Westchester County Law Suit:

Lisa opens the show with the big story about the Westchester County law suit. A civil rights group brought a case about Westchester County alleging that Westchester County in its housing funds was discriminatory against minorities like black and hispanics. Andrew Spano took the extraordinary step in settling the law suit that forced Westchester County to construct affordable housing in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market the housing to non-whites in New York City and Westchester. Lisa said this is like affirmative action for housing - because they are trying to make up for past discriminatory impact in housing and our local and county governments are being charged of righting the wrongs of the past. She said this makes the New Haven fire fighter case look like peanuts! $50 million of tax payer dollars will go toward constructing or acquiring no less than 750 units and it has to be in neighborhoods in which blacks constitute less than 3% of the population and Hispanics makes up less than 7% of the population. Lisa wanted to know how they come u

p with these figures and if her listeners though it was a good thing or a bad thing? A caller from Stamford stated he is concerned that the government is involved, especially the federal government, where we are a network of such diverse communities, it is impossible to legislate these things from a central government.



Mentally Ill Offenders Stretch the Limits of Juvenile Justice:

Bob Francis, Executive Director of the CT Alliance for Juvenile Justice and Solomon Moore, a Criminal Justice reporter for the New York Times, joined Lisa to discuss this story reported in today's New York Times. Lisa cited statistics saying there are about two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates - who numbered 92,854 in 2006 - that have at least one mental illness and more are in need of therapy than punishment. Bob Frances said he is in general agreement with the article and said the state of Connecticut is doing a little bit better because the issue came up a few years ago and more attention is being paid to it. He said Connecticut has more capacity and has developed other services in the community where we are able to divert these young people from the juvenile justice system.

Solomon Moore, a Criminal Justice reporter for the New York Times, said there has been a movement forming around reforming juvenile justice systems in the country. The overall juven

ile population has declined over time, but there is a lot more mental illness in the juvenile prisons. A 2006 study estimates that for every 100,000 youths, there are fewer than nine child psychologists. Lisa said that means nobody is getting any help; they are just getting pills and not all of the time because the medications are inconsistent and the wrong doses. Mr. Solomon said the people he spoke with didn’t have a big problem with medication per se; it was the fact that diagnoses were sketchy sometimes; documentation didn’t follow children from their schools into treatment centers in the juvenile justice centers. Kids who were on one drug, were supposed to be tapered of that drug but it never happened because they move from one place to another and you ended up with kids on a lot of different medications and a lot of diagnoses, but not a lot of coherence in terms of treatment. Mr. Frances said he agrees with Mr. Solomon and adds that there are not enough psychiatrists, social workers and direct service workers in the system.