Last Wednesday, in his State of the City address, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an imminent and significant change to the city’s juvenile justice system: the Department of Juvenile Justice will combine with the Administration for Children’s Services.

Some media outlets, including The New York Times, have interpreted this move as a signal that the city intends to send fewer of its teenagers to jail, opting for a more therapeutic, community-oriented approach. Recent reports have painted a bleak picture of the juvenile justice system in the state of New York, citing recidivism rates well above the national average. Within the state’s youth prisons thrives a “culture of violence”, one report said, with frequent broken bones and sexual assaults. The Bloomberg administration’s new approach, effective immediately, will attempt to deal with some of these shortcomings.

Rather than being sent to prison, some offenders will now remain in their neighborhoods under the supervision of child welfare. For some, this means New York City is “going soft on crime,” but Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs refuted these claims. Essentially, Gibbs said that the new approach to juvenile crime in the city of New York could not be worse than the previous one; combining the Department of Juvenile Justice and the Administration of Children’s Services will place more emphasis on improvements in home life and education, simultaneously saving the city a substantial amount of money. An offender who might otherwise spend the rest of her life in the penal system has a chance, under the new structure, to return to society better equipped to avoid criminal activity as an adult because she committed a crime as a juvenile.

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