter, Larissa, was in eighth grade when she got into a fight on the school bus and that snowballed into 16 months in the state juvenile facility. The justice system was responding to a kid with a lot more going on in her life than just one fight on the bus, but rather than rehabilitate, Jennifer says that system made things worse. |
| Jennifer: | These kids need help and all they are doing is putting them in the system and saying, here, you’re going to be away from your family for nine months to a year and then after that you’re going to be on probation. Again, how effective is that? |
| Al Letson: | Research says it’s not. That’s why many states are moving away from punishing kids, especially for low-level or non-violent offenses, if it turns out that doing things like locking kids up doesn’t change their behavior, so there is a push to create programs that support troubled kids and keep them in the community. But these reforms aren’t a top priority everywhere. A handful of states continue to lock up kids at twice the national average and Wyoming tops the list. Jennifer believes that has a lot to do with why Larissa is no longer alive today. |
| Tennessee Watson pieced together Larissa’s experience with the juvenile justice system and has the story about why Wyoming is so tough on kids. | |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Larissa Salazar was born and raised in Rock Springs, a mining town in southwestern Wyoming. Pink and red rock buttes dot the horizon and wild horses roam the sage covered desert right outside of town. About 23000 people live here. It’s the biggest town for over 100 miles. Larissa’s early childhood here wasn’t easy. When she was little, her biological mom, whose not Jennifer, struggled with drug addiction and was in and out of jail. Her parents split up when she was around five years old and her mom pretty much disappeared from Larissa’s life. |
| When her dad met Jennifer and they got married, Larissa struggled to adjust, but despite those challenges, Jennifer says Larissa was a kid with a big heart. | |
| Jennifer: | She was one of those kids that were non-judgmental. If you were gay or straight or if you were fat or skinny, or if you didn’t have the clothes that other kids had or shoes or whatever, she would still want to be your friend and she would want to give her stuff to you and just always wanting to help people. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer found this old video of Larissa playing with her younger brother. She has long brown hair and a nose ring. She is sitting on the floor while her brother runs circles around her. |
| Larissa: | I love you. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Larissa loved her family but she had a rebellious side too. That’s a common way kids respond to trauma and it got Larissa into trouble. One night she said she was going to a friend’s house for a sleepover, but instead she was hanging out with a group of kids behind the local elementary school. When her dad found her, Larissa took off running. He was in flip flops and couldn’t catch her and it was getting late so they called the cops for help. Officers brought Larissa home and gave her a curfew ticket, which meant she had to appear in municipal court. |
| This is one of the ways Wyoming is different from other parts of the country. In most states, a juvenile court would handle this, but in Wyoming, most of the time kids end up in adult courts. Jennifer didn’t think it was fair for Larissa to have a curfew violation on her record or to pay a fine when they’d called the cops for help. | |
| Jennifer: | I went to court with her and they said, we’re going to have you guys pay the fines. And I was like, no, she needs to do community service or something. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says the judge took her advice and put Larissa in a diversion program. She had to agree to do some community service and to stay out of trouble and the curfew ticket would disappear. |
| Jennifer: | It did seem to work. She kind of grew up a little bit. She was respectable in the house. She was trying and then she got sexually assaulted. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | You heard that right. Just as things were starting to turn around, Larissa was sexually assaulted. It was the day after Christmas and Larissa was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house. Late at night the girl’s 19-year old brother came home and Jennifer says Larissa was the only one still up. |
| Jennifer: | The 19-year old boy wound up dragging her inside of a room and sexually assaulting her. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Larissa decided to speak up about the assault and that turned her closest friends into enemies. This was especially traumatic because until she’d met them, Larissa struggled to feel accepted at school. She was often bullied by other kids. Bullied for being chubby when she was little, bullied for her free spirit. The 19-year old was prosecuted and pled guilty to sexual abuse of a minor and after that Jennifer says his younger sister started harassing Larissa at school, slut-shaming her and telling her she wanted it and getting other kids to bad-mouth Larissa too. Jennifer says Larissa put up with the bullying for months, but with just a few weeks of school left, she decided to strike back. |
| Jennifer: | She was on the bus and she called me crying. She said, “They won’t stop, Mom. They won’t stop telling everybody on the bus what happened and it’s so hard for me to keep hearing what happened.” I said, “Just get off the bus and just come home. And if we have to do something different next year, we will.” She was like, “I’m going to physically assault one of them because I’m tired.” They were sitting right in back of her and they were saying, I’m going to hit you, I’m going to do this to you. They were pulling her hair. And she had had enough and when the bus stopped she got up and she punched one of them in their mouth. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | The case was filed in juvenile court and Larissa was charged with battery, which carries a maximum sentence of six months. But the judge put her on probation and Jennifer says at first that seemed like a good thing. |
