OKPOLICY.ORG
Steve Lewis served as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1989-1991. He currently practices law in Tulsa and represents clients at the Capitol. You can sign up on his website to receive the Capitol Updates newsletter by email.
Generally beneath the radar screen, some potentially significant changes are underway for the Office of Juvenile Affairs (OJA.) OJA provides prevention and treatment programs for delinquent children or those who may be at risk of becoming delinquent. A child is delinquent if declared so by a court for committing an act that would be a crime if the child were an adult. OJA provides services through community based prevention and treatment services, counseling, shelters, detention, probation, group homes, secure residential facilities and re-entry.
OJA Director Keith Wilson resigned last month along with the agency’s chief of staff. Wilson, a retired lawyer and judge in Kansas and former public defender in Oklahoma understands the juvenile justice system and left behind some significant accomplishments. He created and obtained funding from the legislature for a separate secure facility for girls who had previously been confined in the coed Central Oklahoma Juvenile Treatment Facility in Tecumseh. He also got legislation passed and started an OJA charter school for children in the agency’s three residential institutions.
Although the legislature has been protective of OJA funding, even in hard times, legislators want to insure that in lean times the state is getting the best results for its investment to protect the public from juvenile offenses and to help these children. Numbers of children in delinquency proceedings “in the system” have gone down in Oklahoma as they have throughout the country. This is the result of success in prevention, diversion and treatment programs but also of shifting some children more quickly into the adult corrections system. There are still many lives being diminished by bad choices resulting in criminal acts. Both with the children left in the juvenile justice system and those sent to adult corrections, we can do a better job. Moving forward, Wilson’s departure opens the door for the OJA board to hire a new director who may take the agency in a new direction.
Fortunately, there is a strong core of informed and interested legislators who are willing to fight necessary battles in a destructive fiscal climate to give these troubled youth a chance. They’ll be looking to make sure all the OJA programs are as high-quality as possible, probably better than they’ll have the money to pay for. They’ll want to spend the state’s resources on programs that work to keep kids out of the system and to keep them from reoffending once they’re in the system. Hopefully the efforts of committed legislators and OJA will meet the needs of the kids and the community by using both new programs and those we’re already doing that are working well.
