Chairman GLENN. Let me ask you a question that came up in the last group. Miss Osborne, who periodically conducts athletics, agreed that when she was growing up out in St. Mary, out where I was yesterday out around Central, that there was always a YMCA, YWCA or someplace after school for single-parent families, that there was someplace to go where the mother or dad didn't have to worry particularly about the kids and they had programs and there were athletics, dances, charm schools and crafts and all sorts of things like this. That is one of the positive things. It is like Miss Curlee said, "If I am saying 'no' to drugs, what am I saying 'yes' to?" where there were opportunities after school. Has anybody ever thought of this idea that we talked about a little while ago, about the school stopped being used, basically. Some people, maybe, but they stopped being used about 2:30 in the afternoon, and the kids are out there, doing what? Well, roaming around. Could the schools be used as the modern-day Y, and could the churches be taking up this as a project? Churches want to do good on other days besides Sunday, too, and take this on as a deacon's program or something and man the schools at 2:30 or whatever and have programs and crafts and manual arts and dance and charm school and auto mechanics and a whole host of things that it would seem to me a lot of kids would take up and be interested in. Is that something that should be considered? Mr. WHITE. Senator, you have hit upon what I think is a crucial element that should be used in our options. In fact, the meeting I just left, the Intergovernmental Committee meeting between the Board of Education and the City of Cleveland, one of the reasons we focused on recreation, not just as something to get the children out of a person's sight, but to expand the amount of positive recreational encounters and positive encounters with adults that would keep them off of the streets and would give them an alternative. So I would indicate to you that whether it is utilizing the schools as a community center and not just as they have been utilized historically, and secondly, utilizing the churches is a critical part of this. I might just make one other point. Senator, if money was the answer to this problem, I think you would agree that the Congress would have found a way to hit the magic number by now and we would have moved on to the next problem. It is not just money. This is a human-spirit problem, and it's a matter of bringing to bear all of the human content and human commitment to this problem. All the money without the involvement of the adults in this community to expand the recreation like you talked about, to improve our church facilities will not work, so you are absolutely right. So I just would only indicate to you that I think we ought to not try to look for the first grant to expand it. We ought to begin to look at how we can reapply some of our resources. Let's not just do it because there is a new Federal program, let's do it because it's a very important part of how we attack this problem and how we involve our children. Our intermural program in the schools is shot, no basketball, not to the greatest extent, no football on an intermural basis. We are going to improve our Community League as well. Children are going to be involved in something. They are either going to be involved in and depend on drugs or we are going to put in an intermural program in our schools, so you are absolutely right. Chairman GLENN. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We appreciate your coming by this morning. Mr. WHITE. Senator, thank you. Chairman GLENN. Another group I was going to point out earlier this morning was the Central Intermediate School Student Council that is here this morning. Would you stand up, please? [Applause.] Chairman GLENN. We are glad you could be here this morning to hear this, and I would add before we end, if any of you have some ideas you want to express on some of the things said that you think would add to our deliberations here, keep your comments and I will ask you again before we end. We might have some of you up here to give us any additional ideas you may have, too. Our next panel is Mr. Geno Natalucci-Persichetti, who is Director of the Ohio Department of Youth Services, accompanied by Ms. Carol Rapp-Zimmermann of the Ohio Public Information Office, Ohio Department of Youth Services, and I would remind our TV cameramen and photographers that no pictures are to be taken of our juvenile felons who have come forward to testify before us this morning. They can be photographed from the back, but we don't want them to be recognized on camera. They prefer it that way, and Mr. Persichetti asked to have it that way also. So please do not take pictures from the front. If you want to take pictures of the panel as they are testifying, please do it on camera. OK, fine. Before the young people come up, Geno, will you give your testimony? TESTIMONY OF GENO NATALUCCI-PERSICHETTI, DIRECTOR, OHIO DEPARTMENT OF YOUTH SERVICES Mr. NATALUCCI-PERSICHETTI. Thank you, Senator. Chairman GLENN. I will introduce Carol Rapp-Zimmermann of the Public Information Office of the Ohio Department of Youth