| Jennifer: | But then when she was on probation, they treated her like, okay, you’re a criminal. You’re on probation. There’s no other help. You know what I’m saying? You’re just on probation, you’re going to follow the rules, you’re going to follow the rules of your house. You’re going to follow the rules at school and if you don’t, you’re going to get sent away. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | When you were watching this happen, it wasn’t fair. Did you have any tools as a parent to say- |
| Jennifer: | We addressed it with them a couple of times but they were just like, she’s on probation and she has rules she has to follow. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says Larissa was still reeling from the sexual assault but that trauma got kind of lost in the shuffle. Juvenile probation officers monitor who kids are hanging out with, what they are doing on social media, whether they are behaving at home as well as their grades and attendance at school. Bad friends and bad grades aren’t a crime, but on probation it can get kids sent away. This isn’t unique to Wyoming, but it happens here more. |
| Kathy Sizemore: | And then once they in probation, that’s the real slippery slope. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Kathy Sizemore has been a teacher in Rock Springs since the 1980s. She didn’t have Larissa as a student, but she’s taught a lot of kids who’ve been on probation. |
| Kathy Sizemore: | I explain to the kids, it’s like you’re now on the radar and every little thing you do is going to be scrutinized. And whereas other kids can get away with it, you won’t be able to. And if you do enough naughty things or continue those behaviors that got you there in the first place, eventually your probation might be revoked and they will take you back to court and so the judge can then say, well, this isn’t working, lets send you to a placement. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And the threat of being incarcerated for slipping up on probation is real. According to data from the US Department of Justice. Wyoming locks up kids for probation violations at a rate well above the national average, higher than neighboring states and other states with small populations. Larissa resented the power probation had over her life. Even though she wasn’t charged with a drug related offense, she was required to do routine urine analysis or UAs at the juvenile probation office. Jennifer says for a 13-year old kid who’d just been sexually assaulted, that was just too much. |
| Jennifer: | Having to do UAs in front of somebody, she already struggled with her body and feeling self-conscious and so every time she would have to go do a UA and probation is standing in there, she would come out and she would cry to me and tell me how demeaning it was and that she didn’t want to be exposed in front of somebody. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | It might sound simple, don’t do drugs and pass the UA, behave on probation and you won’t be sent away. But for Larissa, behaving was hard because of the intense emotion she felt. That’s not unusual according to research from the Justice Department, which says up to 70% of juvenile offenders have a diagnosable mental health condition, often caused by trauma. And because teen brains aren’t fully developed, they often make irrational decisions anyway. In Larissa’s case, after asking a friend for alcohol on Facebook, she was scared her probation agent would see and send her away. She panicked and took a bunch of pills. |
| Jennifer: | I was on my way to go to Walmart and she comes running out to the driveway and I said, “Oh, you’re going to go.” So I opened the car door thinking she was just going to jump in and go and she said, “No, Mom. I took some pills and I took a whole bunch of them and I think I’m going to die from it.” And I instantly panicked and I rushed her to the ER. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | While Larissa was treated with charcoal to absorb the pills, Jennifer sat with her in the hospital. |
| Jennifer: | She looks at me and she says, “Does people even care that people get assaulted and that their lives are never the same?” I said, “I care.” And she said, “Yeah, but does anybody else?” I said, “I think they do.” She said, “How do they care when I’m put on probation and I’m treated like criminal?” She said, “I hate this. I hate probation and I hate that I can’t just be a normal kid.” |
| Tennessee Watso…: | After the suicide attempt, a judge sent Larissa to a psych hospital on the opposite side of the state for a few weeks, then directly to the girls’ school, a state juvenile facility. Jennifer says she wanted to give Larissa a ride from the hospital to the girls’ school to ease the transition, but that wasn’t allowed. |
| Jennifer: | I asked if she could come home, I said, can we visit her, and she said, no, we’re going to transport her directly from WBI. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Chris Jones who runs the Wyoming Girls’ School says most of the girls sent to the facility have been through some trauma. That’s why judges send girls there. |
| Chris Jones: | Judges know that when the kids get here they are going to get therapy and good schooling and they are going to be safe and I think that plays into it. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | The place feels like a boarding school with a big quad surrounded by dorms with views of the mountains in the distance, but the girls can’t leave so even though it doesn’t look like incarceration, it is. Chris says the goal is to help girls, not punish them. It’s a lesson she learned years ago when a girl wouldn’t take a babysitting class. |
