Probation Mentor Home Program

The Probation Mentor Home Program was established in Allen County, Indiana, in 1990 to provide temporary foster care to juvenile delinquents between the ages of 10 and 17. The purpose of the program was to establish a supportive collaboration among temporary mentor parents, natural parents, the school system, and the Juvenile Probation Department in order to treat at-risk juveniles in the community rather than send them to secure institutions. The program was designed for the logical reason of easing budget constraints, but it also was intended to prevent youths from being exposed to the detrimental prisonlike conditions of state facilities for juvenile delinquents. Funded by the Indiana Criminal Justice Planning Agency, it was created and executed by a county advisory committee and became the first program of its kind to integrate foster care with a rehabilitative philosophy. The Probation Mentor Home Program was thus an innovative development in community corrections, foundational in the advancement of alternatives to incarceration for delinquent youths.

Research conducted in the 1970s demonstrated that the vast majority of youths could be effectively managed outside institutional confinement. Addressing these findings, a few states adopted alternatives-to-incarceration programs for youths, which provided models for the Probation Mentor Home Program. The Massachusetts Department of Youth Services developed structured community-based programs such as foster care and group home placements for low-level youth offenders, as well as secure programs for violent and repeat youth offenders, in response to reports of abuse and insufficient treatment programs in juvenile facilities. Evaluation studies indicated that recidivism rates for youths released from alternative programs were some of the lowest in the country, far lower than those for youths released from juvenile facilities in Massachusetts. Additionally, the alternative programs proved much more cost-efficient than placement in secure juvenile facilities. In the 1980s, St. Louis implemented a similar alternative model for juveniles that was able to reduce costs and lower the recidivism rates of adjudicated youths. The costs of St. Louis's foster care program were drastically [Page 344]lower than its institutional costs, and a majority of juveniles who completed the program were able to return home without further legal intervention. The success of these programs, coupled with Allen County's ongoing financial burdens in the 1980s, led the Juvenile Probation Department in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to take steps to develop its own alternative-to-incarceration program to impede the process of housing juveniles in expensive secure state facilities. In January 1989, the advisory committee, which consisted of probation department officials and representatives from the mayor's office, county auditor's office, school system, commissioner's office, foster parent's association, social services agencies, an insurance corporation, and law firms, as well as the county council and a professor, convened to begin the design of the program. The advisory committee formed seven subcommittees to oversee and address potential challenges. During this phase, the policies and procedures of the program were developed and clearly stated in a manual published by the county. No legal barriers under Indiana state law prohibited the development of foster programs used to house delinquent youths. In January 1990, the program was introduced to the public. Six goals were identified: to avoid the practice of institutionalization through the use of community resources; to create an environment in which the juvenile has a focused treatment plan supported by the natural family, mentor family, and probation department; to integrate the natural family into the process of addressing behavioral concerns; to return the juvenile to his or her natural home after one semester of school; to reduce juvenile recidivism; and last, to reallocate resources from institutional placement to community supervision. In order for a juvenile to be deemed eligible to participate in the program, he or she had to be enrolled in an educational program or be employed at least part-time and be found in need of a residence outside the natural home that would be conducive to the mission of the program.

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