Services. Mr. NATALUCCI-PERSICHETTI. And this is Miss Sherri Walter, who is administrator of our drug program. Thank you again for our opportunity to testify before you and the opportunity to bring some real experts to you to tell about the life of temptation of drugs, dealing in violence in the street caused by drug usage. First, let me begin by just telling you the scope of the problems we face here in Ohio. Currently, we in Ohio are facing youth problems in all of our juvenile correctional institutions, not just attributable to drug-running. On any given day we can have 2,000 juvenile offenders locked up in our state institution. We are overcrowded to the point of being unable to provide adequate services, programs and even adequate housing to these youth or even public safety to the communities in the immediate neighborhoods. The problem of drugs is making our need for programming more and more critical, yet at the same time overcrowding the system to the extent that current programs are stretched beyond capacity. Let me explain the two levels of the problem as we see it. First, youth who use and abuse drugs and, secondly, youth who traffic in drugs. No matter what crime leads a youth to the Department of Youth Services system, about 8 out of 10 juvenile offenders who come into our system have substance-abuse problems, over 80 percent. About 4 out of 10 are addicted or severely dependent. We are proud of the substance-abuse assessment, counsel-ling and treatment services that we are providing currently, but we need to do more. Our population has grown so high and the drug program is so pervasive that we can give needed intensive service to only a fraction of the youth who need it who come into our system. We currently receive about 2,700 juvenile offenders into our system annually from juvenile courts. Approximately 1,000 of those juvenile offenders are in serious need of services, treatment for serious abuse and addiction, and were only capable of providing services currently to about 400 on an annual basis. Beyond just youths in our system with drug problems, we take a look at the number of youth that come to us between the age of 12 and 18 for drug offenses. The increase is downright frightening. From 1986 to 1989 the number of juvenile offenders coming into our system for drug offenses skyrocketed from a handful each year to 300 in 1989, or 1100 per cent increase. Drug trafficking, for instance, one category of drug offenses, which are the offenses committed by these juvenile offenders, drug trafficking zoomed tremendously. In terms of in 1986 we only had 25 drug traffickers in our system, and in 1989 we had 248. Trying to rehabilitate drug traffickers is new to us. We need your help to gain your attention, interest and support if we are going to make any effect on these young offenders to turn their lives around, to give up the criminal career and save our neighborhoods from the fear of crime. We do not begin to have space to handle the youthful traffickers. We will continue to house juvenile offenders in our jails and eventually into adult prisons perhaps for the rest of their lives. The problem is more serious for the one sector of juvenile population in our system: the black juvenile offender. Consider this, that blacks make up only 10 percent of the total Ohio population. They make up almost half, 46 percent of the population that we incarcerate. But more surprisingly, out of every 10 DYS drug offenders is an African-American. This is becoming a very costly situation. Although it is only $14,000 cost per year to house an adult offender in the Department of Corrections, in locking up a juvenile drug trafficker in our system, it costs over $30,000 a year. We don't have any "economy of scale" of a running 1500-man prison. Our prisons range between 200 and 350. We need all of the agencies to start thinking about what we have been spending and what we are losing. The easy answer to the drug problem is "Lock 'em up," because locking up a youthful offender makes us feel safe, at least while he is locked up. We somehow feel locking up a youth will punish him and make him change. We somehow think that the youth will come out fixed, ready to stay clean and sober and get a job and stay out of crime, with no interest in going back to the streets and sell drugs. But stop and consider for a minute the reality. The youth in the Department of Services are education deficient. They have either flunked or dropped out or were pushed out of school. Youth in our system are poor. Eighty percent come from families that are on welfare or some subsidy. Youth in our system have dysfunctional families. They often come from homes where domestic violence, suicide, mental illness, substance abuse or being in prison is in the norm. Fifty-five percent of our youth have families that are addictive or abusive to some drug substance. Do we really believe we can take a poor, dysfunctional youth with no job, no life skills and little family support and lock him up or her up for a year or two and expect him to come out ready to give up the escape of drugs or the lure of drug-dealing? Helping Ohio's juvenile drug offenders will be hard work, won't be splashy and fun. It will