| Chris Jones: | And this young woman refused to go. She threw a fit. So she got a consequence. We addressed the behavior, she got a consequence. And her therapist came to me on Monday and said, you know, she was severely molested by a babysitter and it was just like, the scales fall off. We still have to address behavior but if you understand what’s behind the behavior, what’s driving the behavior rather than just addressing the behavior, then you have the hope of changing it permanently. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Chris says being sent away from your community and family is traumatic enough. Her goal is not to add to that. Jennifer says the separation was hard on Larissa, but the Salazars made the five hour trek sometimes across icy roads to visit as often as they could. Jennifer saw that Larissa had access to activities that were hard to come by at home in Rock Springs. Therapy there helped her rebuilt trust with her family. Horseback riding and yoga made her feel good and she was into the small classes and individualized learning. But Chris Jones says it’s when girls go home that things fall apart. |
| Chris Jones: | If they successful here, that’s great. But the key is making that transfer into the home community. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And not every community is onboard with that trauma-informed approach or makes as easy for kids to stay engaged in positive activities. Jennifer has the discharge papers from Larissa’s trip to the girls’ school which show she was both scared and excited about going back to Rock Springs. |
| Jennifer: | It says that although she has skills to avoid resorting to old and negative learned behaviors, she knows that there will be many pressures and it will be up to her to think of consequences before she acts. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She matured from her eight months at the girls’ school but Larissa was put right back on probation when she got home. |
| Jennifer: | Because every time they release them- |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Then they are on probation. |
| Jennifer: | They are on probation again. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And within four months she was back at the girls’ school for violating her probation. Jennifer says Larissa got caught sneaking out of the house, drinking, and hanging out with someone on her no-contact list. |
| Jennifer: | It just, I don’t know, it seems very harsh to me. But me and my husband just obeyed because you’re under a court order and that’s what you do. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | The judge calling the shots on Larissa’s case was Nita James. In 2019, she stepped down after running the juvenile court in Sweetwater County for close to 20 years. She doesn’t remember the specifics of Larissa’s case but was willing to talk more generally about her approach to juvenile justice. |
| Nita James: | I think the reason I was so passionate about kids is because I have kids of my own. I sat there as a mother, as much as a judge. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She said she wanted what was best for kids and that meant holding them to high standards, something she was worried wasn’t happening at home or in school. |
| Nita James: | Kids are allowed to retake tests if they do bad and I’m always thinking, what is that about. We’re preparing kids for the workforce, they can’t not do their work on time. This is awful. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | When kids appeared in her court, the buck stopped there. Her approach was to hold them accountable and hopefully get them back on track. |
| Nita James: | And so I saw an out of home placement in some cases as a very, very beneficial thing to one, keep the kid safe. Keep them alive where you can help them and then two, get them that help, the counseling and the resources that we didn’t have locally. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | This is something I heard a lot in my reporting. That because Wyoming is so huge and many counties have such small populations, they can’t support local programs to help kids who’ve gotten in trouble. But Judge James says sending kids is not just about resources, she believes it also teaches them an important lesson. |
| Nita James: | And hope that while they were out of their homes, they kind of grew up a little bit. Sometimes you have to have things taken away from you before you understand how much you really like them, you know. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | James says she’s heard positive feedback. |
| Nita James: | I have gotten so many letters from so many kids who have told me that if I hadn’t intervened in their lives, they wouldn’t be where they are. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | I talked to people who said that too. But Jennifer has some different feedback for Judge James. She says during that second stint at the girls’ school, Larissa lost hope that she’d ever get out of the system. Being sent back changed Larissa and not for the better. |
| Jennifer: | She learned things in there that I don’t think she would have ever learned at home. Self-mutilation, how to strangle yourself until you can’t breathe anymore and you pass out and then you wake up, I don’t know, we didn’t do that at home. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer told me she was worried about Larissa’s safety. Her daughter wasn’t the same person anymore. |
| Al Letson: | The psychological harm kids like Larissa experience when they are uprooted from their families, schools, and communities is why many states are working to reduce juvenile incarceration. But Wyoming is resisting. |
| John Tuell: | If there is no one holding them accountable then what motivation do they have to change their practice? |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, the reasons Wyoming isn’t changing course when it comes to juvenile justice. You’re listening to Reveal. |
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| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We’re looking at Wyoming’s high juvenile incarceration rate and why the state has done little to address the problem. Tennessee Watson takes a look at what’s standing in the way and what means for kids like Larissa Salazar. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | When Larissa came home from her second trip to the girls’ school, the transition was rough. |
