After running away from home again, Adam was arrested and jailed for stealing food and magazines from a Hartford bodega.

Thirty days later, he was still incarcerated as lawyers and a juvenile court judge tried to figure out what to do with the 17-year-old, who also was struggling with drugs and a mother who wasn’t showing up for his court dates.

“Do we want him in custody?” Beth Crawford, an attorney for the state’s child welfare agency, asked the adolescent’s social worker minutes before a juvenile court judge would consider committing him to the Department of Children and Families.

The answer to this question, while specific to each case, is one that judges, attorneys and lawmakers in Connecticut generally seem to have reached a consensus on.

“What we are trying to do in the state of Connecticut is get it right and move away from a system that assumes mass incarceration,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a former prosecutor, said last month while standing…

Originally posted on The CT Mirror

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