Editor’s note: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service has changed the names of youths in New York’s justice system upon request to ensure their safety and privacy. NEW YORK — The walk from a subway station in Brooklyn, New York, to a secure facility for kids in the criminal justice system takes all of five minutes. The route passes by a laundromat, a Chinese takeout restaurant, a bodega with fresh flowers on the sidewalk and a college preparatory high school. It’s a little different than the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Milwaukee through fields and farms to Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons in the unincorporated town of Irma, Wisconsin. In Brooklyn, the gray stone apartment building is indistinguishable from other homes on the block. A hip-level black gate with decorative trim opens up to a concrete courtyard with a space for recycling bins. Blue stairs lead to a glass-paned locked door. Once opened, another locked door is just inside, an additional yet subtle security measure. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! The windows have bars on them that match the aesthetic of the gate. No razor barbed wire is in sight. Young people whom family courts deem to be the highest risk to the community are placed in this limited-secure facility, right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, across the street from a school. The front room has two couches by the window and a box of board games for when families come to visit the kids, usually at least once a week. In the winter, the youths help shovel neighbors’ sidewalks, and in the summer, they help garden, said Lisa Crook, vice president of justice for youth and families programs at Rising Ground, one of the nonprofits that operates these homes. “There’s this mindset, like ‘oh, you need to be punished for your crime,’ but what I’ve often said is just because we have a homelike setting, and we have therapeutic intervention, does not mean that the kids are not acutely aware of the accountability and what led them to be placed with us in the first place,” Crook said. “If you have a program that looksinstitutional and treats a kid institutionally, you teach someone how to beinstitutionalized,” she added. In the year and a half since the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake and replace the state’s youth prisons with smaller regional facilities, local and state leaders have proposed various replacement plans. Leaders from Milwaukee County—including County Executive Chris Abele—have looked to best practices in places across the country to use as inspiration for changes locally. They have continually referenced New York’s Close to Home reform initiative as a model to learn from. New York’s approach Felipe Franco, deputy commissioner for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, said: “We believe that kids should be served in their homes or close to their homes, and we value that these communities and these families are actually part of the solution.” This wasn’t always the mindset in New York. In 2012, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation called Close to Home, which restructured the way New York’s youth justice system worked as a whole. The initiative moved all of the state’s young people from state-run youth prison facilities upstate into community-based programs, and, in some situations, into small residential care homes with limited security measures, in the city. More robust alternative-to-incarceration programs were put in place to give judges sentencing options that wouldn’t remove youths from their homes. The criteria for who was considered “high risk” and in need of residential placement were changed, with the goal to keep more kids at home and limit the number of youths who are placed in the Close to Home facilities. For those who the courts decide do need to be placed, these 29 home-like facilities—which can house up to 12 youths but these days usually have fewer than five—adhere to a therapeutic model of care that focuses on shifting the way young people make decisions. The emphasis is on family engagement and involvement in the broader community to prepare the youths for returning home. Girls are housed separately from boys. Nonprofits receive contracts from the city to operate the homes, so as the needs change and as the number of youths being placed declines, the city can easily close homes or change their purpose. The sweeping reforms came in the wake of a declining youth crime rate, a significantly increasing cost of housing a young person in one of the upstate prisons and mounting pressure from advocates as investigations and reports of abuse surfaced from the state facilities.