| Jennifer: | She was very clammed up and wouldn’t share a lot of stuff. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Larissa had been gone for 16 months, even though her initial charge for battery carries a maximum six month sentence. And after all that time, she barely knew her two younger siblings who were just two and four. |
| Jennifer: | And they almost felt like they were strangers. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer said Larissa felt disconnected at school too. |
| Jennifer: | She fell behind from the girls’ school to regular high school. She didn’t have a group of friends anymore. She’d now been away two years almost. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She had a lot to adjust to and was still dealing with the pressure of being back on juvenile probation. The office where kids go to meet with their probation agent and to do urine analysis is in the basement of a building in downtown Rock Springs. The waiting area has bowls of candy and condoms. There are motivational posters on the wall. And I’m here to meet with Karin Kelly. |
| Karin Kelly: | I am the director of Sweetwater County Juvenile Probation. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She’s worked in the program for over 20 years. |
| What do you see in your work that makes you feel like, yeah, this is making a difference? | |
| Karin Kelly: | We really focus on all those little wins. The kid who has failed math for a year passed a math test on Friday, that’s a win. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | The ultimate goal is for kids to complete probation, but Karin says that’s definitely challenging. |
| Karin Kelly: | One student or juvenile who doesn’t have substance abuse issues, passing those drug tests is a very easy part of their probation. Another kid who has academic problems, the requirement of going to school every day and being on time to your classes and making progress and doing the best you can in school, that sometimes becomes the hard part. But I think it is hard and I think it’s hard once you get in the system to work yourself back out. That is difficult. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | But she says not every kid who violates probation is immediately sent away. They try first to refer them to services like tutoring and counseling to see if that helps. |
| Karin Kelly: | We can make those referrals, we can help with those interventions, but it really up to that juvenile and that family to take advantage of that and some do and some don’t. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Karin says there is a balance between helping kids and holding them to what the prosecutor and judge ordered. |
| Karin Kelly: | We are here trying to help them comply with that court order. We don’t have a lot of wiggle room and leeway anymore than the kid does. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says beyond counseling, there wasn’t much else to help Larissa stay on track. The girls’ school offered structured positive activities. Like Karin says, probation doesn’t provide that. |
| Karin Kelly: | It’s a lot of compliance checks and referring and identifying what other community programs are there, but we don’t provide a lot of that programming. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She’d like to offer more, but she says the county doesn’t have the money. So how many kids make it through probation and how many are sent away? Karin can’t answer that, which she immediately realizes is a problem. |
| Karin Kelly: | You asked a very basic question that I don’t have answers to that I should have answers to. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | That’s because in Wyoming, each county decides what to do when kids get in trouble and they all do it differently. Some counties believe incarceration is necessary, others don’t. Some send kids to adult courts while others send them to juvenile courts or a mixture of both. On top of that, Wyoming doesn’t require counties to follow what happens to kids once they are in the system so there’s no way to track whether kids are being rehabilitated or not. |
| John Tuell: | If you’re not required to collect data to show that that’s not working, it’s much easier to stick to it. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | That’s John Tuell from the Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice. He spent the last 25 years helping communities rethink how they deal with kids who get in trouble. But he hasn’t worked in Wyoming, he says that’s because juvenile justice just hasn’t been a priority for the state. |
| John Tuell: | I don’t mean to laugh at a tragedy, but I think Wyoming may have the corner on the market. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | For many years, Wyoming was the only state not to participate in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. The 1974 legislation provides federal funds to states that agree to do things like decrease the use of incarceration for low-level offenses and to monitor racial and ethnic disparities. From 1996 to 2001, John worked for the Department of Justice administering the program, but he says Wyoming declined the federal dollars and continued to do things its own way. |
| John Tuell: | They have a long history of that absence of partnership and therefore absence of accountability to the federal government. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | John says that partnership ended up helping kids in many states and Wyoming missed out. The interesting thing is, John used to believe more in punishment than in rehabilitation. |
| John Tuell: | In my younger days, I guarantee you that I worked against what the research would say works now. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Before working at the DOJ, he worked as a juvenile probation agent in Virginia for close to 20 years. |
