Upstate juvenile detention facilities have come under fire by all levels of government, including the Department of Justice, which has threatened to take them over if serious reforms aren’t put in place. The majority of the kids filling these juvenile prisons are from poor neighborhoods across the five boroughs. The city's trying to change that by expanding programs that both monitor and provide family therapy inside the home. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez visited one program and she answers some key questions about the detention facilities and the city's plans:

Who is going to this program that you visited and what kind of trouble did they get into?
This particular home-based program is run by the New York Foundling, a foster-care agency. The kids are between 12 and 17, and their offenses range from graffiti to fighting at school to carrying a weapon to school to doing drugs. Their parents are mostly single moms, often with other kids. There tend to be more boys than girls. Several have mental health issues and some of their parents do too. I visited one family with a 15-year-old boy whose been arrested several times, most recently for selling crack.

These facilities have come under fire. What are some of the complaints about them?
There have been two very comprehensive reports about the facilities, one by the Department of Justice, which found that poorly trained guards were using excessive force on kids who are often mentally ill and not getting the psychiatric services they need. A report by a government-appointed task force also found similar problems and recommended closing down facilities.

Now that the 15-year-old you spoke with is out of detention, what’s he doing and is he still being monitored?

"John" spent six months in detention and, since getting out, he’s being monitored by a parole officer but also by a family therapist named Tanya Simone who visits him twice a week. The family therapist is trying to teach a parent, or grandmother, or whoever is in charge to deal with the child’s behavior. The therapists also looks for outside help from neighbors, friends, relatives or anyone that can provide support. Oftentimes, many of these kids come from troubled homes. The Administration for Children’s Services says 80 percent of the kids in these alternative programs have a child welfare history, which means at some point they were likely the subject of an abuse or neglect complaint. In many ways, John is lucky because he comes from a two-parent household and both his mom and dad have agreed to take part in this program that allows him to stay at home. Sometimes kids get sent to detention simply because they have no one to take responsibility for them.

Tanya Simone says John "used to be a kid that would stay out overnight and never come home, never communicate with his family what he was doing. He was smoking on a daily basis. We’ve definitely improved in all of those areas and so, although it’s not perfect, there has been improvement."

Simone seems optimistic that John will turn around his life but is there any way to tell yet how effective this home-based program is?
This particular program aimed at keeping kids out of detention or shortening their stay was started in 2007. So far it's served 316 families and 65 percent of the kids finished the program, which means they stayed out of detention for the short term. But to really judge whether the program is working, the Foundling, a foster care agency running the program, is planning a clinical trial that will track kids for three years to see who gets re-arrested. Still, the city feels confident the program will serve kids better than detention centers, where 75 percent of those kids are re-arrested after three years. John Mattingly, Administration for Children’s Services commissioner, wants to double these home-based programs in four years. But Mattingly is running into a problem with funding the programs because the city is not realizing any savings from sending fewer kids to detention centers. What happens as fewer kids go, the state just increases the daily rate for sending them there. A state source says that’s because it costs the same to run the facilities regardless of how many empty beds there are and the only way that will change is if facilities get shut down.

What’s the likelihood of that happening?
There's a big push right now to do just that, but it remains a politically contentious issue. Several upstate elected officials have been fighting to keep the facilities open. Advocates here in New York City argue they want to keep them open for the jobs. The upstate politicians and workers at the facilities say the detention centers are needed to house seriously troubled kids who could be a danger to their communities. But I think both sides agree that many facilities are not acceptable as they are now and serious reforms are needed.