LORAIN — Myeasha is freshly 18 years old—that age where the whole world is laid out in front of you — where will you go? who will you be?
The choices are seemingly endless.
“I am excited to see where life takes me,” Myeasha said.
But a few months ago that excitement was more like fear.
In October 2021, Myeasha was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon found during a routine traffic stop. She was housed in the Lorain County Juvenile detention center for two months.
Until someone saw the potential she has — putting her instead in a relatively new program called Crossroads.
“It makes me feel good because I’m really not a bad kid, and it was just wrong place and wrong time,” she said.
In 2020, Black youth made up about 11% of the population in Lorain County, but more than 44% of the juvenile incarceration rate.
Emily Campbell is a researcher and chief operations officer at the Cleveland think tank Community Solutions and helped put the data together.
“People start to think of themselves as bad kids, and that can be a perpetuating cycle,” Campbell explained.
Racial disparities in the criminal justice system are something we have seen for decades — nationwide, statewide, in our cities.
According to the NAACP, Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of White Americans.
But in Lorain County, court administrator Tim Weitzel said decisions are now driven by the data — and the juvenile courts have been driven to make a change.
“We cut our detention numbers in half, we average 20 youth when we used to average 50 and we haven’t sacrificed public safety,” Weitzel said.
Two years ago, Lorain County joined JDAI, or the juvenile detention alternatives initiative — one of 19 counties out of the 88 in our state.
Since then, they’ve decreased the number of Black youth in juvenile detention by 51% and diverted 1100 cases in 11 months, the charges are typically minor misdemeanors.
“Diversions are a great thing because we’re not pulling them into our system where it becomes difficult to escape,” Weitzel said.
Because going through the court system can become cyclical. You go to juvy for something minor, you get out, you go back in. You slip up on probation.. you go back in.
The damage Myeasha saw herself, firsthand.
“I see kids they keep going back, going back, doing the same thing over and over, and it’s not something I want to do,” Myeasha said. “I want to be successful.”
But of course, with diversion comes the question we know you’re thinking at home.
“You’re not letting dangerous kids walk free, that’s not the goal here,” asked reporter Homa Bash.
“Absolutely not. We will hold the dangerous kids accountable every single time,” Weitzel said. “We just want to make sure the right youth goes into detention, the youth that is a risk to the community.”
But we’d be remiss not to mention Tamara Mcloyd, the 18-year-old charged with killing Cleveland Police officer Shane Bartek on New Year’s Eve.
She was on probation at the time for robbery, instead of serving time behind bars.
But this court doesn’t want one single case to cast a shadow on hundreds of success stories.
Weitzel said the data they have shows public safety has not been compromised since they started diverting youth.
Out of roughly 1,200 cases since May 2021, 148 kids reoffended, data shows, but only 15 of them were sent for formal prosecution. The others, the court found successfully diverted.
Myeasha is one of 64 graduates of “Crossroads” since 2019, a program youth are chosen to go to in lieu of serving time in the detention home.
They get picked up from school and come straight to the facility until about 8 p.m. every night — what’s called “prime-time crime time.”
Instead, cooking and crafting while being surrounded by counselors and probation officers who truly care about them.
“They make me feel like I belong there,” Myeasha said.
When you’re young the choices ahead of you can seem endless.
This place, these people, doing what they can and hoping to help these kids make the right ones.
