The main housing unit in the Deschutes County Juvenile Community Justice building in Bend. 

BEND — The Deschutes County Juvenile Detention facility, located in the county’s law enforcement complex off Poe Sholes Road, is fairly ordinary by the standards of correctional facilities of its day.

Clear lines of sight. Limited private space. Basically, it’s a big concrete building with surveillance cameras everywhere.

When it was built in the late 1990s, the country was fixated on the threat of a supposed new breed of “youth superpredators” poised to overtake the justice system.

But the wave of youth crime and violence never came. Instead, Deschutes County has witnessed a stark decline in youth criminality, with around a decade of decreases in arrests and student expulsions.

So rather than filling up with young detainees, the detention center has been refitted to host a youth rehabilitation program, and now houses only a handful of juveniles thought to represent a risk to the community.

“Back in the day, like in the ’90s, we really ran it like a prison,” said county Juvenile Detention Manager Rob Gilman, who remembers strip searches for kids at the start of his career. “And we’ve really lightened up.”

The center was built to accommodate 54 youths. Today, the detainee population fluctuates from around a half-dozen to a dozen at any one time, Gilman said. Some days, as on a recent morning when The Bulletin toured the facility, there was none.

“Most county youth correctional facilities in the state were built this way,” said Deevy Holcomb, director of the Deschutes County Justice Department, which oversees juvenile justice.

Holcomb said the detention center is actually fully utilized today, but in a different way than originally envisioned. Of the four housing units, one serves as housing for “pre-adjudicated” youth. This is the type of kid who readers might think of when they hear the term, “youth offender.” These youths are often accused of serious crimes and are being detained for their safety or the safety of others. When their cases are adjudicated and disposed, they may be transferred to the Oregon Youth Authority, which operates nine secure facilities around the state.

In the field of juvenile justice, the term “referral” is favored over “arrest,”’ the term “adjudicated” is used over “convicted,” and “disposed” used in place of “’sentenced.”

Perhaps the largest driver of the declining youth inmate population: fewer referrals from police.

Prior to the pandemic, juvenile justice received an average of 1,200 referrals per year from law enforcement agencies. Of those 1,200, only around 300-350 cases, ultimately required some form of “supervision” for the youth. The others were screened out through the division’s risk assessment process and handled informally.

In the parlance of juvenile justice, “supervision” can mean many things. Often it involves living out in the community, checking in with a case worker and living up to certain expectations.

Steve Gunnels started his career at the Deschutes County District Attorney’s office in 1998, prosecuting cases in the juvenile system. He remembers the juvenile correctional facility operating at or near capacity for periods near its ribbon-cutting.

He said the greatest change has come in the past 10 years, when there’s been consensus among the court, the juvenile department and the district attorney’s office that they should reduce the use of detention for juvenile offenders.

“There are still offenses in which detention is appropriate and the facility is used, but we’ve gotten away from using detention as a default for juveniles,” Gunnels said.

Those cases include when a young person has been accused of a violent crime, and continues to violate a parent’s house rules.

The decline in youth referrals accelerated around 2013, when Deschutes County implemented its new risk assessment process, to better determine which children represent an immediate safety risk to the community and which children should be sent back to their guardians.

“Our assessment tries to balance the immediate public safety risk of young people who are acting out, with what we know to be the detrimental impact that detention can have on recidivism and on brain development and that youth’s trajectory,” said Sonya Littledeer-Evans, director of the county’s juvenile justice division.

The other two housing units in the Deschutes youth correctional facility are now being leased by nonprofit J Bar J Youth Services to operate its J-5 program.

J-5 is a short-term stabilization center for boys age 13-19, offering a “reset” for kids who’ve been unsuccessful in the past.

Though located in the detention center, the J-5 program has its own entrances and is physically separated from youth being held in detention. Boys in the program often stay overnight at the facility, but they also regularly venture into the community, for instance to buck hay at the county fair.

The decision to lease to J Bar J for the J-5 program was made around two years ago when it was obvious the population of detained youth would not approach the capacity of the building. The county commissioners also considered using the space as a residential treatment facility for the Behavioral Health division.

J Bar J has a wide range of programs, and J Bar J Director Stephanie Alvstad, explained the reduction of youth in detention in a broader social context.

With social media and other forms of digital communication, kids aren’t spending as much time in each other’s presence, which could also explain declining instances of teen pregnancy.

At Bend-La Pine Schools, student expulsions dropped 74% in the six years prior to the pandemic, from 75 expulsions in 2013-2014 to 19 in 2018-2019. And there have been just 11 total expulsions since the pandemic began in 2020.

District representatives attribute it to a focus on prevention, “restorative justice” and keeping kids in school.

As an example of restorative justice, students at a district school recently damaged a toilet taking part in a “challenge” inspired by a trend on the social media video app TikTok. School officials had those kids speak with the employee who had to unclog the toilet about what that was like.

“We only get this small window in time when we get to work with them, and we don’t necessarily want to spend it punishing them,” said Eric Powell, director of curriculum and instruction for Bend-La Pine Schools.

Like many experienced juvenile justice workers, Gilman started his career in a much more “reactive” era, when there was little distinction paid to adult and juvenile defendants.

Over the years, Gilman has seen a common scenario play out when an arresting officer brings an unruly child to the facility. But once the officer leaves, the child’s behavior turns around 180 degrees.

“It’s like, dude, you’re the one causing the problem. You’re the one who can’t engage with this kid right now,” Gilman said. “A lot of the time, law enforcement just doesn’t see them in the light we see them in.”

In the Deschutes detention center, the sound of radio chatter is ever-present, partly because no one can walk through a door without buzzing in.

It’s not the easiest place to run a shelter or a day program, Holcomb admits. That’s why pains were taken to add student art covering the drab concrete masonry, and other homey touches.

“If it were built today, it would be built to be more flexible,” Holcomb said. “I think that the planners of days gone by were influenced by tragic events like school shootings that were making people fearful. I think the specter of that continuing is what drove a lot of the big buildings that were built around that time.”