| John Tuell: | My approach was if I hold them accountable for the conditions that were imposed by the court, then they’ll have some structure, some discipline, and some ability to overcome adversity and that’s what my job was. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | But then John says he realized he was just pushing kids deeper into the system and not helping them overcome the trauma and instability causing their delinquent behavior. He says programs that give kids positive interactions and experiences and focus on helping them feel safe and supported make the biggest difference. But John learned that lesson the hard way. |
| John Tuell: | I think I had a role in the ultimate demise of three kids that I worked with. And it was their own self-demise by suicide. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And that heartbreaking realization didn’t come right away. |
| John Tuell: | To argue that I had an epiphany with their passing, that I needed to look at a different approach, that would be too Hollywood. I didn’t feel that way at the time. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | He says he was able to overlook those deaths because there was no oversight. He was holding kids accountable for their actions but no one was holding him accountable. He says that’s what’s happening in Wyoming. |
| John Tuell: | They get to tell an anecdotal story that might signify success, but if they don’t have results or data they are not forced to confront the fact that what they are doing is unsuccessful or works against what the research says. And who pays? The kids pay. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Kids like Larissa. And that’s what Jennifer didn’t want to talk about in front of her husband, Andrew, when she arranged to meet with me at the park. Jennifer says when Larissa came back from her second trip to the girls’ school and was put on probation, she hit an all-time low. |
| Jennifer: | It’s almost like she was going into a depression and I reached out to the probation. And her probation officer wasn’t there, but I talked to the supervisor and I said, look, I don’t know how to help her. I said, she’s not bad in the home, she was very respectable, she was doing what she needed to do. I said, but I see there’s something going on with her emotionally. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says she wanted probation to ease off, to let Larissa adjust to school. She wanted probation to call and tell Larissa she was doing a good job. |
| Jennifer: | She says, well, your probation officer’s not in right now, I can leave a message. We can try to call her, maybe schedule a meeting. And I said, I kind of need this to happen ASAP. The feeling is not right to me. I said we need to do something for her. And she said, okay, we can figure it out. I’ll give you a call back. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says she made that call on Tuesday. Two days later, Andrew found Larissa dead in her room. She’d taken her own life. |
| Jennifer: | Even to the last week of her life, I called and I tried to get help for her. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Jennifer says Larissa was failed. Is it fair to lay Larissa’s death entirely at the feet of Wyoming’s juvenile justice system? Probably not, sadly there were too many traumatic things in Larissa’s life to isolate just one cause of her suicide. She’d had her ups and downs mentally from the time she was a little kid. But from Jennifer’s perspective, the juvenile justice system made things worse. |
| Jennifer: | Would she have benefited more from not being institutionalized, but having more interaction here locally to where she could get help that she needed and still be here with us? |
| Tennessee Watso…: | I went to meet with the two juvenile probation agents who worked Larissa’s case. Diana Melton and Crystal Britt. |
| Crystal Britt: | Hi, come on in. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | I wanted to know if Larissa’s suicide made them rethink their work. |
| Crystal Britt: | Not make me rethink anything, but it is just, you feel for that family. You never forget any of that. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Crystal says while she doesn’t 100% agree with everything about the juvenile justice system, she thinks they do more good than harm. |
| Crystal Britt: | I think there is a lot of pressure, but life has a lot of pressure and you have to learn that. Adults don’t always handle the pressure all that well either. She was a good kid and it was terrible what happened, but a lot of parents say, you’re putting a lot of stress on my kid. You’re putting a lot of stress on my kid and my family. I don’t really know how else to say it and I don’t want to sound rude, but we didn’t put you here. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Once kids end up on probation, there are limited options Diana and Crystal can offer them no matter how much they want to help. Judge Gary Hartman says Wyoming’s use of probation and incarceration has more to do with the system’s own momentum than what’s actually good for kids. |
| Gary Hartman: | There has been a tradition to say, you’re going to be in court, you’re going to have to answer for this and I think that’s a hard thing to break. It’s difficult to turn the ship. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | When Hartman was a juvenile court judge, he tried to steer his district in a new direction. He looped in social workers and educators who knew the kids who ended up in his courtroom. And as a team, they made decisions about what would help the most. That approach became state law and now all juvenile court judges have to take recommendations from a community team. The people who serve on those teams say they end up sending kids away to places like the girls’ school because resources aren’t available locally. Right now, Hartman says there is no incentive to change that. |
| Gary Hartman: | The state is the one that actually pays the bill when these kids go into placement. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | In other words, it’s cheaper for counties to send troubled kids away because it’s the state that covers the cost. |
