If you had visited the juvenile lockup in Pima County a decade ago — at the height of the adult-time-for-adult-crime campaign — you’d have seen young people sleeping in the cafeteria because of overcrowding. If you’d visited five years ago, you’d have seen nearly 200 juveniles held each day.
If you visited on Monday, you would have counted 78. In annual numbers, there were almost 3,500 youths detained in Pima County in 2003, a number that plummeted to 2,583 last year and is still dropping. In year four of a wide-scale transformation of Pima County’s juvenile-justice system, troubled kids are being diverted into other alternatives.