New Orleans has seen too many incarcerated children suffer with no resources to address their mental health needs. A new initiative is changing that.
The Orleans Parish Juvenile Court has received a federal grant of $750K to establish a mental health court system to reduce juvenile crime. The pilot program is primed to provide new pathways to address juvenile crime and recidivism.
Judge Ranord J. Darensburg, who has sat on the New Orleans Juvenile Court bench since January 1, 2021, has seen firsthand how untreated mental health issues play their part. According to a study by National Statistics, up to 70 percent of youth involved in the juvenile justice system are suffering from or have a diagnosable mental health challenge. This number rises to 89 percent in his court.
“What we were seeing was that most of the youth that were detained were suffering from mental illness, something we didn’t address,” he shares. “I started traveling to different communities and learned that other jurisdictions could do this testing immediately. My goal became to move toward doing mental health and behavioral health testing and analysis at the point of entry into the justice system.”
With the input of several community voices, like social scientist Mosi Makori, who has worked with groups like Innocence Project New Orleans, along with Dr. Thomas Oden of Oden Psychiatry and Dr. Adeeba Deterville of Sankofa Cultural Institute, who are instrumental to the court’s planning, development and implementation, the federal grant proposal came to fruition. It is one of only 11 selected nationally out of over 200 applicants. The three-year grant allows Judge and his contemporaries to better leverage resources from additional federal agencies.
“Once a youth is identified as suffering from a mental health challenge, it becomes a special court session to address the mental health issue,” Judge Darensburg explains. “Now, along with the lawyers, the defendants will have the school, the psychologist, the social workers—all the people that can come together in one room and develop a plan of action for the child, which is then monitored through the program.”
As poverty is a primary root cause of delinquency, “We want people to be more supported, supervised and taken care of,” Judge Darensburg declares. “I’m a lawyer and judge, and I also happen to be a social worker. We want to frame our program around healthy families, creating stronger families that create safer communities.”
The program is set to launch in January 2024.