Juvenile facility has been serving area youth in trouble for two decades | August 4, 2023

By JIM PHILLIPS, PERRY COUNTY TRIBUNE EDITOR

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Photo Credit: Mark L. Cooper

NEW LEXINGTON — For a young resident at the Perry Multi-County Juvenile Facility, his 21st birthday would mark the necessary end of his stay. The facility itself just turned 21 last month, and county Juvenile Judge Luann Cooperrider, who acted as its project coordinator, wants the public to know about the good work it has been doing all those years for male juvenile offenders, and for the surrounding community as well.

The Perry Multi-County Juvenile Facility (PMCJF) is what is called a community corrections facility or CCF. According to its website, it “provides youth with significant problems the opportunity to become well-adjusted individuals ready to return to their communities as responsible, productive, and law-abiding citizens.”

Cooperrider said the 20-bed facility, located in the industrial park on Commerce Drive in New Lexington, helps turn around the lives of boys and young men who have been convicted of felony criminal offenses. “It’s all funded by the Department of Youth Services, and it’s for 20 young men,” the judge explained. “You have to be at least 12 (to be committed there), and if you’re committed before you’re 18, you can stay until you’re 21.”

Typically a youth sent to the facility will have committed a non-violent, non-sexual lower-level felony offense. “Most of ours are theft, things like that,” Cooperrider said. “No sex offenders – we felt like that’s a more specialized program. Most of ours are felony threes and fours and fives. Receiving stolen property, using drugs, things like that. Or all of those into one.”

The PMCJF provides them with the help they need to move in a new direction than the one that landed them in juvenile court. Services include addressing the needs that may have driven their criminal behavior in the first place; incentive-based behavior modification; life skills; structured family therapy; cognitive behavioral interventions; substance abuse treatment; and teaching victim awareness.

How long a youth stays in the facility depends on the juvenile’s behavior, attitude, and willingness to work the program. Cooperrider said the average stay is under a year. The PMCJF website notes that the length varies “depending on the resident’s progress in the program. Sometimes it takes a few extra months of behavioral therapy work for the resident to understand the importance of identifying their antisocial thoughts, and to start implementing their newly gained pro-social thinking strategies.”

The residents also receive the education they may be missing, or have missed, in school. “Since 2011, we have had 73 young boys graduate from high school, who probably wouldn’t have (otherwise),” Cooperrider said. “About 50% are 16- or 17-year-olds, and then we have other ages as well… They’re educated, they get life skills education, and they have counseling, individual and family. We do community service. We have visitation where the parents come and participate in the counseling.”

In addition to Perry, the PMCJF accepts youths from Coshocton, Delaware, Fairfield, Knox, Licking, Morgan and Muskingum counties. And while helping them, it also helps Perry County, the judge said.

“Our budget is $1.7 million,” she noted. “And of that, payroll, with insurance and benefits, is $1.5 million. So all that comes into Perry County. We currently have 26 employees… (and those are) good jobs, with benefits, and retirement.”

The facility also provides a benefit to the community in the form of community service by the residents. “Last year our kids did 107-1/2 hours of community service,” the judge reported.

Remarkable for a county its size, Perry County is home to two CCFs, the other one being another juvenile court program, the ALPHA School. Reportedly it is the only county in Ohio that can say this.

ALPHA School “was residential in the beginning. It opened in 1995,” the judge said.” That was my first big project. That was also a community corrections facility, and when we opened up this Perry Multi-County, we made the other one a day program.”

As Cooperrider noted, she was project coordinator for both the county’s CCF, but she considers it less a feather in her cap than a privilege.

“It’s just wonderful to be a judge and have the ability to help kids in your own backyard,” she declared.

Email at jphillips@perrytribune.com