Wyoming locks up kids at the highest rates in the nation. Bill to help understand why died without debate.

Wyoming has for decades incarcerated juvenile offenders at the highest rates in the nation. 

The state’s multi-year efforts to reduce those numbers have been hampered, in part, by an unclear picture of why kids enter the justice system and whether incarceration seems to help. A bill to strengthen data and information sharing about state-supervised youth, including those in the juvenile justice system, died without debate in the House Judiciary Committee last week. 

The five no votes came from freshman lawmakers aligned with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Rep. Lloyd Larsen, R-Lander, a 12-year veteran of the House, led the effort to craft the measure. He took the bill’s failure as evidence more could have been done to communicate the backstory behind the need for more data.

“We didn’t just come up with this on a Saturday night while we were eating popcorn,” Larsen said of the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee-sponsored legislation. “We’ve gone through two interims of looking at this.” 

Why it matters 

While many of Wyoming’s neighboring states have decreased their use of juvenile incarceration, the Equality State once again posted the highest rate in the nation, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2021, Wyoming courts removed adjudicated delinquents — juvenile justice-specific terminology for young people convicted of crimes — from their homes and placed them in public and private facilities at over three times the national average. The majority of the offenses were non-violent, and 13% were technical violations — in other words, kids failing to comply with the terms of their probation, be it missing a drug test or poor academic performance. 

Research has found juvenile incarceration does not significantly deter delinquent behavior or improve public safety while leading to poor outcomes for young people — from lower academic performance to higher suicide rates. Instead, studies show that community-based programs, which address the root causes of delinquent behavior while keeping kids close to home, lead to better outcomes and do so with a smaller price tag for the state. 

Five years after South Dakota implemented juvenile justice reform — investing $6.1 million in expanded community-based programs in 2015 — the state cut the number of incarcerated youth in half and reduced its juvenile corrections budget.

The fiscal implications of Wyoming’s high juvenile incarceration rate have not been lost on lawmakers here. In 2021, the Joint Judiciary Committee agreed to study Wyoming’s juvenile justice system during the legislative off-season, acknowledging that “youth confinement is one of the largest expenditures for the Department of Family Services.” 

House Bill 48, “Department of family services-confidentiality amendments,” which died in the House Judiciary Committee last week, was seen as an important step in a multi-year effort to understand what’s driving Wyoming’s heavy, and expensive, reliance on juvenile incarceration. 

How we got here

Back in 2021, when the Joint Judiciary Committee set out to study juvenile justice, the panel’s members quickly realized the first problem they would need to tackle was a lack of consistent data.

That’s in part because Wyoming doesn’t have a statewide juvenile justice system. Instead of sending all juvenile cases to juvenile court, county attorneys have discretion — a policy known as single point of entry — and each county takes a different approach. Some will funnel juvenile cases to municipal and circuit courts, some rely on juvenile courts and others routinely use all three. There are also counties with diversion programs designed to keep juvenile offenders out of court altogether and others that rely heavily on juvenile probation programs. 

But no matter what a county decides to do, once a court orders a young person into custody, the state pays the bill. And for decades the state had no way of assessing what was happening at the county level to drive up, or drive down, juvenile incarceration rates, or whether money spent to confine kids was having the desired effect. 

Wyoming didn’t know high school graduation rates or recidivism rates for juvenile offenders, or how often they reoffend as adults. 

Acknowledging it’s hard to manage what you can’t measure, the Wyoming Legislature passed a Joint Judiciary Committee-sponsored bill in 2022 mandating the Department of Family Services set up the Juvenile Justice Information System. 

While DFS oversees out-of-home placements and juvenile incarceration, the agency quickly realized that pre-existing privacy laws would make it hard to fulfill the Legislature’s mandate for a comprehensive system tracking how kids enter the system or what happens after. That’s because DFS, the Wyoming Department of Health, the Wyoming Department of Education, the Wyoming Department of Corrections and the court system, which all hold pieces of the puzzle, are limited in what information they can exchange.

Solving that problem was a top priority of the Legislature’s Mental Health and Vulnerable Adult Task Force, which convened over the last two years. House Bill 48 was the fruit of that labor. 

Larsen, the Lander representative who co-chaired the task force, said enhanced data sharing is about helping state agencies better serve constituents and operate more effectively and cost-efficiently. 

“I think data really helps us identify what programs are needed and what programs aren’t,” Larsen told WyoFile.

Balancing the state’s desire to evaluate programs with privacy and confidentiality was a focus of the task force, Larsen said, given the vulnerability of the families DFS serves. 

“We should always be nervous about privacy,” Larsen said, which is why so much time went into “House Bill 48 which really addresses a very delicate, sensitive issue.”  

Those concerns were also on DFS Director Korin Schmidt’s mind when she testified to the House Judiciary Committee about the need for HB 48. 

“We take seriously the confidentiality of the information that we gather,” Schmidt said. “However, the confidentiality statutes, in large part … were created in the ‘70s, and they didn’t contemplate a time where maybe we could help these families a little bit earlier, a little bit more effectively, while also being good stewards of the dollar, while also ensuring efficiencies across our systems, both internally and externally.”  

State agencies are simply unable to answer many fundamental questions about juvenile justice, Schmidt told the committee. 

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“We have frequently been asked the question: How many kids that you serve in your juvenile justice system go into the Department of Corrections system? We can’t answer that question,” Schmidt said. “And one of the reasons we can’t answer that question is because of our confidentiality statutes.”

House Bill 48 would give the DFS director authority to initiate changes in how data is shared between state agencies through a rules-changing process requiring public and legislative input. 

That ensures “the general public also knows what it is that we are doing in a very transparent way,” Schmidt said.  

Those guardrails did not persuade the majority of the House Judiciary Committee — the bill died on a 5-4 vote. Reps. Laurie Bratten from Sheridan and Marlene Brady from Rock Springs, briefly mentioned privacy concerns before casting no votes, along with Republican Reps. Tom Kelly from Sheridan, Jayme Lien from Casper and Joe Webb from Lyman.

What now? 

Juvenile justice data sharing was just one piece of HB 48. The bill would also have enhanced DFS’ ability to evaluate its other programs — helping abuse and neglect victims, for example — and opened up opportunities for cross-agency referrals between DFS case workers, public health nurses and mental health providers. 

While HB 48 died in committee, Larsen said, that doesn’t mean solutions are off the table this session. He suggested individual lawmakers may bring their own versions of the bill. 

Lawmakers have until Jan. 29 to introduce bills in the Senate and Feb. 3 in the House. 

Learn more: Listen to Juvenile (in)justice from Reveal.