WASHINGTON — A day after DC Police arrested a 12-year-old boy for his involvement in a carjacking that left a 13-year-old boy dead, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser faced questions for cutting funding to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS), which not only houses juvenile offenders pre-trial but provides services to help young offenders get back on the right track.
This year, Bowser and DC Council cut the DYRS budget to $87,299,227. That’s 2.5% less than last year and a 7% decrease from four years ago.
“We ensure that we are properly budgeted at DYRS and all of our other agencies, and all of our budgets reflect that,” Bowser told reporters at an event Wednesday. “There's no concern.”
The decision to cut comes at a time when DC Police statistics show juvenile crime is on the rise, with arrests up 17% in the first six months of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022.
DYRS data seemingly indicates facilities like Youth Services Center, which houses violent teen offenders pre-trial, are six people over the capacity listed on its website. But Wednesday, DC’s Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lindsey Appiah said budget and staffing cuts at DYRS are a result of judges not detaining as many juveniles pretrial as they used to.
Appiah said if judges want to detain more juveniles moving forward, the current facilities and staffing levels can handle it.
“There's capacity for us to do congregate setting, double bunking, many things that happen in secure juvenile facilities,” Appiah said.
Appiah said she’s visited the facility when as many as 150 youth were being housed.
“Is that what we want? Certainly, no, but the agency is more than capable of housing safely whatever number of youth the court deem need to be securely housed," she said.
But when WUSA9 asked DYRS directly if the agency needed more space, a spokesperson seemed to say yes. She said DYRS is currently trying to increase the number of beds in existing shelter homes, find additional local group and shelter home providers and identify more space out-of-state to place committed youth.
Due to privacy laws, data on cases where a judge wanted to detain a teen after an arrest but couldn’t due to a lack of space is not public.