| Gary Hartman: | So instead of working in the community to try to solve the problem, I think prosecutors and judges too will send the kid out to say, out of sight, out of mind. We’re not going to worry about them for six or eight months. We’ll worry about them when they come back. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And for counties that want to build programs to keep kids out of the justice system and in their own communities, they mostly pay for that on their own because the state sets aside very little money for that. But even if the state gave money to counties for local programs- |
| Gary Hartman: | That doesn’t mean that it’s going to solve the problem of keeping the kids in the community. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | That’s because the state provides very little oversight. Right now, counties aren’t forced to measure whether they are actually helping kids. I wanted to find out if the state was willing to put that kind of pressure on counties so I called up Governor Mark Gordon. |
| Hey, it’s Tennessee calling. He’s a republican who has been in office for two years. | |
| What role should the state play in reducing juvenile incarceration rates? | |
| Mark Gordon: | Tennessee, obviously it’s an evolving issue and so I think that conversation at a state-wide level is very valuable, but the issue in Wyoming for a long time has been dealt with on a local level and we are a local control state and that’s always been the tradition there. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | But that tradition has costs. Costs for young people who end incarcerated at higher rates, costs for their long-term well being, because the state’s model doesn’t require counties to prove their approach is working. And it’s costing the state a lot of money. I looked at what Wyoming has spent on juvenile justice for the last 10 years and Sweetwater County where Larissa was from costs the state more than any other county and it’s mostly for sending kids to juvenile facilities. |
| Sweetwater spends more than even the most populated county, home to the state capital, Cheyenne. This is at a time when Wyoming needs to save money. The state gets most of its revenue from taxes on coal, oil, and gas, but with those industries in decline, the state budget has been shrinking and that’s only gotten worse with the pandemic. Given the financial situation we’re in, why not put some pressure on the counties to try and figure out a more affordable, more effective way to deal with troubled kids? | |
| Mark Gordon: | In terms of the term pressure, my sense is it’s much better as a conversation because then we’re all going to arrive at a much better solution and I think the points you’re making about community-based approaches, those are always better but we have had a massive change in our revenue picture, huge reductions and I think everybody is trying to get through to the next day before we have a chance to really sit down and say okay, now let’s reallocate our resources. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | State revenue has gone down so much that Governor Gordon is calling for across the board budget cuts. That includes eliminating the small amount the state does give for community-based programs even though the research says they are more effective than incarceration. In the meantime, prosecutors and judges are not being asked to send fewer kids away. |
| Al Letson: | If Wyoming wanted to figure out how to help kids who get in trouble and at the same time save money, it wouldn’t have to look far to get ideas. Next up, we go to South Dakota. That state had high juvenile incarceration rates like Wyoming but in the last five years decided to try something different. You’re listening to Reveal. |
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| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. When we met Jennifer Salazar at the park, she was thinking about leaving Wyoming. She didn’t want to take a chance on her younger children getting caught in its juvenile justice system like her daughter Larissa did. | |
| If Jennifer wanted to find a state that’s taking a different approach to kids who run into trouble, she could go to South Dakota. It’s just one state over to the east and for many years was similar to Wyoming with high juvenile incarceration rates. But then South Dakota caught on to what a lot of other states had already figured out. Kids who are incarcerated are more likely to get in trouble again whereas kids who receive support close to home are not. So South Dakota decided to change direction. Tennessee Watson picks up the story in a rural community that’s trying this new approach to juvenile justice. | |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Mitchell, South Dakota’s big claim to fame is the Corn Palace. The building’s exterior is decorated with mosaics made from different colored corn kernels. I catch a glimpse of it on my way to meet Katie Buschbach at the local rec center. She’s waiting outside for me with a big smile on her face. |
| Katie Buschbach: | Let’s go ahead and we’ll take the younger- |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Katie works for Davidson County where Mitchell is located and it’s her job to keep kids out of lockup and in the community. That includes coordinating a diverse program to keep them out of the courts. Today, Katie is trying something new because she noticed a lot of the kids in her program weren’t involved in afterschool activities. |
| Do you know why that’s happening? | |
| Katie Buschbach: | I would say a lot of it is mom and dad are at work, maybe their second job and they can’t take them to those appointments or practices and things like that so it makes it hard for some of those kids to be able to do that. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | But that unsupervised time after school is when kids get in trouble so she started up a program on Wednesday evenings to give them a little extra support and she asked the rec center to host it because every kid can get a ride here on a school bus. Katie is expecting three girls to show up today and as they arrive, volunteer Ashley Anson is pulling out art supplies. But Ashley is not an art teacher, she’s a lawyer who takes court appointed cases to represent low income families and she felt frustrated by the juvenile justice system. |
