Last week, I wrote about the efforts of a group of youth who are organizing to close the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.

For the first time in memory, we have a real chance in Cook County, under the leadership of Board President Toni Preckwinkle, to potentially end juvenile detention as we know it. Ms. Preckwinkle is committed to halving the number of youth at JTDC within two years and hopes to eventually move to a system of secure community-based alternatives to detention. This is an incredibly positive development. However, it is important that the requisite amount of resources be redirected into communities in order to address the needs of youth in conflict with the law.

Ms. Preckwinkle recently toured the JTDC and a report about this appeared on WGN-News (VIDEO). I highly recommend the story.

Preckwinkle is quoted in a Chicago Tribune article published on Friday as saying after touring JTDC on Thursday: “I think we need to do everything we can to empty this building out.” The article goes on to expand on the solutions that she offers:

That means putting children in group homes, monitored home confinement and other community-based programs where advocates say youths have better opportunities for counseling, job training and other life-skill instruction.

“What we need to do is have a number of smaller, secure safe homes for kids scattered around the county rather than having one huge juvenile prison,” Preckwinkle told the Tribune. “It’s a prison for kids. It’s an inappropriate setting for almost everybody who’s here.”

I agree with Ms. Preckwinkle, prison is “no place for kids.”

Click HERE to see a larger version of this infographic.

Click HERE for a fact sheet that I created about the JTDC relying on 2010 data.