Category: Regional Print

Jeffrey Butts is director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and he’s worked with policymakers in 28 states, largely on youth justice. “It takes a high level of neglect for a long time for this stuff to emerge,” he said “It’s like black mold: It will grow if nobody is cleaning it up.”

As juvenile justice experts around the nation were recommending smaller, more localized facilities, Wisconsin went in the opposite direction, consolidating operations in a remote setting. ... "This is a 19th century or early 20th century model, where you have a large state-operated facility hours away from the urban centers," said Jeffrey Butts, director of a research center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "It is profoundly ineffective and wasteful."

Other sources of potential support faded away, explains Jeffrey Butts of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, due to fundamental misgivings with the quality of even the juvenile justice system and with the arbitrary choice of 18 as a magical birthday. Butts and others have advocated for a total overhaul of the system, so that it gradually escalates responsibility and adjusts services up to age 25. He said he told individuals within the Cuomo Administration of his concerns in 2014. "My advice was don't do this," he says. "Don't waste the political capital on the Raise the Age debate because it's a partial victory at the very best." "Why would he want to be the 49th governor to raise the age to 18," he continues, "when he could be the first governor to revolutionize the whole conversation?"

Crime upticks from 2004 to 2006 generated similar concern after a decade of declines, said Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College. “Everyone started to panic, there was all sorts of speculation, and then it started back down again in 2007 and 2008, and it just plummeted from there,” Mr. Butts said of the overall decline in crime rates. “On a year-by-year basis, you can’t overreact or over-infer.”

Sociologist Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said combating gang violence requires a multipronged approach that includes both enforcement and prevention. “There’s no single solution,” he said. “Every community that gets serious about this realizes they have to work on multiple fronts and multiple angles.” He said a key is to work with young people to prevent them from being recruited into gangs by instilling a sense of belonging and helping them repair relations with family and friends, building a sense of hope and finding out if there are problems at school and, if there are, finding out why.

“It’s not unheard of for good people to commit crimes; in fact, it’s common,” said Jeffrey Butts, director of the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center, a criminal justice academy in New York City. “Most of the people who get caught up in the justice system are not evil people in all areas of their life. A few are, but they’re a small proportion.”

Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the Waterville chief’s comments are “typical of the immediate gut reaction to horrific crimes.” “It is easy to indulge in the Wild West fantasy that crime would be deterred if we were all armed all the time, and undoubtedly this is true,” Butts said Thursday. “But far more crimes would be created than prevented by widespread gun ownership.”

But Jeffrey A. Butts, director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said data has shown that the more contact a young person has with the criminal justice system, the more disadvantages they experience in life — even compared with a person with a similar chaotic life. While the ideal vision of the system is one of rehabilitation and correction, Butts said that's not how much of the juvenile system works. Juveniles who get a record could head farther down a path of trouble and become increasingly leery and defiant of law enforcement, Butts said. Non-punitive intervention is best, he said.

The steep drop mirrors both an international trend in developed countries and a national one, according to Jeffrey Butts of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. There’s no single reason for the decline, and in an email, Butts, director of the college’s Research and Evaluation Center, lists several, such as economic factors, better home security and theft protection on consumer products, and more ways for kids to entertain themselves rather than resorting to crime.

Jeffrey Butts, director of research at the City University of New York College of Criminal Justice, studied the impact of teen courts extensively. Butts believes their primary effect comes from the teens' experience in the courtroom, rather than their sentence. In his view, the most successful programs are the ones in which teens manage the courtroom, treating the process with professionalism and seriousness.

However, Delgado and Jeff Butts, director of John Jay's research and evaluation center, said they did not know yet whether these drops could be related to the increase in trust, and Butts cautioned against reading too much into numbers and trends that still only focused on a one year difference. "At this point, we don't really know about cause and effect," he said. "You always want to do a survey at least three times," he continued, "and some of them might be genuine, but others might disappear when you go to time three."