| Ashley Anson: | I felt sort of helpless in the courtroom. I can give a sentencing argument any day, but really I don’t feel like it’s very helpful. You’re kind of stuck with whatever parameters are available. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And for a long time, probation or incarceration felt like the only options for kids who got in trouble. Ashley didn’t want kids sent away, but she wasn’t sure they’d get what they needed sticking around town. She says Katie’s work has given her and the kids a local option. |
| Ashley Anson: | It helped me immensely in my job as a defense attorney. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Tonight Ashley is facilitating a workshop on smash-booking. It’s like a feistier and less organized version of scrap-booking. |
| Ashley Anson: | Okay, we’re going to start out focusing on the negative emotions but it will end on a happy, positive note, I promise. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | She asked the girls in the group to share negative thoughts they have about themselves that might get them in trouble. An eighth grader who goes by the name, Marie, jumps in. |
| Marie: | Even if you don’t want to drink or you don’t want to smoke with them and just bash you for it. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Marie’s hard to hear through her mask. She’s talking about feeling pressure from friends to drink and smoke. And Ashley helps Marie think through how that leads to negative feelings about herself. |
| Ashley Anson: | The negative idea you have about what they think of you if you say no would be you aren’t friendable, you can’t fit in? |
| Marie: | I’m uncool. |
| Ashley Anson: | I’m uncool. That’s perfect. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Ashley asked the girls to write some of those negative beliefs on a blank sheet of paper. |
| Ashley Anson: | There are gel pens up here, colored pencils. Markers, sharpies, whatever you want to use. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And the girls spend some time modge podging over the negativity with layers of positive words and images they’ve cut from magazines. Marie says tonight was helpful. She hadn’t realized how the pressure from friends to do drugs impacted her self-esteem. |
| Marie: | I don’t like saying no. It’s just something that I struggle with. And since I’ve been friends with them for so long, it’s just hard to drop friends that you’re close with. |
| Ashley Anson: | How come you’re here and they are not? |
| Marie: | I got caught with the most things and they didn’t. |
| Ashley Anson: | Okay. |
| Marie: | It’s fine. I want to get better. I want to stop. It’s probably for the best anyway. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Even with realizations like that, Katie says behavior doesn’t change right away. |
| Katie Buschbach: | It doesn’t matter if it’s a kid or an adult, we all make poor choices at some point and it’s going to take repetition to learn that so instead of saying, okay, we tried a diversion one time with you and you should have learned. Now you’re going to have to face the consequences. We’re teaching them how to make a better decision the next time. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | This approach isn’t just about being nice. It’s based on the well researched fact that kids brains are different from adults. The frontal lobe that controls how we respond to our emotions isn’t fully developed until we’re in our 20s. In other words, Katie says- |
| Katie Buschbach: | Kids are just hardwired to do stupid stuff. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | And no amount of punishment is going to change that. But figuring out the stresses kids are feeling and giving them steady, positive reinforcement does help them make better choices. Katie’s job is to coordinate that support, but not so long ago Katie’s job didn’t exist. |
| So what changed? For almost two decades South Dakota had the highest juvenile incarceration rates in the country, right along with Wyoming. In South Dakota, 70% of the kids incarcerated there were locked up for low-level offenses or violating probation. This was costing the state a ton of money, up to $144,000 per kid a year and it didn’t work. Nearly half the young people released from state facilities were locked up again within three years. Those numbers caught the attention of republican governor Dennis Daugaard. He also saw that states that moved towards community-based alternatives had lower recidivism rates and were saving money. He wanted that for South Dakota, but he had to convince lawmakers who thought kids who broke rules should be punished and sent away. The argument that it would save money helped win them over. | |
| In 2015, Daugaard signed comprehensive juvenile justice reforms into law and by the time he gave his State of the State address in 2017, South Dakota was starting to see results. | |
| Dennis Daugaard: | Now the statutory purpose of our juvenile justice system is rehabilitation and locking up youth has been shown to make them more likely to commit crimes as adults. The reforms invested $6.1 million in expanded community-based treatment. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Within five years of those reforms, the total number of incarcerated youth in South Dakota declined by half, so did the juvenile corrections budget from close to $30 million down to $15. South Dakota funnels a portion of that savings back to communities that run successful diversion programs. In Wyoming, incentives like that don’t exist. Katie’s program in Davidson County has seen success in part because of how it collaborates with schools. |
| Shane Thill welcomes me into a conference room. He is the director of Mitchell’s alternative high school, Second Chance Academy. He says before South Dakota’s juvenile justice reform, he watched kids bounce in and out of facilities. | |
