Lackawanna County will partner with Berks, Dauphin and Lehigh counties and eventually house male and female juvenile offenders at a Berks County detention center targeted for reopening, local officials confirmed Monday.
Commissioners Thom Welby, Bill Gaughan and Chris Chermak will hold a special meeting Tuesday to approve a related intergovernmental agreement with the three partner counties for the detention center initiative, which comes amid a statewide shortage of juvenile detention beds. The four cooperating counties will each have guaranteed access to 10 detention beds when the Berks County facility reopens in 2027, likely in the summer or fall, Lackawanna County Chief of Staff Brian Jeffers said Monday.
Berks County will staff and operate the facility, though the four counties will share operational and other costs. Lackawanna’s estimated share, about $2.6 million annually, will be defrayed by state reimbursements, Jeffers said, with the state reimbursing approximately 50% of the partner counties’ bed-usage costs.
The planned partnership comes years after Lackawanna County stopped housing juveniles in 2018 at the former Scranton detention center it leased from Lackawanna College. The county has subsequently relied on contracts with costly out-of-county facilities, including one as far away as Jefferson County, Ohio, to house its juvenile offenders.
Officials see the planned Berks County facility as a favorable alternative to those arrangements both financially and otherwise, Jeffers said, noting the near-fatal shooting of Scranton police Detective Kyle Gilmartin in early 2024 and the challenges of local youth and gang violence it illuminated reinvigorated county efforts on the juvenile detention front that had begun under a prior county administration.
Work to restore an in-county option for detaining juveniles charged with serious crimes began in early 2023, with officials initially exploring the potential of housing juvenile offenders in a dedicated area of the Lackawanna County Prison. But that would not have been ideal for a number of reasons, and Jeffers said state officials ultimately encouraged the county to explore potential regional partnerships.
The pending partnership between Lackawanna, Berks, Dauphin and Lehigh counties is the product of those efforts.
Among other challenges it aims to address, Jeffers said the lack of available detention beds at contracted facilities sometimes precludes the out-of-county detention of juvenile offenders who warrant it. Officials discussing the need for a better juvenile detention option in spring 2024 highlighted a then-recent fatal shooting near Weston Field in Scranton and other incidents of violent crime involving young people when making that case.
Gang member Kenneth Tapia — who was 17 when he shot and killed Robert Raheem Dawson, 32, near Weston Field in April 2024 — later pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced last year to decades behind bars. Tapia shot Dawson multiple times in the upper torso with a handgun shortly after a group of juveniles beat Dawson at the Weston Field basketball court, police said.
Three other juveniles then ages 17, 16 and 15 also arrested as part of the police investigation into that incident were all previously adjudicated delinquent in the Lackawanna County Juvenile Probation System and placed on house arrest, as detention was not approved due to lack of housing, officials said in April 2024.
The cooperative agreement commissioners will vote on Tuesday has a 20-year term and establishes financial and other terms of the detention center partnership. Each of the four partner counties, for example, will appoint three members to a 12-member Regional Youth Detention Center agency tasked with carrying out powers and duties related to the facility.
The collaborative initiative is “not just about fiscal responsibility, it’s about public safety,” Jeffers said Monday.
“At the end of the day I know people want to look at numbers and scrutinize numbers and stuff like that, but the reality of it is … you can’t put a price on someone’s life,” he said. “This is about public safety from our children through all the way up to our elderly. I mean everybody needs to be able to walk out of their house any day of the week, go to work or go to a coffee shop and not be worried about or concerned about their safety due to juveniles who, because we have no beds, are out and about.”
Tuesday’s special commissioners meeting will begin at 10 a.m. in the fifth-floor conference room of the county government center in Scranton. The meeting agenda is available online at lackawannacounty.org.