How Can We Reduce Wyoming’s Juvenile Arrest Rate?

by Tom Rose

I have been researching Wyoming juvenile justice issues for several years now, and I am still sometimes surprised at what I find. When I began this research, I will admit that I was predisposed to simply believe that our law enforcement community should just stop arresting so many juveniles.

In April of this year the Center for Public Integrity published an article indicating that Wyoming is the fourth-highest state for in-school referrals of students to police or courts for behavior deemed criminal. This is a troubling issue and one that we've examined before in Wyoming. The focus of this Center for Public Integrity article was not about Wyoming specifically, but the underlying issues including more law enforcement and court referrals of special needs students and minorities.

While these are important issues that go to the heart of how we are treating our most vulnerable citizens, a recent look at Wyoming juvenile arrests over time provided some new insights.

Feedback on this article included people saying that with Wyoming's small overall population it was unfair to compare Wyoming to the whole nation. After all, smaller populations simply chart less smoothly when you compare them to larger ones. This is true, but we already looked at how Wyoming's juvenile arrests over time compared with Vermont's since Vermont has a very similar juvenile population in both size and demographics. Vermont is a very long way from Wyoming and it would be much more useful to compare Wyoming to another small juvenile population closer to home.

The idea is that if we can find a community close to Wyoming which is performing very well, we can learn from the things that they are doing right and improve our treatment of juveniles without sacrificing our unique Wyoming approach.

The following chart shows juvenile arrests from 1994 to 2012 with four trend lines. You will notice that only two trend lines are labeled: Wyoming and national. There is one unlabeled trend line which is obviously performing even better than national standards and one unlabeled trend line which is even more volatile than Wyoming's.

You do not have to be a data whiz to interpret this chart. By now, the familiar green Wyoming upswings and downturns are clear. Our endpoint in Wyoming puts juvenile arrest rates at more than twice the national rate in 2012. Arrest rates are calculated based on number per 100,000. There is a more detailed walk-through of arrest rate calculations later in this blog. Arrest rates are the standard measurement used by the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data on which all charts and tables in this blog are based.

So where is the juvenile population whose arrest trend line is in unidentified pink? That trend line which has maintained consistently lower than national arrest rates is data from our very own Lincoln County, Wyoming. For those of us from more populous counties, lest we dismiss this as anomalous based on extremely small juvenile populations, let's cover a few points.

The following chart is Lincoln County, Wyoming's juvenile population from ten to seventeen (what the FBI tracks for juvenile arrests) from 1994 to 2012.

As anticipated, Lincoln County, Wyoming has a small population but it is definitely large enough to count as a valid trend and not an anomaly.

Here is another look at how arrest rates are calculated.

The calculation is simply the arrest count divided by the population. This number is then multiplied by 100,000 to get the rate per 100,000. It is frequently easier to envision these numbers as percentages, but the standard for measuring dissimilar populations is rate per 100,000. Only formalized arrests are counted in UCR data so for many counties and localities there may be many more than the counted arrests for actual contact between juveniles and law enforcement. "Catch and release" policies or non-judicial/non-arrest policies are not reflected in formalized arrest statistics.

Let's look at the well-performing Wyoming county and the still unidentified higher juvenile arrest rate on the same chart.

I do not have any ready explanations for the profound difference in juvenile arrest rates between Lincoln County and the unidentified county. What seems clear, however, is that there is a profoundly different policy being pursued in these two counties. In fact, when I looked at all of Wyoming's counties it became apparent that policies varied widely. What this means, in short, is that we are not a good state for a one-size-fits-all national solution pushed out by policy makers from outside the state.

Before we can transform our juvenile justice system we need to make sure we Wyomingites are all playing on the same playing field. Right now it is apparent simply by looking at these two counties side-by-side that we're not even playing the same game.

So what can we learn from Lincoln County? According to Wyoming State Representative Marti Halverson (representing Lincoln, Sublette and Teton Counties) the persistently low juvenile arrest rate from 1994 to 2012 is simple:

"That's because we give them a spanking and send them home"

To be clear, Representative Halverson is not talking about literal spanking, nor advocating corporal punishment, so don't use her proud candor out of context. All three of Representative Halverson's counties are performing significantly better than Wyoming as a whole and exponentially better than several "problem counties" in terms of juvenile arrest rates.

Keeping the magnitude of consequences for juvenile misbehavior in its appropriate context and out of the judicial system is not limited to these three counties. We know of another Wyoming county where the county prosecutor personally takes calls at three o'clock in the morning when there is a discretionary decision to be made in regard to the disposition of a detained juvenile.

In both of these specific cases we have people advocating for juvenile misbehavior to be decriminalized. One poor decision on the part of a juvenile does not create criminal intent.

More than thirteen out of every hundred kids in the high-arrest-rate Wyoming county were arrested in 2012. Slightly more than two out of every hundred kids in Lincoln County, Wyoming were arrested in 2012. If you were a kid in Wyoming who got into trouble, which county would you want to live in?

Rather than forcing homogeneous national policies that do not permit individual discretion on the part of law enforcement or prosecutors we should build from our successes. Instead of permitting Wyoming to be pushed around by larger populations and outside "experts" I believe that we should ensure that our small size is an advantage and learn from our small communities which are already doing an excellent job.