| Shane Thill: | They’d be gone for six months, a year, whatever and what we’d notice is when they would come back, they were okay for about a week but then after that, basically all hell broke loose and boom, they are gone again. The frustration was, how are you going to help these individuals become stronger community members if they are not within the community? They don’t really learn how to be a positive citizen within the community. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Shane says schools now play an important role in keeping kids local because staff spend a lot of time with them. When they see bad behavior or mental health issues, they can intervene before things spiral out of control. |
| Shane Thill: | This is a very frustrating population to deal with, but you have to set aside your own frustration and understand that this kid just watched his mother get beat to a pulp by a boyfriend and now you want him to do 40 math problems. It’s like, it’s not going to happen because he is not functionally situated emotionally to handle that right now. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Shane says the key to supporting kids who are struggling is making sure they show up at school. That’s where Katie Buschbach comes in. In addition to coordinating the county’s diversion program, she’ll go find kids who are absent. |
| Katie Buschbach: | I love going to get kids to take them to school. It’s my favorite thing in the world. I’m not being sarcastic. I love going and picking kids up in the morning and helping them get to school. I’m just kind of making it a bright spot in the day, being silly, goofy, playing some music on the way to school. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | This hasn’t always been Katie’s MO. Once upon a time she was a juvenile probation agent playing hardball with kids who cut class. But get this, she lost that job because of South Dakota’s juvenile justice reform. So the reform happened and your job was cut and were you like, this will be great for kids or were you like, what the hell? |
| Katie Buschbach: | I was not excited. I can be 100% honest about that. I was thinking this is going to be terrible. We’re going to see an uprise in crime. The kids are going to be out of control, nobody is going to be held accountable. But that’s the case whatsoever. It’s the complete opposite. The kids are getting a chance to make a dumb decision and be a kid, but not having to be a criminal because they’ve made that bad decision. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | How did you make that transition from the probation mentality to where you are now, what was it that helped you? |
| Katie Buschbach: | It was honestly seeing the numbers and how the diversion was working. If I was not in charge of seeing those numbers and the statistics of the success in the program, I think it would have been really hard for me to actually wrap my brain around that it does work. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Katie has that data because South Dakota requires that counties track what happens to kids in the justice system. The numbers show before the reforms when more kids were being sent away, about 50% of them would get in trouble again. Katie says for kids in her program, it’s about eight percent. And the data shows what still needs improving, like how there are disproportionately more young people of color entering the system. Katie says she wants to bring that number down in Davidson County. And for each kid who completes Katie’s diversion program, the state pays the county $220. |
| Katie Buschbach: | There is a reward for it in two different aspects. There’s the financial reward but there’s also the reward that this kid is going to be coming back into the system and we’re not essentially plugging this kid and creating a criminal. |
| Tennessee Watso…: | Not creating a criminal. That’s after all what the juvenile justice system is supposed to do, but after looking at this issue for the past year, it’s striking how different juvenile justice can look from one state to another. Wyoming puts its money towards sending kids away to incarceration. South Dakota funnels money to communities to give kids the support they need close to home. I took what I learned back to Jennifer Salazar whose daughter Larissa took her own life after years in Wyoming’s juvenile justice system. Here’s what she had to say. |
| Jennifer: | I think it’s sad that us here in Wyoming, we live in a beautiful state, there is great people here. Why haven’t we implemented something like that so that way our children can be better in their future? |
| Al Letson: | Wyoming might have the highest rate of juvenile incarceration, but West Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska, and Oregon also lock up kids at nearly twice the national average. It’s up to those states to decide whether that’s a problem they want to fix. The federal government doesn’t have the authority to set juvenile justice policy or to make states follow what the research says is good for kids. |
| Our show this week was produced by Tennessee Watson, an Abrams Nieman fellow for local investigative reporting. She had help this week from Ada [inaudible], Taki Telonidis edited the show. Thanks to Wyoming Public Media and South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Amy Mostafa. Original score and sound design by the Dynamic Duo, J. Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, My Man, Arruda. They had help this week from Brett Simpson and Amita Ganatra. Our digital producer is Sarah Merck. Our CEO is Christa Scharfenberg. Sumi Aggarwal is our acting editor in chief and our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. | |
| Our theme music is by Camerado Lightning. | |
| Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising Simons Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the In as Much Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. | |
| I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. | |