Troubled teens need LI facility

Teenagers — even those approaching adulthood — still need support, schooling, family, and love. And that’s true even when those teens have been accused of felonies.

That’s why New York’s Raise the Age legislation, passed four years ago in an effort to treat most 16- and 17-year-old offenders differently than adults, was a necessary step in trying to keep troubled teens on track to a productive future. The inability of Nassau and Suffolk counties to establish a secure location where "adolescent offenders" from Long Island can be safely detained, even four years after that legislation went into effect, is troubling.

Dozens of Long Island teens, including those accused of murder and rape, are at times being sent to faraway parts of the state, leaving them hundreds of miles from their families, lawyers, support systems, and homes. That makes an already difficult situation far more difficult, and makes the ultimate goal — of providing services, rehabilitation, and a path forward for those teens — that much tougher.

Because the region lacks a designated, secure facility it can take time to find a placement, which can mean some teens temporarily find themselves in a "juvenile room" in a Nassau police precinct, where they get a cot and meals and not much else.

It is, state officials have said, a "detention crisis." As they wrote to Nassau and Suffolk officials in 2020, "detention is a local responsibility." But the counties, they said, haven't done enough. County officials say they've offered solutions that have been turned down, and they note that they've lacked the time and funding to establish appropriate facilities in the region.

Such a blame game doesn’t help the situation.

The lack of county facilities was highlighted in April, when the Nassau Legislature was asked to approve a $100,000 contract to send teens to Albany. And the taxpayer expense goes beyond such contracts, including the hours and mileage law enforcement personnel spend driving when a teen must be brought to Long Island for a court proceeding and then returned upstate.

A regional solution is needed. Nassau and Suffolk have suggested constructing a regional facility for adolescent offenders on the grounds of, but separate from, the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Yaphank, an idea that makes sense, and one for which the state has offered "provisional support." Such a facility also could serve the region's "juvenile offenders" currently at the older Juvenile Detention Center in Westbury, which lacks the necessary security and specialization to handle those now housed upstate.

With a new administration in Nassau starting this week, the two counties have to act with urgency to finalize plans at Yaphank. Work together with the state, get the facility built, add in the right staff and services, and let's see what can be done to turn these lives around.