Illinois Could Help Kids in State Custody by Providing “Expressed Interest” Representation 
Each year in the state of Illinois, children in youth jails and prisons are released by judges and yet continue to remain incarcerated after adjudication because the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) cannot find suitable places for them to be released to.
In 2015, the state of Illinois chose to remove nearly 500 residential beds in group homes and related institutions, planning to place kids in private homes instead. The goal was a more robust system of therapeutic foster care that would serve as wrap-around, community-based support for youth exiting detention centers. Yet what was unaccounted for was the infrastructure required for such a significant move, with only 26 of these homes operating by 2020. In effect, as Cook County Public Guardian Charles Robert states, the “DCFS abolished the 500 residential group home beds before they had created any of the therapeutic foster home beds,” failing to meet the needs of youth or to meet the goal of therapeutic community care.
Since 2018, the number of children and teens released from detention centers who remain stuck in jail has been steadily increasing. It is an astonishing violation of human and civil rights to keep individuals – especially children – jailed due to a lack of foresight by the institution that has been charged with caring and protecting them. While Illinois DCFS spokesman Bill McCaffrey noted that the agency has added “more than 120 beds since 2019, and is in the process of adding another 70 more,” the number of youths who are released-upon-request (R-U-R) and continue to sit in the detention centers across the state has not been ameliorated.
According to WBEZ Chicago and DCFS data, there were 71 kids left in detention centers after release in 2021 with the average stay being 53 days. WBEZ Chicago initially broke the report on the State of Illinois holding youth after being released back in 2015, stating that in-total, kids stayed “up to more than 7,300 days in Cook County juvenile jail.” Some quick math will tell us that the number of days spent in jail for youth after release was about 3,800 in 2021, and while this may seem to denote a 50% decrease, this 3800 number was already reported in a November 2015 piece by WBEZ Chicago that followed up on their original report. If anything, this demonstrates that the State of Illinois’ DCFS is treading water in making substantive change towards solving this issue.
There is a distinct bottleneck funneling towards DCFS, which has created these complications, causing negative impact on the lives under their care.
From March 2020 to March 2022, the number of abuse cases increased by 18% while the number of vacancies within DCFS topped out at 21%; the growing need for investigating cases is not in-concert with staff capacity. Further complicating issues, Illinois currently requires legal guardians of youth to pay for foster care services received, and for those already experiencing poverty, this can exponentially increase the inability for youth to be released to proper and court-appointed guardianship. Not having representation available to intervene in this pipeline upon entrance into the court limits the ability for both the youth and related family to have a voice.
Illinois by-and-large provides guardian ad litem (GAL) support to kids involved in the legal and child welfare systems whose main role is to analyze the case to provide a summary judgment of what this representative deems to be in the best interest of the youth. The youth’s voice can get lost in this process. What has proven effective at achieving better long-term outcomes for youth is providing them with expressed interest representation which prioritizes the voice of the youth by advocating for what they desire for guardianship. Illinois law does not require that the government provide kids with expressed interest representation. We at Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts advocate for this essential change to ensure that children are not needlessly placed in state care. Doing so will not only support the youth, but support DCFS’ mission to prioritize youth who unequivocally require placement into DCFS care.
Substantial evidence demonstrates that incarceration during childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood is correlated with a variety of physical, mental, and emotional health complications. Studies have shown that even if a child has spent just one month or less in juvenile detention, it leads to higher rates of adverse adult outcomes, such as: general health complications, functional limitations, depressive symptoms, and suicidal thoughts, with increasing severity as time spent in juvenile detention centers lengthens. As already indicated, in 2021, the average length of stay for youth in juvenile detention was 53 days; it is clear that this practice will have detrimental, long-term effects on the lives it currently impacts. These factors are also associated with long-term difficulties related to attaining education and employment. Prior incarceration in juvenile detention centers is a greater predictor of recidivism compared to other predictive factors, such as carrying a weapon or membership in a gang, at a rate of nearly 4-to-1, representing a drain on public funds when there are more than adequate diversion programs and therapeutic programs that can be done in the home and save funds to allocate towards more pressing needs of the community.
The inability of the state to adequately support youths in DCFS care after release from juvenile detention prolongs their time spent in these facilities and deepens the feelings of hopelessness associated with depressive episodes and suicidal ideation. Along with supporting the ACLU-IL’s work for expressed interest counsel for all kids involved in the legal system, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts urges Illinois’ DCFS and Department of Juvenile Justice to immediately address this issue and make significant shifts to infrastructure and provide everything necessary to support their return to their communities. All youths charged under DCFS care deserve maximal support; we will continue to monitor this issue with subsequent posts to investigate this problem in greater detail.
CJ Beck (he/him) is a second-year Master’s (AM) student in the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, enrolled in the Transforming Justice: Programs and Policies program of study.