take money and innovation. We need to take the following steps: Support, obviously, education, prevention and early intervention for all Ohio youth. It is much less costly in human suffering, in tax dollars if kids never come to the Department of Youth Services. Support state and local treatment programs that help juvenile drug abusers to get clean and sober. And support transition and social programs for those youth who are being released from our institutions to help monitor their behavior and support drug-free and crime-free life styles. Support the development of job-training programs, programs that keep high-risk kids in schools and services that help direct kids to crime-free ways of earning money. Help us find the answers to problems of youthful drug traffickers. We need to find innovative and practical programs to affect this new and growing breed of offender. I have also asked you as well as our national leaders to investigate over-representation of minorities in our criminal justice system. We need to be sensitive to this problem and support andfund programs that attempt to address this. We want to make sure that there is more use of services that the higher-risk youth have access to and trust in, like neighborhood youth centers and settlement houses, street worker programs, storefront programs, mentor programs and even resurrecting programs like the old CCC camps to address the needs of inner-city and high-risk kids as alternatives to traditional programming. Before I offer to bring up the three youths from our institution center, I would like to have Miss Sherri Walter make a few comments on this. TESTIMONY OF SHERRI WALTER, ADMINISTRATOR, DRUG Ms. WALTER. Senator, I particularly wanted to address a few things that were stated earlier. I get real concerned when I hear statistics quoted. You quoted the statistic of the latest senior study. My concerns become these show that drug abuse among teens is going down, at least that is how the American public sees it, but, unfortunately, I think this is extremely misleading due to the fact that 25 percent of our kids on the average, drop out with up to 50 percent of our kids in major urban areas being dropped out. These are the kids that are using and abusing drugs at the highest rates. They are not represented in these statistics. I think it is terribly misleading to say that drug use and alcohol use among teen-agers is down, but in reality I think it is anything but that. Those are some concerns I have. I also think we need to look at the fact that we of the Department of Youth Services, we see the kids where the programs that are presently in place, they are not reaching these kids. They are either not impacting them, or they are just plain out not reaching them. Our kids don't stay in school, our kids don't get involved in community programs and, unfortunately, the kids that are involved heavily in drugs and alcohol aren't involved in these types of programs. Intervention is an important piece in this war on drugs, but we have got to do much more than prevention, because prevention is not reaching those kids who are already involved in drugs and alcohol or who do not become involved in those community programs. We need to make sure we have treatment programs and we need to make sure that we have intervention programs which are specific to these kids, minorities and specific to juvenile offenders and specific to other populations, whether it be aging Americans and Appalachian Americans, but we need to reach their specific needs. The last thing I would like to mention is that many of the kids who we see at some point or another have been involved with some social service agency. Whether that agency has been a juvenile court, county welfare agency, childrens protective services, we need to make sure that all of these gatekeepers, if I may say, have the staff and the training to assess these youth and provide them with intervention services the first time they get involved in some social service agency instead of waiting till when these kids get to the point that they are in juvenile detention centers and get to the point where they are in the Department of Youth Services. We oftentimes wait too long, till we get involved with these youth. So we urge you to look at that. All of our social service agencies need to be starting to deal with these youth from the ghetto and not wait till they become serious problems, and I don't think we do that. Much of our money is going into interdiction and much of our money is going into prevention, but we are missing that middle ground of treatment and intervention services, and these are the kids that need the services now. Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much. Have you done any research on what happens to kids after they leave DYS? In other words, do you know whether your programs are helping to turn anybody around? Mr. PERSICHETTI. Senator, in our research on substance abuse programs that we have just begun we are seeing impact, that those kids that are getting some degree of services are not resurfacing. The department has it as a factor that between 55 and 60 percent of the youth currently leaving our system are recidivists into crimi |