If Wyoming Decriminalizes Status Offenses What Happens Next?

by Tom Rose

Last week I wrote about some trends in truancy laws and how truancy fits into the status offense decriminalization issues for Wyoming. Although most legislators with whom I speak about status crimes and other juvenile justice issues are well informed, I still run into people who are unaware that Wyoming regularly jails status offenders or really what status offenses are. In short form, status offenses are actions that would not be considered criminal if done by an adult. Truancy is a relatively easy one to understand since adults do not have anyone requiring them to attend school.

One important issue to understand about status offenses is that while we as Wyoming citizens want them decriminalized this does not mean that we want to encourage the behavior. While schools have come to rely on police and criminal referrals to deal with "problem students" these schools and our communities will have to think creatively to discourage the behavior without criminalizing the culprits.

I created the following chart based on official FBI arrest statistics available online. These arrest statistics are useful in many ways in getting a perspective of scale and scope of a problem but not every status crime arrest can be tracked due to the usage of categories like "all other offenses" which comprised a full 21.9% of Wyoming's 4,773 juvenile arrests in 2012. Looking at the status crime arrests that can be tracked shows the following.

A quick calculation will demonstrate that a full 50.3% of juvenile arrests in Wyoming in 2012 were in these minor categories. As a juvenile advocate in Wyoming one of my ongoing frustrations is the difficulty in communicating to legislators and citizens alike that while we definitely continue to have the second-highest juvenile arrest rate in the country it isn't at all because our kids are more criminal. We simply arrest and incarcerate too many juveniles for behavior that is dismissed, diverted, or otherwise non-criminally deterred in the rest of the country.

Possession of alcohol and possession of tobacco for minors are two status offenses that communities may want to consider specifically. Because of generalized FBI categories and other factors it is difficult to say with certainty how many Wyoming kids are jailed for tobacco possession per year but a quick look at incarceration data from a few juvenile facilities shows a disturbingly high number. The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count initiative put together a heart-wrenching look at Wyoming's juvenile justice system in 2011 called Your Neighbor's Child. I'd love to say that all of the conditions described in the documentary have changed but they have not. According to one of the teens featured in the film, his only crime was tobacco which led to months of incarceration and many other very bad long-term consequences.

Basically though, communities will have to realize that if they want effective solutions to the not very egregious but annoying "problem behaviors" of youth in their communities they need to be more a part of the solution rather than sitting back and assuming that law enforcement will handle it. Decriminalization of status offenses sends the message loud and clear. It is not the job of law enforcement to stop non-criminal behavior simply because someone wants it to stop. In one of my conversations with Byron Oedekoven, Executive Director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, he stated outright that "Wyoming's juvenile problems need to be solved at a community and not a state level." He went on to say that things that work in a small town may not work in Cheyenne or Laramie.

Change like this forces the dialog back into the communities where it belongs. Finally in Wyoming we're taking some small but critical steps to improve the situation for Wyoming youth. In a world where bad news overwhelms the good on a daily basis It's a welcome change.