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The number of youths under the care of the D.C juvenile justice agency re-arrested during the first half of the year has fallen, a new report says.

According to a report from D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, 52 percent fewer youths under the agency’s supervision were re-arrested during the first six months of 2013, as compared to 2011. Just 124 juveniles, defined as people under 20-years-old, under DYRS’s care were re-arrested in D.C. between January and July. That’s down from 170 during the same time period in 2012 and 260 in 2011.

D.C. Crime was first to report the findings.

The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services is tasked with supervising and caring for juveniles charged with a delinquent act who are housed in or committed to a DYRS facility.

“To date in 2013, DYRS has linked more youth to job training and jobs; helped more achieve their high school diploma or GED; made available community-based mental, behavioral, and physical health services; and strengthened family’s involvement with their youth’s treatment,” according to the release.

In late 2012, Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) sent a letter to Mayor Vincent Gray to raise concerns about the mental health and drug abuse services offered to DYRS youths. The Washington Times reported:

The troubled agency has struggled to manage and provide services to a population of youth who in recent years have been behind an alarming spate of violent crime in the nation’s capital. Recently, a series of sexual-assault charges against DYRS wards has complicated an already bleak reality — previously reported by The Washington Times — that in the past five years DYRS has placed more than 50 medium-to-high-risk youths in communities where they have either been killed or been convicted in a killing.

A recent DYRS report showed a majority of 180 youths studied who had been found guilty of a crime suffered from drug abuse or mood disorders, yet were sent back to D.C. neighborhoods where they were to receive services from local nonprofits funded by contracts and subcontracts with the city. Eventually, all the youths studied were transferred to out-of-state residential treatment centers (RTCs) because they had not received “adequate mental health, behavioral health, and substance-abuse treatment services,” Mr. Graham’s office wrote.

Mr. Graham, chairman of the council’s Committee on Human Services, was skeptical that the facilities could provide the type of treatment needed to rehabilitate the youths, according to the oversight documents.

In May 2013, a 19-year-old DYRS ward was convicted of killing an 18-year-old woman.