Bill Carbone with show host Babz Rawls-Ivy.
Bill Carbone has had a plaque on his desk for 30 years with a quote from Frederick Douglass: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Carbone said it sums up the mission of the Tow Youth Justice Institute.
Carbone, a retired state criminal justice official, is the director of the institute, which is located at the University of New Haven. He also serves as the executive director of justice programs and experiential education at the university.
On a recent episode of the WNNH FM program “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant,” Carbone talked about criminal justice reform in the state and how the four-year-old institute was founded to make sure the reform movement is sustained.
Carbone said the state has gotten a lot right when it comes to criminal justice reform, particularly juvenile justice. The state’s most recent accomplishment is closing down the Connecticut Juvenile Training School, Connecticut’s only prison for children.
“Connecticut is leading the nation in many respects in justice system reform,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot in the last couple of decades.”
He identified three points that he believed the state has learned and addressed in the road to reform that began in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
One lesson learned: The more contact that kids have with the criminal justice system, the more likely they will return. The state has established diversion programs such as juvenile review boards and youth services bureaus to keep kids out of the system.
Another lesson: Incarcerating children does much more long-term harm than good.
“It’s very traumatic to remove kids from their homes and their communities, and put them in a cage,” Carbone said. Incarceration limits the contact of children to other incarcerated children who have anti-social tendencies, he said.
“They actually come out worse than when they went in,” he said. Instead of incarceration, the state has moved toward a system of small community-based group homes where juvenile offenders can receive more wrap-around services for mental health and other problems.
The third lesson: The need to treat behaviors like truancy, running away from home, and being out of control with parents as the troubling behaviors they are and not as if they were crimes. Under the state’s old juvenile justice system, such behaviors could land a kid before a judge. Old zero-tolerance policies at school for fighting and other disciplinary infractions could also do the same feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.
“Now these cases are funneled by referral to social services,” he said. And when it comes to school discipline, the state Department of Education moved away from zero tolerance to more restorative justice models of dealing with behavior and discipline.
“In many respects, Connecticut is achieving some great reforms,” he said.
And Carbone said those reforms have not been made at the expense of public safety, given that the state is having record low rates of crime and the number of young people moving through the system.
“Connecticut is in a good place,” he said. The Tow Youth Institute is here to make sure it stays that way and gets better, he said. The institute was founded by a philanthropic New Canaan family that “wanted to create a place to do research, plan, and problem-solve, and continue to keep the issue of reform on the radar screen in Connecticut regardless of what political party is running the state,” he said.
“Criminal Justice Insider” airs every first and third Friday of the month on WNHH FM at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Listen to the full interview by clicking on the Facebook Live video below.
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