CLEVELAND — The Greater Cleveland Congregations is again asking Cuyahoga County to examine how it handles the bindover of young teens under the age of 18 into adult court.
The organization pointed to county public defender data showing Cuyahoga County had a 68% increase in bindovers from 2018 to 2022 compared to the previous five years. The data showed Franklin County reduced bindovers by 28% and Hamilton County down by 24% during that same time period.
Greater Cleveland Congregations, or the GCC, believes it's a bindover system that disproportionately penalizes young teens of color, causing them to face long jail sentences potentially, and in some cases, doesn't give them a fair chance at reform.
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Rev. Napoleon Harris with Cleveland's Antioch Baptist Church, also a GCC member, told News 5 that a complete evaluation of young teen offenders is needed before sending them to the adult system.
"We must do a better job at reducing the root causes of crime," Harris said. “The tough-on-crime mindset has failed us; we have been running it since Reagan, and the only thing that it’s been tough on is people of color, tough on people of low income, but it hasn’t been tough on crime, the crime rates have skyrocketed.”
GCC Executive Director Keisha Krumm said she was hoping Cuyahoga County Council would approve moving $650,000 in county funding to the county public defender's office to help support more resources in evaluating whether a young teen offender can be reformed and stay in the juvenile system. However, the council voted 9 to 2 not to move the funding at this time and told the Nov. 20 meeting it couldn't agree to send the funds without a request from the public defender's office or without input from county juvenile judges.
“We are very disappointed in the vote by the county council," Krumm said. "The $650,000 to the public defender office in 2025 puts us on a path to get to best practices in the way that other counties are dealing with bindovers. Cuyahoga County is out of whack on that issue. Public defenders do their homework, they do their research, they find out who this child is, where that child came from and what are the mitigating factors that really led that child to the decisions that they made.”
GCC member Ginger Van Wagenen agreed public defenders have made a difference in reducing bind over rates in other Ohio counties.
There’s a way to hold these kids accountable for what they’ve done without putting them in the adult system," Van Wagenen said. “Public defenders have social workers, investigators and the support staff to develop a mitigation report to develop the history for these children. So when the judge asks is this child amenable to rehabilitation, the public defender's office can say yes and here’s why, here’s what we know about this child.”
Even though the county council did not approve the moving of funding, it did agree the bindover system needs evaluation. Cheryl Stephens, Cuyahoga County Council Vice President, told the Nov. 20 meeting all parts of the juvenile justice system need to meet within the next 90 days to come up with initial ideas on how to improve the bindover system for young teen offenders.
“We must do something different. We continue to lose more and more young boys of brown and black color,” Stephens said. "To adjust a system that they never return from as whole adults.”
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