Make Iowa juvenile court records private, group told

The court records of convicted juveniles in Iowa should be confidential and unavailable for public review, a move that would help youth who have completed probation turn their lives around, a state group studying justice policy reforms was told Wednesday.

Many people in prison either were unemployed or under-employed before they were incarcerated, said Jerry Foxhoven, executive director of the Neal & Bea Smith Legal Clinic and a Drake University law professor. “If we get them on the right track so that they won’t still be unemployed at 30 because they shoplifted when they were 14.”

Foxhoven and Mike Sorci, head of the Youth Law Center in Des Moines, both recommended that the state group support changing Iowa law so that juvenile court records for youth convicted of a crime in juvenile court remain out of the public realm unless a judge orders it to be public. Currently, court records of juveniles convicted of crimes can be accessed on Iowa Courts Online and from court files.

The meeting Wednesday was the second of the Governor’s Working Group on Justice Policy Reform, a task force announced by Gov. Terry Branstad in August. The group is expected to make recommendations by Nov. 1 on reforms in a variety of areas, such as improving drug and mental health courts, juvenile court records, and the costs of making phone calls from Iowa prisons and jails.

The group met on Sept. 24 when it learned about the lack of uniformity in Iowa’s drug courts, which supporters say help reduce recidivism rates.

Iowa has one of the nation’s most open juvenile court record laws, Sorci told the group. He said the state should adopt a policy similar to Rhode Island, where juvenile court records cannot be accessed by the public.

Stigmatizing and labeling children as delinquents is a self-fulling prophecy, making it “very easy for that child to fall into the pipeline to prison,” Sorci said.

The arrest rate for African-American youth is nearly five times that of white youth, according to a review of data from Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Iowa City, Sioux City and Waterloo, Foxhoven said. Making juvenile court records confidential could help reduce the minority unemployment rate, which could help lead to lower incarceration rates for minorities, particularly blacks, he said.

“As Juvenile Court Services work with these youth and get them on the right track, it doesn’t do (the juveniles) a whole lot of good if we tag them with an arrest record that follows them the rest of their lives,” Foxhoven said.

Alan Ostergren, Muscatine County Attorney and a member of the state group, asked how the public would know whether the state’s court system was doing a good job or a poor job in addressing juvenile delinquencies if records were secret. Doing so would make it difficult for the public to scrutinize what the court system does, he said.

Sorci’s response: “We need to weigh the harm to the child versus the public’s right to know.”

The group also discussed the telephone fees charged to state and county prisoners and their families in Iowa, a practice some believe siphons money from the state’s poorest citizens.

Inmates at Iowa’s state prisons make about 1.1 million telephone calls a year, said Jerry Bartruff, Department of Corrections director. In January, the state reduced its phones fees to $2.90 per 20 minutes of use from $3.15.

Annually, the department collects about $523,000 from the phone calls, money that is used to provide educational and vocational programs for inmates.

Angela McBride, an assistant state ombudsman, recommended that prisoners be charged a per minute fee rather than a flat rate and that the charges reflect only the actual cost associated with making the calls.

Research by the ombudsman’s office shows that other states charge much less than Iowa. For instance, Missouri charges 5 cents a minute, she said.

“We need to think nationally about this,” she said.