ome. The facility Director Norbert Sickler says the facility helps pay travel expenses for some families and offers free accommodations in the area. We do encourage the kids to keep family connections both by writing and telephone also. The BOP does plan to house all federal juveniles within two hundred and fifty miles of their homes by fiscal year 2000. Staff attorney for the Youth Law Center says even that might not be good enough. He stresses the point that no strong after-care programs are set up so therefore is no transition back to the community. Leaving the kids to pick up right where they left off. Although the Congress is talking of charging more juveniles in federal courts, no one has answered if the federal prisons can handle more juveniles. The BOP already struggles to handle the two hundred thirty-nine juveniles under its control. The federal prison system is built for adults and has one hundred sixteen thousand of them. The number of youths has already risen from one hundred and eleven in 1990. There are not many talks of how they will handle more youths just that they are going to get tough. Youths can land in federal prison for violations of federal law such as drug trafficking and bank robbery or for crimes on federal property. Most are in for felonies committed on Indian reservations. Native Americans make up two-thirds of all juveniles in the BOP system. James Cunningham, another juvenile-justice expert says that the BOPs instruments were geared toward adult penal situations and not toward rehabilitating children. What they are doing is not meeting then needs of those children in terms of rehabilitation. An audit team found that each youth gets just twenty hours a week of programs including schooling, vocational training, counseling, a and mental health services; if that. It is also known that most of the juveniles have serious problems with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine so they need some licensed counselors to addr...
