A Message from Craig Sparks, YSC Director
Greetings from the Bernalillo County Youth Services Center. The Youth Services Center is a 78-bed juvenile detention facility that houses youth ages 11 to 17 while they are awaiting court for an allegation of a delinquent act. The mission of the Youth Services Center is to protect the community from those youth placed in its custody.Youth are detained in a safe, secure, and humane environment in accordance with the principles of direct supervision and in accordance with American Correctional Association standards.
The center is committed to creating and maintaining alternatives to detention through community supervision programs that promote education, healthy lifestyles, and positive choices for youth and their families. In addition to providing detention services, we also operate:
- a community custody program in which our staff supervise youth in the community as an alternative to detention;
- day reporting programs, open Monday-Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., where youth attend programs and receive services, then return to their home at night;
- a community mental health clinic that serves the community and youth that are in the juvenile justice system.
The Bernalillo County Youth Services Center is a National Model Site as identified by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI).
We are one of only five sites nationwide that has received this designation (Santa Cruz Calif., Chicago, Ill., Portland, Ore.,, and the state of New Jersey are the other JDAI model sites).
The JDAI promotes the use of secure detention for only those youth that pose a threat to public safety, and believes the majority of youth can be safely and appropriately served in the community through detention alternative programs.