By Khalida Sarwari
New Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Dave Cortese said in his “State of the County” address this afternoon in San Jose that taking strides to eliminate the county’s juvenile hall would be among his top goals for the year.
“My goal is to put juvenile hall out of business,” Cortese said. “I would like to transition the highly skilled employees there out into the community to work on prevention and intervention instead of locking our kids up.”
He said that last year the county passed an ordinance to ban the incarceration of children under the age of 13, and that this year the board would continue to restructure the juvenile justice system to shift the emphasis from punishment to reform.
Cortese outlined several initiatives to that end, including asking the court system and probation department to phase out the jailing of children between 13 and 15 years old, except in cases of the most violent crimes.
He suggested creating new systems for first-time youth offenders, such as placing them in community organizations focused on intervention before they are arrested.
A restorative justice program where first-time offenders are tried and judged by a jury of their peers would give young people a different perspective of their actions, Cortese said, offering Alameda County’s McCullum Youth Court as an example of such a program.
He also discussed initiatives to correct and transform the overrepresentation of minorities in the system and make services for issues such as drug and alcohol addiction more accessible at schools.
Declaring 2011 the “year of the child,” Cortese said he would also focus on education, starting with a proposal he plans to put before the board encouraging the endorsement and adoption of a college prep curriculum in every school district in the county.
“Humankind owes to the child the best it has to give,” he said, quoting from a 1959 United Nations declaration.
Cortese also shared a plan to retain funding for senior meals programs and address mental health problems that affect seniors. He said he wants the public health department to assess the health of different ethnicities, starting with the Vietnamese, who have high rates of smoking and cervical cancer.